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.

Stage Fright: Aquarius (1987)

The killer wears an owl’s head mask. A bulky, feathery mask with dark eyes and a beak. What a fantastic look! And now imagine an actor wearing that owl’s head with a suit and flying through the air on stage during rehearsal for a musical rock number. This happens in the first five minutes of Stage Fright: Aquarius (1987) and at that point, how could it get any better? It will. That owl’s head is first worn by an actor in a musical that’s set to open soon, which is bizarrely about a psychopathic killer of women. Then later, that very same owl-head is worn by a psychopathic actor (not just any psycho killer but one who used to be an actor!) who has escaped from a mental hospital! The killer proceeds to lock both cast and crew into the theatre with him during one dark and stormy night.

The dream of 1980s Italian horror, for me, is an aesthetic where everything feels like it will transform into a music video for either a new wave power ballad or a heavy metal chugger. And Stage Fright: Aquarius has this aesthetic energy in multitudes thanks to the theatre environment, the gaudy make-up and costumes, and fake scenery backdrops. I’ve always been a huge fan of director Michelle Soavi’s Dellamorte Dellamore (aka Cemetery Man) so it’s been great to finally catch up with his earlier work in horror like The Church and now Stage Fright, which was his directorial debut, produced by Joe D’Amato and written by George Eastman. Coming out of the gate firing with a musical opening number, the film does take time setting up all of the pieces, getting to the locked room/one night set-up. Once it’s there though, Stage Fright delivers in bloody, memorable deaths and stylish suspense sequences. The score by Simon Boswell is bombastic, and will charge into a rock metal number for a chase sequence, and then a syncopated rap beat for a “searching for a key in a desk” moment. Barbara Cupisti (also from Soavi’s The Church) is a solid lead, David Brandon is great as the bitchy British director, and there’s even a cast member who looks like a dead ringer for Sting. And every cut away to a couple of cops sitting in a squad car as it rains, trading weak banter as unbeknownst to them people are being hacked to bits inside, became funnier to me as it went on. Memorably gory “kills” with a high sense of style in the framing and atmosphere, heightened by some very “what the fuck?” moments.

Available to stream on Tubi (US). Recommended.

Pulse (2001)

I don’t know how director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and his collaborators pull this off, but in an opening sequence of Pulse (2001) where we observe a young woman visit a friend’s apartment, cutting from her travel in a bus interior to walking down a street to walking up the apartment block stairs, all of this is rendered as eerie and unsettling. She is always alone in the frame and everything feels empty. Emptiness is a feeling explored to unsettling effect in this J-horror movie, which much like Kurosawa’s previous masterpiece, Cure, unnerves through absence and suggestion more than jump scares and extended violence.

When people start dying strangely, taking their own lives after withdrawing from the world, several characters notice the connection to computers and the internet, specifically a website that displays grainy video footage of people in their apartments. While the technology might have vastly improved in the prevailing decades since Pulse’s release, you can’t beat the creepy noise of an internet dial-up tone and that technological screech. The lo-fi quality of the technology displayed, the basic monitors and the pixelated images on the computer screen just add to the creepiness. When a character enters something called “the Forbidden Room” and comes face-to-face with a ghost, it is a masterclass sequence that gets under the skin. Much like other Japanese horror movies of this era, the horror is in being in the presence of a ghost and the slow advance towards you.

Unexpectedly veering towards the apocalyptic in its second half, and losing some of the sustained tension, Pulse still remains an effective horror movie, which is more about the horror of loneliness, disconnection and nothingness. I also appreciated Haruhiko Kato’s slacker energy as a character which serves him well through the growing chaos. And if Cure made the visual of a black “X” against a wall a creepy sight to behold, the use of red tape against doorways is also a great use of imagery. Available to stream on Kanopy and Tubi (US). 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.

Piercing (2018)

Sanctuary, a film about the power balance in a BDSM arrangement, stars Christopher Abbott and Margaret Qualley, in a hotel-set two-hander with dark psycho-sexual themes. It almost felt like Abbott had made this movie before, or was making a habit of using his deep black eyes and dramatic intensity to be in a ruinous pairing with another actress. And yes, there was Piercing (2018), which partnered Abbott with Mia Wasikowska in an adaptation of a Ryu Murakami novel (the author of Audition) directed by Nicholas Pesce. I had always been meaning to catch up with Piercing in cinemas, and now I am sorry to have missed it on a big screen. Considerably more sick and twisted than what Sanctuary covers, and working within the horror-thriller genre, I found myself more taken with Piercing, particularly the push-and-pull of its narrative, how it kept you on your toes with the oscillating power balance between potential killer and potential victim. We follow a mild-mannered husband and father, Reed (Abbott), close to murdering his own baby son in the opening scene, but redirects his homicidal urges into a secret plan to murder an escort. Booking a hotel and telling his wife that he is out of town on work, the agency sends him Jackie (Wasikowska) who is off-beat in her own way and harbours a dark secret herself. What follows isn’t a simple reversal of the premise – i.e. the hunter becomes the prey – and maintains a dark comedy to its tension: who has the upper hand, and where is this going? Abbott is great at using his wiry intensity to explore weakness and insecurity, and Wasikowska is so underrated in the way she can portray troubled waters while maintaining a placid, sweet demeanour (see also: Stoker and Maps To The Stars). What also caught me off-guard was the use of miniatures for the urban environment, which adds to the overall approach to locate this story in a strange heightened reality, using high style such as split-screens, dream sequences and framing within a fabricated world. Then there was the score, which is comprised of 1970s giallo soundtrack cuts by people like Stelvio Ciprani, Bruno Nicolai and Goblin, complimenting the visual signifiers of the genre such as leather gloves and sharp objects. Unpleasantly violent, wonderfully performed and strangely compelling. Available to stream on SBS On Demand. Recommended.