Review: Death Spa (1989)
(aka Witch Bitch)
Directed by: Michael Fischa
Starring: William Bumiller, Brenda Bakke, Merritt Butrick
Written by: James Bartruff, Mitch Paradise
Music by: Peter D. Kaye
Country: United States
Available on: Blu-ray/DVD (MPI Home Video)
IMDb
Michael Fischa’s Death Spa is the second of the two prominent health club-centered horror movies of the late ‘80s, the other being Killer Workout from 1987. While David A. Prior’s attempt at exercise-focused mayhem is mostly a limping failure — although if you’ve ever wanted to see folks harpooned by a comically oversized safety pin, it may be your kink — Death Spa pounds enthusiastically on all the buttons an ‘80s horror movie set in a gym seems designed to press. There’s a plethora of eye candy in the form of neon-clad hardbodies, sexy aerobics, tanning bed abuse, homoerotic weight-lifting, group showers featuring jazzercized beauties, raging transphobia, and gruesome, inventive murders of neon-clad hardbodies that revolve around sexy aerobics, tanning bed abuse, homoerotic weight-lifting, group showers featuring jazzercized beauties, and raging transphobia. Death Spa is an hour and a half of everything the decade has to offer, from its charming excesses and exuberance to its ugly superficiality and queer-fear, melted down into a weird supernatural slasher.
Story-wise, we’ve got Michael, the owner of the hi-tech Starbody Health Spa, whose wife burns herself alive after becoming crippled. He’s distraught but not distraught enough to keep his penis tucked away, since he’s shacked up with one of the ladies that frequents the spa, with a few more female clients (including the lovely Chelsea Field and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air’s cousin Hillary in her debut acting gig) waiting in the horny wings. Something about the way Michael is conducting himself has pissed off his corpse of an ex-wife, because she’s back from the grave and has taken possession of the club’s central computer to induce bloody automation-based mayhem.
For a film with absolutely no aspirations of subtlety in its content, Death Spa is decidedly more stylistic than it should be. The cinematography and production design is pretty impressively colorful. Most of the locations are constructed sets, and while they’re definitely identifiable as fake, their artifice seems like an intentional choice that reminded me of Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive (1976). The staging of shots is dynamic and often the most unusual angle is used to present the action, keeping even talking head scenes from getting too monotonous. This isn’t the work of Stanley Kubrick or anything, but it’s commendable that Fischa and his crew decided to sashay their way through the production of a superficially stupid concept.
But artistic aims aside, Death Spa earns its name with its splatter. The abundant carnage is mostly back-loaded into a profusely bizarre finale featuring bodies torn asunder or otherwise decomposed in myriad ways, and it makes you wish a few more of the garishly gruesome tidbits had been sprinkled in the first two thirds, during which the supernatural hi-jinks are more a nuisance than a death sentence. But regardless, this is a movie that accomplishes its blood-smeared, trashy, spandexed mission with an inordinate display of death, leotards, and pubic hair. And by god, Ken Foree is having his best time since frolicking in a banana hammock with Barbara Crampton and Jeffrey Combs. We all want Ken Foree to have a good time, don’t we?
Overall rating: 7.5 out of 10
