Death Spa (1989)

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Director: Michael Fischa

Screenplay: James Bartruff and Mitch Paradise

Cast: William Bumiller as Michael Evans; Brenda Bakke as Laura Danvers; Merritt Butrick as David Avery; Robert Lipton as Tom; Alexa Hamilton as Priscilla Wayne; Ken Foree as Marvin; Rosalind Cash as Sgt. Stone; Francis X. McCarthy as Lt. Fletcher

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #148

Synopsis: Starbody Health Spa is the best in health spas. Fully automated by an advanced, innovative computer system. The best equipment. The most beautiful and charismatic people, not at least co-owner Michael Evans (William Bumiller). But Michael's late wife only a died a year before when, wheelchair bond, she dosed herself in gasoline and lit herself alight. And the new woman in his life Laura (Brenda Bakke) is blinded one night in the spa when chlorine gas is inexplicably poured into a steam room, immediately leading to the police investigating. When diving boards fall down when said police are there to investigate the previous incident things progressive get worse from there. Is Michael himself responsible? Michael brother-in-law David (Merrit Butrick), creator and operator of the spa's computer? A ghost? Why's the tiles flying off the walls in the women's shower room?

A shot over an urban skyline. Full, multi-spectrum colour in the dark. Neon sign of the Starbody Health Spa. Lighting hits the roof. With a title like Death Spa, or the alternative Witch Bitch, you don't expect it to immediately have an atmosphere that envelops you into it. But that's the case with Death Spa. Utterly ridiculous as a film but made which such a compelling mood in its style it's still effecting. It's a film which progressively gets stranger as it goes along, entering a groove that deepens as it continues. Obviously one questions whether the film's legitimately good, but this is one of those cases that, in the right frame of mind, its compellingly strange. It's an eighties flashback, a last hurrah as it was released in the last year of this decade cramming as much as possible into itself. Aerobics with its skimpy, multicoloured spandex. Health food crazes and exercise, all through a cornucopia of fashion from leg warmers to a Flintstones t-shirt of Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble exercising at their own prehistoric gym. Yes, it's all beautiful people, an exaggeration of what a real gym would be with its vast and diverse shapes, one where the visage is emphasised by the gratuitous group shower scene in the female bathroom which used women from a porn casting agency as extras. It's an exaggeration, one from an era where films attempted to capitalise on this trend, but having found myself drawn to the virtues of exercise, the exhilaration of merely a home placed bench press and how it could almost be Zen in its removal of negatives thoughts, I can still appreciate this idealised version still having a jest of fun and energy even if it comes off as a music video. The absurdity of these symbols of American excess is more in how over-the-top glamorous it is in spite of a film like this being visibly an excuse for an exploitative movie.

What you don't expect from this film, which has a factor in my response to it, is how distinct and well done the look and production style of the film is. Imagine a schlocky b-movie with the aesthetic of a Rinse Dream production having ingested mad Italian horror logic for dinner. Particularly when you compare it to the other spa related horror film from around the same time, David A. Prior's Killer Workout (1986), which is serviceable to say the least, it's a surprise that a film that basically boils down into a possessed gym manages to have the level of style it has. It's not even a scary film as horror, which should immediately undermine it, but you get something weighed by the level of quality thrust upon it this issue doesn't come up. Dolly shots of the camera prowling across corridors. The colour matched against the artificiality of the environment, gothic architecture if redeveloped as mall culture public building. The music by Peter D. Kaye that, whilst occasionally slipping into some corny scary cues, which adds to a hazy mood. I confess, whilst these words may sound cruel, that I don't know any of the other work the production crew of this movie has made including the director but they managed for Death Spa of all things to give it a fantastic tone, doing their damndest to shot this film the best they could technically in spite of how silly it is.

This helps to connect together a plot which gets more and more elaborate, convoluted to be perfectly honest, as it continues. The two police officers trying to make sense of the strange spate of injuries and accidents taking place, a pair straight from a buddy cop movie from the era. That Michael's wife could be haunting the premises, typing computer messages to him trying to convince him to join her, something that spooks him enough to hire a paranormal investigator. That there might be a conspiracy to drive him insane from his own staff when a bird's nest is found in his office onwards. Or that his ex-brother-in-law is acting weirdly, a twin who might be hearing his late sister talk to him. A whole torrent of plot points that get crushed together into a mass you have to accept and let pass over you. If the film was more conventional and less slick in style, it would be a tedious slog. With its current tone it's something much weirder, where the reoccurring flashbacks Michael has of his wife's death are with her shot against a dusk sun with the vibrancy of a Kenneth Anger film.

It's a film with no hesitation in being lurid either which emphasises this weirdness. The nudity which could be seen as crass to some, strangely emphasising the sweltering mood for others in how explicit it is even for horror from the period. Something gruesome which takes the influence of Italian genre cinema fully. Where a woman is half melted by acid, heart exposed beating and still alive. Someone's head blowing up in pieces shot in a slow motion haze and possessed food processors. Material that straddles the line between the rewarding and utterly stupid and being both. It can present to you a beautiful coloured aesthetic, even if it's of the time, than presents a romantic scene between Michael and Laura where a piece of asparagus is comically phallic in how its eaten. It's difficult to ask whether the film altogether is actually well made or if it's just the production style that saves it, but it helps immensely how wild the film is, culminating to an extreme at a Mardi Gras costume party at the gym which escalates things further. It's a final act that doesn't drop in quality but escalates the strangeness further, between gender confusion and ghostly influence to the idea of burning someone to death in a tanning bed and a flesh eating, frozen fish. Effectively taking the strangest of American genre cinema, upping the quality of the film technically, upping the level of luridness, and adding Ken Foree. Something unique at least even if you scratch your head afterwards.

Personal Opinion:

For the curious. Those who can appreciate how silly it gets will come for its premise, stays for the style and madness.

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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