Boy the things that passed for entertainment in the decades before right now. This isn't actually as bad as Slasher fans may describe it, and along with NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR stand as evidence of the influence of the dance movie craze brought on by DIRTY DANCING crossed with horror movie conventions. KILLER WORKOUT (as retitled for home video) does not have any break dancing Menudo clones like NIGHT TRAIN did, but it has something even better: AEROBICIZING!!
THE PLOT: A young ditz manages to fry herself in a tanning bed in the film's opening segment. Five or eight or ten or however many years later, people start dying horrifying slasher movie deaths at an Aerobics club catering to the dumbest people in Santa Monica or Bakersfeild or Beverly Hills or wherever this film is supposedly set. Details like those are usually added to confuse viewers into thinking they are watching a story about people rather than a series of contrivances designed to kill off the supporting cast in a horror movie by their relative importance to the plot. KILLER WORKOUT is if nothing else par for the course on all such fronts, so fans of the genre will be entertained, and non-fans will have something to laugh at while drinking beer. Life is short, and this video (if you can find one) will help make it seem even shorter.
What makes AEROBICIDE (the original theatrical title) kind of nifty is that it knows these things, does not dwell on them, and concentrates on the killings, some T&A, and LOTS & LOTS of footage of various leotard and legwarmer festooned big haired '80's hotties (and one fat guy on a stationary bike) working out to the film's atrocious musical score. It's like A-Ha crossed with the Bangles, and reminded me of why I started listening to King Crimson when in high school: The music of the 1980's sucked, for the most part. This stuff is especially bad, and the reason the film is probably Out of Print has to do with the rights to the music, which apparently just isn't worth bothering with to whomever owns it. Don't blame them at all on that front.
So this is a nice blast from the past for anyone with a yearning to re-visit 1985/1986, has some gratuitous nudity, some nice touches of gore, a neat plot twist, a second even neater plot twist after that, topped off by an amusingly sadistic ring to the ending that says Oh Yeah, The Fun Has Just Begun. Sadly there was no KILLER WORKOUT 2, because I liked the ambiguous good/bad/insane character of the woman scarred by the accident, the fact that there were three homicidal psychopaths in the film clamoring for screen time, and the movie's self awareness about being essentially a low-rent, brutal, misogynistic little Califiornia Aryan parable about the 1980's Yuppie Workout Generation ... Who are of course all now on Lipitor and having plastic surgery to keep their sun stretched skin from sagging. People in general are still stupid in 2005, and it's reassuring to see how dumb they were 20 years ago too. We're not doing so bad, I guess: We got rid of the big hair at least.
But ya know, the people who frequent this Aerobics Club are an odd bunch. They are all in amazingly impeccable shape, all gorgeous white homogeneous suburbanite professionals, and they keep right on Aerobicizin' even as the bodies pile up, and to anyone who does not inhale Drano for kicks, it's an inside job. Yet they keep jumping and leaping and spreading their bodies around, jiggling this way and that to tone up those muscles usually used when posing for Hustler Magazine, which is about where the mentality of the film rests. It's slickly made, suggestively voyeuristic, populated by psychopaths and airheads, and if I remember correctly, that pretty much summed up the 1980's.
THE PLOT: A young ditz manages to fry herself in a tanning bed in the film's opening segment. Five or eight or ten or however many years later, people start dying horrifying slasher movie deaths at an Aerobics club catering to the dumbest people in Santa Monica or Bakersfeild or Beverly Hills or wherever this film is supposedly set. Details like those are usually added to confuse viewers into thinking they are watching a story about people rather than a series of contrivances designed to kill off the supporting cast in a horror movie by their relative importance to the plot. KILLER WORKOUT is if nothing else par for the course on all such fronts, so fans of the genre will be entertained, and non-fans will have something to laugh at while drinking beer. Life is short, and this video (if you can find one) will help make it seem even shorter.
What makes AEROBICIDE (the original theatrical title) kind of nifty is that it knows these things, does not dwell on them, and concentrates on the killings, some T&A, and LOTS & LOTS of footage of various leotard and legwarmer festooned big haired '80's hotties (and one fat guy on a stationary bike) working out to the film's atrocious musical score. It's like A-Ha crossed with the Bangles, and reminded me of why I started listening to King Crimson when in high school: The music of the 1980's sucked, for the most part. This stuff is especially bad, and the reason the film is probably Out of Print has to do with the rights to the music, which apparently just isn't worth bothering with to whomever owns it. Don't blame them at all on that front.
So this is a nice blast from the past for anyone with a yearning to re-visit 1985/1986, has some gratuitous nudity, some nice touches of gore, a neat plot twist, a second even neater plot twist after that, topped off by an amusingly sadistic ring to the ending that says Oh Yeah, The Fun Has Just Begun. Sadly there was no KILLER WORKOUT 2, because I liked the ambiguous good/bad/insane character of the woman scarred by the accident, the fact that there were three homicidal psychopaths in the film clamoring for screen time, and the movie's self awareness about being essentially a low-rent, brutal, misogynistic little Califiornia Aryan parable about the 1980's Yuppie Workout Generation ... Who are of course all now on Lipitor and having plastic surgery to keep their sun stretched skin from sagging. People in general are still stupid in 2005, and it's reassuring to see how dumb they were 20 years ago too. We're not doing so bad, I guess: We got rid of the big hair at least.
But ya know, the people who frequent this Aerobics Club are an odd bunch. They are all in amazingly impeccable shape, all gorgeous white homogeneous suburbanite professionals, and they keep right on Aerobicizin' even as the bodies pile up, and to anyone who does not inhale Drano for kicks, it's an inside job. Yet they keep jumping and leaping and spreading their bodies around, jiggling this way and that to tone up those muscles usually used when posing for Hustler Magazine, which is about where the mentality of the film rests. It's slickly made, suggestively voyeuristic, populated by psychopaths and airheads, and if I remember correctly, that pretty much summed up the 1980's.