31 Days of Gore: Death Spa (1990)

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

It’s the late 80s/early 90s and strange things are happening at Starbody Health Spa, an inexplicably futuristic club run entirely by computers and card readers. Within minutes of its opening, Death Spa boils Laura Danvers (the unusually gorgeous Brenda Bakke) alive in a steam room. At least I thought she was being boiled, but later its revealed someone dumped a toxic dose of chemicals into the steam. The incident leaves her blind at the brink of death.

Laura is the girlfriend of Micheal (William Bumiller), the club’s owner who’s still recovering from the trauma of his wife’s suicide. See, one day his wife rolled her wheelchair into the garden and self-immolated. I’m sure the film explained why at some point, but I never paid that much attention to it. The filmmakers initially want you to believe Micheal’s wife is haunting the gym, but then they try to convince you the high-tech computers and a cross-dressing hacker are to blame. When they can’t decide what kind of movie they want Death Spa to be—supernatural or technological—they decide it’ll be both. And it’s just weird enough that it works.

In yesterday’s review, I said City of the Living Dead wasn’t incoherent enough for MST3K-style mockery. Get your drinking buddies together because Death Spa is a riot. Unlike Evilspeak and Shrunken Heads, I’m not entirely convinced all the cast were in on the joke. Ken Foree is obviously aware this ain’t Shakespeare. Rosalind Cash, playing one of the two investigators, understands the assignment as well. There are others who clearly know what kind of film they’re making, but I can’t say the same about all of the cast… or the director, for that matter.

The gore is so incompetently filmed, you often can’t tell what’s going on. At one point the villain merely touches a victim’s face and you hear what sounds like someone biting into an apple. The next time you see the victim, his face looks like a ball of freshly squeezed Silly Putty. In another scene, a client straps his arms into a fly machine. When the machine inevitably attempts to kill him, you expect it to rip his arms right out of their sockets. Instead, a Capri Sun-sized amount of blood spills out of his left flank.

The editing, too, is nonsensical. When Michael’s girlfriend Laura finds herself trapped in the aforementioned steam room, she’s falls toward the floor in such a manner the back of her neck will hit first. At the exact moment of impact, however, they jump-cut to her lying on the floor, her legs where her head should be according to the previous shot. In other scenes, the editor cuts to reaction shots of the actors not reacting whatsoever, which adds to the campy incompetence.

As usual, it’s another film which rewards the viewers for sitting through the boring parts by tossing them the occasional bone or severed limb. If ever you needed a reason to set a movie in a health club, it’s this: there are very attractive people in this movie, including Chelsea Field, in skimpy workout gear. Why they chose a leading man who could have appeared in Quest for Fire without the need for makeup, I’ll never know.

At only 88 minutes long, it’s brief enough not to outstay its welcome and you don’t have to wait long for the payoff. Any horror film which stocks its cast with a paranormal investigator who carries a Luger is essential viewing as far as I’m concerned.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.