Death Spa is a movie that has some issues it needs to work out. Death Spa is a little lean in some areas and pretty fat in others. Death Spa is an exercise in mediocrity… Okay, I think that’s all of them I can think of at the moment. It’s not good, shocking, I know.
In the 80s and early 90s the hippest things out there were working out and computers. Slide into a pair of “biker shorts” or your best lycra leotard and sweat out all that cocaine… er… I mean fat. Looking to capitalize on the current rage of health spas and campy horror movies, Death Spa appears. Michael is the proud owner of the “Starbody Health Spa”. It’s a computer controlled gym in LA that is where ALL the sexiest people go to work out. Michael’s supercomputer controls every aspect of the club from the lights, to the amount of resistance that each piece of equipment uses, and it’s all personalized to the user. The one problem that the spa has is that Michael’s late wife is now a poltergeist trying to kill everyone inside, including Michael. Oh, and she can control the computer too, apparently.
Where do I begin with this sweaty gym sock of a movie? Let’s start with the wife. She killed herself by dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself on fire. This was done on a mountainside, presumably somewhere in LA. I bring that up because she did NOT kill herself in a health spa. Which, let’s face it, would have made WAY more sense. So now she has starting possessing the computer at the spa and making it do things to kill people. Her ultimate motive is to have her late husband kill himself so that they can be “together forever in hell”. *sigh … sure.
During the climactic final confrontation with his dead wife’s ghost, there is a large party going on in the spa. At no point, during any of the gruesome deaths, do the party goers have any reaction to the things around them. Zero. None. A woman has her arm chewed off by a blender a, kicking and screaming, while a cop tries to pull it off her bloody stump, screaming for help himself, and the party continues only a few feet away. Someone is thrown through a plate glass window INTO the party and no one pays any attention to it. I guess I am just confirming that, yes, cocaine is a hell of a drug.
While Death Spa does offer up some 80s gold for horror movies, that being a lot of blood and a lot of T&A, there isn’t much else on display here. The special effects are kinda lame. The story is nonsensical, and the acting is bad even when comparing it to other 80s horror movies. If you are really hard up for a dumb flick with lots of tits, some bush, and blood, I guess there are worse options out there. For me, though, I am canceling my gym membership.
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