Death Spa

As the title suggests, this is a movie about people dying at a spa, which is what they sometimes called a gym in the 80s. More specifically, the owner's dead wife's ghost (played by the fake Ashley who was on The Young and the Restless for a few years while Eileen Davidson wasn't) is killing them while possessing the body of her twin brother, who still works at the spa because he's the only one who can operate the Electric Dreams-like computer that runs the place. The computer which of course is helping the Wonder Twins kill people. People who work out entirely too little for a movie about a gym.

Spoiler alert: this is an AWFUL movie. That does not mean I don't like it. I enjoyed it quite a lot. I just wish the person who wrote the incredible line, "I'm beta and you're VHS," spoken by a gay man brushing off a predatory woman, had written the rest of the screenplay.

It totally stands to reason that I could only purchase this movie as a Japanese bootleg, because it seems like something they would go for, what with the scene in which a man is sucked into a freezer and then bitten to death by a zombiefied frozen fish.

At least there is lots of gore and plenty of naked women in a group shower. I was looking through the credits and noticed Tane McClure's name. I said to my husband, "I didn't see Tane McClure in this movie," and he said, "I'm sure she was in the shower."

This has all the great 80s horror conventions. You know who the killer is from the beginning, someone gets killed being seduced by a ghost, someone uses food as foreplay, somebody gets killed while sneaking off to meet someone they shouldn't be meeting, a tanning bed scene, a sauna scene, bodies that are never found after days of lying around in the health club, and the whole thing leads up to a party that can't be cancelled where you know everyone is gonna die. There's even a song at the end that describes what went on in the movie. Then there are the bonuses: a hand in a blender, an exploding hand, an exploding torso, and Merritt Butrick rolling around on the floor in drag.

But with all that, it still manages to be only fit for those who seek out bad movies on purpose. I would say this would be great for a remake, except that you couldn't make this today. Remember, the whole plot hinges on the spa being run by a computer that only one person can operate and he's evil. Nowadays you could just fire him and bring in your second grader to run the computer for a dollar a day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go and watch Aerobicide.