Death Spa (1989)

Terrible things are happening at the health spa of hunky – so says the script, at least - Michael Evans (William Bumiller): first his girlfriend Laura (Brenda Bakke) suffers burns and temporary blindness from a steam room accident (or was it?). Then all hell really breaks loose, with health spa goers not only tortured by aerobics but also hit by levitating tiles, murdered by fitness apertures running amok despite (or because of) the spa’s automated control systems, stabbed by stabby things and later on exploded and mutilated in many different ways when things come to a head on the place’s annual Mardi Gras bash.

Has the spa’s computer turned evil? Is the ghost of Michael’s dead wife (Sharri Shattuck) responsible? Or is her computer nerd brother out for vengeance? All of it? Something different?

Well, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s inflicting Michael Fischa’s mind-boggling Death Spa (the spa that kills?) on your unsuspecting brains. It’s candy-coloured like the 80s themselves! It’s sleazy with many a scene of female nudity that would be absolutely gratuitous if it weren’t the point of the film apart from the gore! It has a plot way too complicated for anyone involved to keep under control that tries its hardest to pull a Carnacki on the audience with a “natural” and a supernatural threat theoretically kinda-sorta happening at the same time (but don’t ask me which parts of the wild happenings are the responsibility of the ghost and which ones that of the other threat?)!

If that’s not enough to set the eyes of the kind of person (for example me) this thing was probably made for all a-glow, there’s much more to add, for this one is probably the most successful attempt (conscious or unconscious or through sheer incompetence) of a US horror film at becoming exactly like an 80s Italian horror film. So the plot makes no sense whatsoever: try the plan of the human bad guy that consists of making the spa so horrible Michael will lose it, so that bad guy and his partners then can easily acquire a spa nobody in his or her right mind would ever want to visit. Characters like psychic investigator (with a noir private eye sort of office) Dr. (of psychometry, I assume) Lido Moray are introduced with great fanfare, to then have nothing to do but to die. The dialogue sounds exactly like the sort of thing Italian dubbing studios would have come up with, full of non-sequiturs, bizarre phrasings and absurd declarations.

There’s also a case of possession that leads to in turns transvestism and bodily transformation into the other gender (twins, the film “explains”), smallish roles for Ken Foree, Rosalind Cash and Chelsea Field, and so much of treacly, sometimes rubbery gore I can only assume the influence of Fulci. However, to make that clear, Death Spa has little in common with the nightmarish atmosphere of the maestro’s best films – it’s much more like a hallucination induced by a bad combination of different kinds of alcohol and indigestion.


Not to put to fine a point on it, but Death Spa’s a horrible film by the standards of most sane people (though even they’d probably admit that some of the lighting is pretty rad in its way). By my standards, on the other hand, it is pretty darn awesome, mixing awkwardness, stupidity, and overambition with an increasingly hysterical tone that reaches the point of glorious absurdity once the Mardi Gras bash full of blind and deaf people who have their troubles seeing and hearing horrible deaths happening right next to them (which means they miss out on the undead fish that kill one of the cop characters, among many other things). I am convinced Death Spa is a major achievement; I’m just not sure what it achieves beyond blowing minds.

Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

Relationship-troubled couple Michelle (Kate Hodge) and Ryan (William Butler) are driving across the USA, bringing the car of Michelle’s dad to Florida. Right now, they are smack dab in the middle of Nowhere, Texas.

Some time after passing a police investigation digging up a mass grave, they end up at a gas station in the middle of the desert, meet a reasonably friendly and charming cowboy (Viggo Mortensen) and find themselves threatened with a shotgun by the crazy gas station owner (Joe Unger), which drives them to flight on a rather suspect road, chased by someone in a truck who throws a dead dog at them. Then follows a hectic attempt to change one of their car’s tires with only a flashlight for lighting; and a head on collision with the car of the improbable Benny (Ken Foree, hooray). Improbable, because he’s a black survivalist, and an actually decent guy to boot. Be that as it may, this is a very bad place for anyone to crash one’s car, and soon everyone is hunted by good old Leatherface (R.A. Mihailoff) and his new and improved cannibal family. Unpleasantness ensues.

I think Jeff Burr’s sequel to/reboot of  the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre based on a script by David J. Schow (perhaps known to you as the guy who coined the term Splatterpunk, and a pretty fine writer of fiction) is rather unfairly maligned. Of course, this film doesn’t have the visceral punch of Hooper’s original, and it didn’t change (or try to change) the direction of the horror film as a whole, but then, if I’d set the hurdle a genre film has to jump this high, I’d hardly ever get to enjoy one. For a New Line Cinema – “the place where horror franchises go to die” was their motto, I believe - horror sequel this is surprisingly engaging stuff.

I’ve read in various places online (hopefully not all working from the same wrong source) that Schow’s initial concept for the script was to treat the plot as the truth behind the urban legend that then created the Hooper original, which explains why Leatherface here has a new family that sort of but not completely resembles the old one, and why the parallels and nods towards the original play out as they do. It doesn’t explain a starting text scroll that suggests the first film did indeed happen (Schow, the scroll, and I prefer to pretend the Hooper’s second TCM never happened, which is good for everyone’s sanity), but I’d bet that’s just useless studio meddling, particularly since the “truth behind the massacre” idea makes perfect sense if you ignore that scroll. In any case, Schow delivers a playful but generally not campy variation of the original, including some elements that look glaringly late-80s/early 90s horror to my eyes. This works particularly well in the film’s first half or so, somewhat less so – yet still enough - in the finale when things become a bit too late-80s/early 90s action movie to be taken seriously anymore, and not at all in the pretty damn stupid final five minutes. But all in all the plot makes sense, and the film flows.

It does so of course also because Jeff Burr is one of the truly capable journeyman filmmakers of this particular time in the genre, with a nice hand for suspense – and much of Leatherface is focused on suspense and hits thriller beats more than strict horror ones – and the ability and knowledge to shoot relatively generic scenes in ways that aren’t always totally generic and obvious. This may not sound like much of an achievement but it really puts Leatherface miles above most horror sequels of its time. It feels like the work of people with a degree of respect for their audience and the genre they are working in, and that’s not at all something you can expect from any kind of sequel.

If I were in a criticizing mind, I’d remark that the glossy sheen of filmmaking of this time doesn’t jibe too well with the grime the material asks for but I’m not in that kind of mood tonight.

Three Films Make A Post: It's Alive With Thrills!

Devil's Den (2006): Remember the second half of From Dusk Till Dawn? Well, so did the people responsible for this one, and decided to remake it, only with half the humour and one third of the cleverness of the original, and without Robert Rodriguez' mad enthusiasm or Tarantino's knowledge of where and how to quote and still make a film that's more than a mere series of quotes; my old enemy competence makes an appearance instead. As far as rip-offs of post-modern horror action movies go, though, this is actually is one of the more watchable ones: at least as long as Ken Foree's on screen and the film doesn't try and do characterization.

 

The Meateater (1979): A US local independent production about a mad, rat-eating, Jean-Harlow-loving cannibal killer creeping through a newly reopened provincial cinema. Awkward acting between "Oh my GAWD, there's a camera" and "I'm so sleepy", bizarre framing and a fat, beef-jerky eating cop named Wombat attack and awaken the highest expectations in the lover of this very particular type of movie. Alas, after an hour or so, the film's misshapen yet adorable creativity disappears, never to return again, leaving me bored and a bit disappointed.

 

Yo El Ejecutor (1987): Keeping with movies that start out wrong yet strong only to get bogged down in things of no particular interest, this Mexican action movie about a tough guy killing bad guys for the US government by, about and with action trash maestro Valentin Trujillo begins with fantastic twenty minutes of every cheap-skate 80s action film action scene cliché in existence, but soon enough loses every bit of momentum and silly excitement to bad, drawn-out melodrama. There is still a bit of entertainingly stupid violence later on, as well as some hilariously wrong-headed moments of 80s macho man romancing (okay, "romancing"), however, the lost sense of witnessing a perfect encapsulation of what the 80s nearly-no-budget action movie was all about never returns. We'll always have the beginning.

 

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