Discovering “DEATH SPA”
by Johnny Wallace
Los Angeles, late 1980’s. Club owner Michael’s STARBODY HEALTH SPA is booming. It boasts state-of-the-art facilities, beautiful clientele, and vibrant staff who know how to put the ‘personal’ in personal trainer. The hyper-modern building and its electronic workout machines are controlled by a computer system so advanced, it can only be operated by Michael’s genius hacker ex-brother-in-law, David.
But Michael has problems. It’s been one year since his wife Catherine lost their baby in childbirth then burned herself to death in a wheelchair. Catherine shared a psychic bond with her brother David in life, which carried over in death, and so neither of them approve of Michael dating a young employee of the Spa named Laura so soon after Catherine’s death. Still with me?
The horror begins one evening as Laura becomes locked in the steam room. Instead of harmless steam, deadly chlorine gas is pumped in. She survives, barely, and two LAPD detectives arrive to investigate. Snide David seems at fault, but while he’s being questioned, more strangeness occurs. A man’s chest flies open using a chest-fly machine. Could be computer malfunction but… bolts unscrewing themselves from diving boards? Tiles flying from shower walls, colliding with bubbly naked women? Seems unnatural. Or supernatural. What’s more, Michael finds a bird’s nest in his office, complete with dead bird fetus. Is this a metaphor? And then the message on his monitor: “Michael, I miss you.”
Catherine has been plaguing Michael with nightmares, so he meets with a paranormal investigator who tells him the accidents could be his dead wife returned, even though she’s been “burned to unrecognizable ashes.” Michael agrees to let the P.I. snoop around the spa. We are also shown a scene that seems to confirm that Catherine has returned as David commits spectral incest with the ghost of his twin sister, thankfully played out off screen.
The P.I. discovers the body of a young woman in the basement, melted by acid. A girl who had made advances at Michael. He also meets… the ghost of Catherine! He draws a luger handgun which instantly explodes in telekinetic fury, and he is bashed to death on the ceiling by unseen force. A subplot continues where Michael believes his lawyer Tom may be involved with the accidents as well, trying to devalue the spa for a takeover. Either way, the madness must stop.
Michael must shut down the spa to prevent further carnage, but the Mardi Gras party he’s been preparing for all week is already in full swing. Hedonic acts and culturally insensitive costumes run rampant. The ghost of Catherine takes possession David’s body and seizes the computer control room. Things get zany. Blenders attack people, saboteurs spontaneously combust. The half-filleted body of a sushi fish reanimates and launches across a walk-in cooler to rip the throat out of a police detective.
David/Catherine and Michael square off in a showdown. The doors are locked, and partygoers are killed at random. Michael manages to save Laura from a tanning bed set to roast, then uses the spa’s electricity panel to somehow fry Catherine/David in the computer room, evicting the ghost. Madness. The remaining police detective unloads her revolver into David’s head. It’s a fuckin’ PARTY!
From its opening sequence where a CGI storm and lightning bolt strikes the STARBODY HEALTH SPA sign, leaving DEATH SPA in its place, to the riotous finale where workout equipment and ghosts mutilate people trampling each other for escape- this movie is balls-out amazing. It’s like the abandoned sex-child from some orgy consisting of the movie Poltergeist, Olivia Newton-John’s music video for ‘Physical’, the soap opera Days of our Lives, and every ‘80’s action movie where the machines take over. DEATH SPA.
Johnny Wallace is a freelance writer and is currently a copywriter and data manager for Darkside Releasing.
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