My review was written in May 1985 after watching the film in a Midtown Manhattan screening room.
"Terminal Choice" is a dull medical thriller unlikely to stir the blood of horror fans with its clinical bloodletting. Pic was lensed in Toronto in 1982 and has gone through various name changes, including "Trauma", "Critical Lit" and "Death List".
Joe Spano (of tv's "Hill Street Blues") toplines as Dr. Frank Holt, known for his drunkenness, whose patients are dying at Dodson Medical Clinic. Audience is tipped off immediately that someone is tampering with the automated hospital's computer, and that the doctors and staff are engaged unethically in betting on details of the patients' diagnoses and recovery periods.
Computer wiz (and Holt's former girlfriend) Anna (Diane Venora) is investigating along with hospital's attorney Chauncey Rand (Dori Francks) and there are many suspicious-looking doctors on the premises, notably new intern Henderson (Nicholas Campbell). Several more stiffs enter the loss column, including pathologist Mary O'Connor (Ellen Barkin), before the bad guys are exposed and plot ends tied up in an awkwardly structured final reel windup.
More lowkey and ominous than suspenseful, pic elaborates far too much on what Stanley Kubrick succinctly created in his classic "Life Functions Terminated" computer display (when HAL the computer kills the sleeping crew members) scene in "2001: A Space Odyssey". Under debuting feature helmer Shelodn Larry's cool direction, violence is meted out by machine, with the human factor present (man controls machine) but out of sight. The tangible fear of powerlessness in a hospital situation are not really tapped, and a science fiction style open-ending (in which the computer is supposedly poised to self-program) does not work.
Acting is merely adequate by a cast far superior to the material at hand. Emphasis upon blood and vomiting is strictly a turnoff.
