Review: Killer Workout (1987)
Directed by: David A. Prior
Starring: Marcia Karr, David James Campbell, Fritz Matthews
Written by: David A. Prior
Music by: Todd Hayen
IMDb
In the late ‘80s, there was a brief spurt of slashers centered around the world of health clubs, which consisted primarily of Death Spa (1989) and this, Killer Workout. I’m not sure why this was a thing, but either way, here we are. Killer Workout is not good. As expected from a movie set mostly in a gym, there is a lot of on-screen exercising here, conducted mainly by beautiful big-haired, long-butted women of the ‘80s. This is of course intended as T&A, but there are a couple of problems with the approach: (1) the exercise choreography sucks, and all the actresses look bored as hell, and (2) none of them ever get naked. Slashers of the decade generally excelled at, if nothing else, T&A and gore, but this movie stumbles in both areas. The killer stalks victims with … a giant safety pin? It’s ridiculous but true. This means people are mostly murdered via a bunch of small puncture wounds. Health spas present so many opportunities for creative kills: immolation via tanning bed (which this movie does leverage, but not in a very useful way), being crushed beneath weights, boiled in a sauna, etc. But no, the filmmakers went with safety pin pokes. There are a lot of unnecessary red herrings around the killer’s identity, but this does lead to more than one badly done but amusing fight between the same two mulleted male members of the club that know martial arts for some reason. It’s like Connor MacLeod and the Kurgan but so much stupider. Spoilers, but the killer ends up being a woman who was badly disfigured in the aforementioned tanning bed fire and hates beautiful people as a result. So she decides to own a health club where she’s constantly surrounded by beautiful people? That makes sense. The lesson here is don’t ever be imperfect or you’ll go homicidal, which seems on par for the zeitgeist during which this was made. On the positive side, the soundtrack is fun and energetic and will make you want to put on your goddamn leotard and jazzercize.
Rating: 4 out of 10