Few “bad” and “B” movies find themselves so far down the category’s rabbit hole that they somehow transcend to the other side. It may depend on the movie at hand, but the fans will attest that this phenomenon in which they’re “so bad they’re great” typically occurs with some assistance. This could bea required mindset, a chosen enhancement consumed by the audience, oralongside a good riffingof said movie. Yet somehow, one such movie has escaped the purview of the general audience. That movie isDeath Spa.
Death Spais a 1988 supernatural slasher flick that takes place mostly at the Starbody Health Spa. In the film, a lonely and bitter spirit who succumbed to suicide, Catherine Avery Evans (Shari Shattuck), possesses the lifestyle center owned by her still-living husband, David Evans (William Bumiller), its facilities, and her twin brother, David (Merrit Butrick), who also serves as the spa’s System Engineer. Unfortunately, neither the titular spa nor its poltergeist actually eats people. However, the ghostdoesmurder many gym rats and yuppies while managing to check off every box for a classic, hammy, horror movie: Solidly entertaining deaths, cheesy dialogue, and plenty of awkward, sexually charged asparagus scenes for everyone to cringe at with matching camera angles to boot!
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‘Death Spa’ Is More than a Slasher Flick
Death Spais a cinematic gem whose trailer alone draws you in, beckoning you to watch it as if possessed by Catherine’s lonely soul. The beauty of the film rests in several aspects: Firstly, the cast and scenery are ripe with everything the world loved about the ’80s and the time’s health-awareness fashion. Every shot is soaked in neon lights and colors with the cast proudly wearing their best body-con spandex and short shorts under tastefully hair-sprayed manes. If nothing else, nostalgia fans will fall in love with its cinematography and just how much the movie truly is a product of its time.
Digging further into the production,Death Spawas the brain child ofMichael Fischa,James Bartruff,Mitch ParadiseandJamie Beadsley.It was inspired by the health crazethat had taken Los Angeles by storm at the time. According to Fischa, there was such an abundance of health spas popping up in the area that they tended to close their doors just as fast as they’d opened. This prompted him and everyone involved to flip the idea from businesses dying out to one inhabited by a ghost. While it may or may not have been their intent, it can also be thought of as a statement on the social impact of health trends of the past and today with the characters so obsessed with fitness and the gym that they spend most of their days at the health spa.
Given the self-absorbed nature of the time, Catherine’s spirit inhabiting the Starbody facilities to kill her victims is nearly poetic. Her first kill of the movie involves sabotaging the computer-programmed arm press station causing a patron’s his side to burst open through his mesh shirt and the movie concludes with the health spa going down in flames. The symbolism of this works in figurative tandem with the unsaid joke of David technically being married to the spa he owns.
Death Spa Features a Surprising Cast of Future Stars
It isn’t uncommon for films with such a limited budget to feature a cast of relatively unknown actors. Typically, they fizzle into Hollywood obscurity with a few finding some B-Movie success.Death Spa, on the other hand, finds iself as a springboard to fame. The most referenced future star of this diamond in the rough isKaryn Parsons, whom most might know better as Hilary Banks in the originalThe Fresh Prince of Bel-Airsitcom, but the cast list has a few stars that many viewers may not realize they know.Ken Foree, who plays Marvin in the movie, should be right alongside Parsons given his extensive resume. Among his credits, the audience may best place him from 1976’sDawn of the Deadand a recurring role as Roger Rockmore in Nickelodeon’s popularKen and Keltelevision series. Anyone suspecting that they’ve seen Darla (Chelsea Field) or Laura (Brenda Bakke) elsewhere may not be wrong. Prior to this, Field took on the role of Teela inMasters of the Universe(1987) and Bakke would star alongsideCharlie Sheenas C.I.A. Agent Michelle Rodham Hiddleston in 1993’sHot Shots! Part Deux. Fans of theStar Trekfranchise prior to the J.J. Abrams era will also recognize Buttrick most as David Marcus in bothStar Trek II: The Wrath of Khan(1982) andStar Trek III: The Search for Spock(1984). Unfortunately, he fell to Toxoplasmosis at the age of 29, but anyone looking at his credits can see there was a good chance he had a future in the business ahead of him had circumstances been different.
Death Spaalso managed to have an impressive amount of product placement, which deserves some acknowledgment. Brands like Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Triscuit can be found littered throughout its scenes. No matter how seriously this film is taken in the end, praise has to be given to its creators and their ability to have convinced so many companies that it’d do well enough to warrant being referenced in the movie.
Death Spa is a Campy Ode to Horror
Going in, the movie has a scatterbrained story that it just barely manages to navigate coherently. Viewers follow David trying to nonchalantly move on from the insanely intense death of his ex-wife via his new beau, Laura, who is tragically blinded in the movie’s first chapter. David’s tortured not only by his wife’s ghost, but also his own grief and the barrage of his female patrons coming onto him. Somewhere along the halfway point, the narrative slips in a subplot where his lawyers scheme to force David to sell his spa to them while also beginning to give up on what story it already had. Usually, this is something it shouldn’t do, especially given the surprise subplot injection, but it was for the best. Instead, the story goes all-in on some absurdly glorious kills.
Putting this masterpiece’s dark comedy aside for a moment, the crew’s craft and dedication must be acknowledged. Given its low budget, the fact that the script was only just good enough to be worth shooting, and its very limited release, there’s much to be proud of. The gruesome detail of each kill is great and many can be seens as an ode to its mainstream predecessors. The neck impalement of Marci Hewitt (Vanessa Bell Calloway) in the first act of the movie pulls influence from the brutality of theHalloweenandFriday the 13thfranchises. When watching the utterly ridiculous eel attack in which Catherine possesses a frozen eel to kill one of the officers investigating the string of deaths at the health spa, one can’t help but be reminded of the tongue-in-cheekiness of Freddy Kruger’s kills inNightmare on Elm Streetand Catherine’s finale massacre of the gym’s partying patrons feels as if it were pulled straight out of the blood-drenched, fire-blazoned end-sequence from the originalCarrie(1976).
Listen, if you’re looking for a horror feature that takes its scares seriously, you’ll want to look elsewhere. When I first learned about it,I sought outDeath Spa’s trailersand, though it’s clearly not going to be part of a Criterion Collection by any means, I was entranced by what I saw. TheGremlins-esque soundtrack and opening sequence of the neon signage for “Starbody Health Spa” short-circuiting into “D EA TH SPA” teases viewers of the brilliance they’ve stumbled upon. It’s an artfully executed campy horror that’s absolutely bananas from start to end. Honestly, it’s surprising thatRifftraxnorMystery Science 3000never took it on. It’s worthy of an absurdly entertaining movie night where nobody understands what’s happening in the movie, but everyone’s here for it. The only thing that’d make it better is watching it while being served sushi.
