Death Spa (1989)

NEWBODY HEALTH SPA

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D EA TH SPA

Death Spa (1989) – a perfect title! Completely indicates the type of horror movie it is, and if you hadn’t guessed, it’s a cash-in on the aerobics and gym craze of the 1980s. As if some producer threw a dart at a poster of Perfect stuck on a wall, and thought, why not make that into an Elm Street thing? Then you have the amazing VHS cover art, fiery agony of a gym-bro tortured by a weights machine in the background while a swimsuit babe with a demon face takes up the foreground.

The wonderful thing is that Death Spa is as good as its title and VHS cover art. Ideal 1980s horror schlock forgotten in the video store aisles and now revived as a “what the fuck?” cult classic.

Do you want to know the plot of Death Spa? Well, let’s say it involves a successful gym and health joint, where everything is run by a central computer, and unfortunately, the system is haunted by the dead wife of the hunky owner (William Bumiller). As people experience strange accidents and injuries, even death, there’s even a Death Spa version of the Jaws mayor as a lawyer says no to the computer system being shut down, nothing can ruin the upcoming members Masquerade ball at the gym! Featuring some familiar faces in spandex or gym shorts including Brenda Bakke (Tales From The Crypt: Demon Knight), Chelsea Field (The Last Boy Scout) and Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead). Teasing out the dead wife’s ghost haunting the system and causing all the destruction is great, particularly when she finally appears in the third act as a strong screen presence in actor Shari Shattuck, delightful demonic and enjoyably campy as a villain.

All of this is heightened by the amazing set dressing and vibrant lighting choices, which often cast the sets in strong colours (the pinks! The blues! The reds!). Within its remastered version, Death Spa has a high sense of style, obviously very Eighties, and also rolls out gnarly kills with gloopy, old-school, practical special effects. I had an absolute ball.

Available to stream on Tubi (US). Recommended.

Silent Trigger (1996)

Dreaming about a YouTube ambient video titled, “Meditating with Dolph Lundgren in his high rise building sniper’s nest while raining.”

While Silent Trigger (1996) is an action movie that gives fans what they want – Dolph using a massive sniper rifle to take down masked mercenaries who are toting sub-machine guns – it also aims for an arty ambience, as if director Russell Mulcahy (of Highlander and Ricochet) rewatched Le Samoruai and wanted to get some existentialism into his pulp. Mulcahy also knows how to add a bit of sizzle to a factory-produced steak; this is the type of movie that has a shot of a building upside down, and then a boot steps into the image of the building, revealing we’re looking at the building’s reflection from a puddle in the street.

The movie is like a Metal Gear Solid cut scene with Waiting for Godot pretensions. Lundgren is a sniper who sneaks into a corporate tower under construction. He takes up position at a window on the top floor, and is eventually met by his spotter, a breathy British babe played by Gina Bellman (from the UK sitcom Coupling). As the film’s opening, and flashbacks strewn throughout the narrative, make clear: they worked together before in a vague Eastern European conflict, and there’s a level of distrust. Lundgren failed to clear his target and Bellman as a rookie showed more trust to her masters than her shooter. The only other inhabitants in the building are two security guards, one of whom is revealed to be a drug-taking psycho who takes orders from the spiders tattooed across his body. A lot of the movie is Lundgren waiting for the moment to take out his target, and the chemistry and intrigue he has with his spotter.

My favourite scene has the duo in an intimate conversation next to the green-lit windows as rain falls, ambient noise competing with the score that has a sexy exotic Deep Forrest sound. As soon as you hear that music, a love scene seems inevitable but we get there through Lundgren’s reflections on being in war and seeing the enemy in himself, and when they eventually have sex, the film cuts to flashbacks of them escaping from the war. To me, the film’s obliqueness doesn’t necessarily have any depth, but I appreciate its reaching for something, if only to be enigmatic and strange. That and its “tech shit” atmosphere of anonymous black bag organisations and click-clacking sniper rounds, and impersonal corporate interiors. Available on Amazon Prime. Recommended.

Automatic (1995)

“This guy is cool!” – security guard under his breath, watching a cyborg on a monitor wipe the floor with a crack team of mercenaries.

Automatic (1995) is a sci-fi action flick Die Hard knock-off which is mostly shot in the shadowy interiors of a corporate building, the HQ for robot/manufacturing company RobGen. Some movies are “warehouse action flicks”, this one is mostly a “conference room action flick”! Watching a DVD upload onto YouTube meant that the film was mostly swimming in darkness, as if you were watching a LaserQuest match from the sidelines with a florescent bar for lighting.

French martial artist Oliver Gruner (from Nemesis) is once again playing an emotionless cyborg, thankfully wearing a buttoned-up white shirt, so you can actually see him. When the sleazy boss of secretary Daphne Ashbrook attempts to sexually assault her after hours in his spacious office, the cyborg steps in and terminates him. This concerns John Glover – back playing a chipper yuppie CEO after Gremlins 2 but this time more evil – who wants to ensure his series of “Automatics” – his production line of buff-male cyborg security systems – won’t grow hearts and malfunction en masse. Sleazy Jeff Kober and his team of mercs are sent to “retire” these employees, and cover up the situation. What follows moves at a quick pace, an on-going chase through corridors, elevator shafts, ventilator ducts, and giving plenty of opportunities for Gruner to do a roundhouse kick or two, and fire off a bulky futuristic machine gun.

Clocking in at 90 minutes, Automatic is enjoyable straight-to-video cyberpunk trash with enough action and John Glover chewing the scenery to keep your attention. Bonus points for including character actor Troy Evans (you won’t know the name but you’ll recognise him) as that schlub security guard and Penny Johnson from The Larry Sanders Show as comic relief. Obviously echoes Robocop, Total Recall and Terminator, and has enough flashes of old-school computer graphics and fleshy mechanical props to appeal to any cyber-head. On YouTube. Recommended.

Dark Breed (1996)

Delving further into the world of PM Entertainment productions was a highlight for me of 2023, a repository for direct-to-video B-grade action schlock from the 1980s and 1990s, where they put the money on the screen with the amount of explosions featured, cars flipped on the streets and stunt-people flung through the air. My compulsion for more 90s cyberpunk action led me to PM Entertainment greats like T-Force and Hologram Man, and there’s something wonderful when PM Entertainment meets sci-fi. There’s a 1990s TV look to these movies and they often feel like an X-Files episode just with a higher budget for explosions and stunt-work, and this is the case for Dark Breed (1996), which is basically a photocopy mash-up of Aliens, Species and Predator 2.

A crew of astronauts (all with large American flags emblazoned on the backs of their jumpsuits) crash-land back on Earth after a mission in outer space, and are immediately hunted by the military. Something has contaminated the astronauts, and as evidenced by the cheap reptile eye contact lenses they give the actors, whatever it is ain’t local! It’s up to former astronaut military man Jack Scalia to save the day, stop an alien invasion of Earth as well as a government conspiracy to harvest the alien eggs for biological weapons. Oh yeah, and Scalia’s ex-wife (Donna W. Scott) was one of the astronauts(!) and she’s possessed by one of the good aliens thankfully! While this is a pretty stock plot with all the cliches, Dark Breed is an enjoyable time, especially with the fun action sequences. The first act has a night-time freeway truck chase including a helicopter and a fist-fight in a model home being carried by a truck. Then, later at the end of the second act is a daytime car chase where Jack Scalia winds up being pulled along the roads on broken satellite dish tied to the back of a van – definitely a case of the stunt team working backwards to ensure that stunt is in the movie whether it makes sense or not! You’ve also got casual use of rocket launchers, giant meca-machine guns with harnesses, gooey green alien eggs and reptilian creatures grabbing people in dripping warehouses. Oh, and even a wino played by George Buck Flower, king of the movie winos!

Most notable star in the cast is the great character actor Jonathan Banks (Mike from Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul) as the leader of the astronauts, with half of his scenes distorting his voice to make him sound more alien (and he would have been a perfect guest star on The X-Files). This is the third PM Entertainment movie with Scalia as the hero and I like his slick-haired, tough-guy persona, and he always meets the material with a serious energy; he’s not checked out or looking down at this trash genre fare. There’s a bit of (unintentionally) funny dialogue and weird digressions like when our hero’s ex-wife now possessed by a good alien meets him at a diner and does a variation of the Five Easy Pieces scene when she can’t order a pizza for breakfast. Directed by Richard Pepin who is responsible for most of the PM Entertainment I’ve seen at this point.

Available to stream on Tubi (US). Recommended.

Mean Guns (1997)

“The original Mambo king… makes you want to dance…”

On video store shelves, I confused the cover of Mean Guns (1997) with another direct-to-video Christopher Lambert action movie, Gun Men, though the former would have been released during the transition to DVD. Becoming more and more part of the auteurist following to director Albert Pyun, I had always heard good things about Mean Guns. To be a fan of Albert Pyun is knowing that none of his movies are perfect, either taken out of his hands and re-edited, or suffering low budgets and production issues, yet still pulling off something that is visually striking and entertaining in spite of and even because of its limitations.

For example, Mean Guns is set in a new LA prison complex set to be open but taken over for one day by powerful gangster Moon (Ice-T). As a way of cleaning house for “The Syndicate” that Moon works for, he invites fifty or so criminals and gangsters who have all either cheated, betrayed or dishonoured the organisation. Unknowingly, as they enter the empty prison, everyone is signing up for a death game – the three who remain standing will take a suitcase of $10 million dollars to split between them, and will be able to walk out with their lives. As hundreds of guns and thousands of bullets rain down upon the collected players – including blonde wild card Lou (Lambert), quiet hitman Marcus (Michael Halsey), glamorous assassin D (Kimberly Warren), and a lawyer turning state’s evidence, Cam (Deborah Van Valkenburgh) – everyone grabs a weapon and begins to shoot each other. Pyun and his collaborators were able to film in a newly opened prison, and yet couldn’t damage or mark the property, hence why the multiple bullets fired don’t result in blood pack squibs or bullet holes in the wall. Despite this limitation, the movie is still entertaining for a post-Tarantino crime flick with ponderous, “poetic” dialogue, Hong Kong influenced action sequences and Spaghetti western inspired showdowns.

Long-time Pyun collaborator musician Anthony Riparetti infuses the action with a John Carpenter bass synth throb at times, but the main musical signifer is… Mambo, which is heard throughout the movie as much as gunfire, often both, adding to the movie’s strange, alternate universe feel (a precursor to the type of John Wick world-building). I had fun with Mean Guns as it keeps moving with shoot-outs, team-ups and double-crosses, particularly driven by Lambert doing his thing with an intense stare breaking into a raspy laugh, Ice-T chewing the scenery with his silver teeth-grill, and nice moments for actors like Van Valkenburgh (from The Warriors and Streets Of Fire) and Halsey’s British Lee Van Cleef energy. I watched the Director’s Cut on YouTube. Recommended.