spencergrande6
Holy crap, this was put on late at night in drunken good fun and somehow this is a late 80's camp gem. The colors, music, and cinematography are crazy good fun. The premise is solidly ridiculous - a murder spree at an LA fitness club seemingly caused by a malfunctioning computer. There's a playfulness to the whole enterprise, from the lighting, cinematography and lighting, to the overall high camp feel of it all. It's slightly surreal but in an offhand kind of way. The opening scene is pretty spectacular - a long take set to some sweet 80's synth with a great title "card". And the kills ramp up nicely - ending with a head exploding in a gale force wind and some killer flying fish.
Michael_Elliott
Death Spa (1989) *** (out of 4)Michael (William Bumiller) runs a health club that's the biggest thing in the city thanks to new technology that allows a computer system to run things. However, things take a dark turn when a couple members are severely injured and after more deaths happen it appears there's something much darker at play.If you rented videos back in the 80s or 90s then I'm sure you stumbled across this film in the horror section at some point. I must have passed the video by countless times, picked it up a few times but I never left the store with it. After all, it's a horror movie set in a health club, how good could that be? Now that I've finally caught up with the picture I can't help but be disappointed in myself for not giving it a shot back in the day.Look, if you're wanting high art or some sort of hard-hitting drama then you're not going to find it here. DEATH SPA is basically a low-budget slasher movie that appears to have been directed by someone who knew what the people watching a film like this wanted to see. Director Michael Fischa and writers James Bartruff and Mitch Paradise all do a wonderful job because what you've basically got here are a bunch of gory murders and a bunch of hot ladies taking their clothes off. These are staples of the VHS-era and this film offers plenty of both.I really liked the death scenes in the film as they were not only creative but we also got some extremely gory moments. There are several highlights among the death scenes but there's one where a woman gets some sort of acid on her and just gets eaten away. As for the nudity, yeah, there's the required shower sequence but with a twist. DEATH SPA certainly isn't a masterpiece and it really would have benefited by being ten-minutes shorter but at the same time this is exactly what a film should be like if it wants to be in that low-budget horror field.
MisterWhiplash
Sometimes you just need something that is brilliantly executed Z-grade trash. Death Spa (which announces itself by showing us in the opening shot of the film an exterior of the front of the "Starbody Health Spa" and when lightning strikes the building it leaves only the word "d-ea-th spa") is one such a MOVIE (not a film, a movie, of course), and it has some little nibblets in its DNA from Psycho and (near the end) Carrie, but is its own piece of wonderful garbage. It's a laugh riot for about half the time, and for the other half you can at least enjoy the stone-faced 'acting' from William Bumiller as the owner of the Spa-that-kills, Michael Evans.How does this spa killed? For sure, I wouldn't reveal *that* to you, would I? A big clue can be found in the control room where the major-league, over-the-top, why-is-this-doing-that electrical engineering and technical overriding is like if HAL decided to take Olivia Newton John's advice from her early 80's music video. David runs this room and is super tight-assed, though there's more to come from him during the course of the movie. To say more than that would be more than a spoiler - it would be downright cruel to give that juicy bit of plot exposition.I think if I had one major complaint is that only, I don't know, 65% of the film takes place at the Death Spa(?) Psshaw, it should've been more than that, like who cares about Michael's house and what goes on there? The key thing is that there are wonderful, consciousness-expanding murders that go on at the spa; the first attack on a naked female character is getting a steam and gas pours into the room that she can't get out of right away is the most disturbing (TMI, I flashed to the holocaust during that one moment, but that's my fault). Then we get into... girls in a shower also getting chlorine-gas blasted and tiles shooting out at them, machines making, for example, a guy's arm so tightened and intense that his ribs crack out; boiling water creams a girl, literally, into a basement floor; the whole finale/climax which features, among other kills, a guy locked in a freezer and a fish comes alive and attacks his neck... ouch.Death Spa includes a sub-plot involving the murder investigation by two hilariously "movie" cops (both kind of inept and dumb, somewhat, kinda, I don't friggin know), and the main character, Michael, being haunted in his dreams by his dead former wife who killed herself by dousing herself (on a wheelchair) in kerosene and lighting herself on fire while all the same still, uh, having sex with seemingly so many girls at the spa (plus his girlfriend, the woman from the opening of the film who becomes temporarily blinded by the attack on her). There's also the continuing question as to what is killing people at the spa, why, say, it isn't shut down, what happened to the one black girl who gets it very bad in the locker room, and a Mardi Gras party that seems to not make much sense given all of the things happening there. Hey, it's haunted/possessed/supernatural/dangerous, why not have a, uh, Mardi Gras/quasi-Halloween party at a SPA(!?) I think what made me like this so much is that the filmmakers do commit to the premise enough to make it totally entertaining; you know watching it it has a few jobs to do: make it gory, make it filled with sex (there's some rather ODD spots though, like when Michael feeds his girlfriend a piece of asparagus in what's meant to be a sensual way, unironically), and make it filled with characters that can keep our attention. Not to mention, if you like your 80's (mid to late 80's) cheese and sleaze, and violence that is intentionally going for broke for the gore effects, then this is for you. It comes out somewhere in-between being something that is not really *good*, but it's also not trying to be so over the top that it becomes something else, like The Toxic Avenger, which, as you may recall, also took place in a health spa/gym type of place for part of it. To give you an idea of what this movie is: it beats Tommy Wiseau by about 15 years in having two characters throwing a football around, you know, because have two guys throw a football, it's fun!
Tikkin
After reading the glowing reviews for this film I had to seek it out, especially as it's been compared to Aerobicide (Killer Workout). However I found that Death Spa was not as good, despite the fact that there's more gore.The plot to Death Spa is a bit muddled and I found it hard to follow to start with. It seemed to be about a mans dead wife who was coming back to haunt him, causing deaths at the spa. There are some nice scenes such as when the naked girls are showering and bits of glass fly at them. And there's the scene where the guys ribs split open. The thing is, the deaths are not quite as 'gory' as some reviewers here would have you believe (at least on the Witch Bitch VHS I saw). The best scenes are at the end when all the mayhem occurs. The highlight is the frozen fish death scene that many have mentioned, which is hilariously cheesy. There's plenty of naked breasts too if that's your sort of thing.Overall, Death Spa is fairly good but not amazing. The frozen fish scene is priceless. If you liked Death Spa you may also like Killer Workout, which I personally think is much better.
