Death Spa
I spend a lot of my time writing, as evidenced by the constant updating of these blogs. This means, inevitably, that I spend a lot of time thinking of ways to promote said writing, which generally ends up with me thinking of easy to swallow catchphrases or brief paragraphs that explain the work it is I'm trying to share. With that being said, I can not, for the life of me, no matter how hard I try, think of a worse tagline for something than "You'll Sweat Blood." That doesn't sound like an advertisement for a horror movie, that sounds like a side effect of some bad medication. Like, that tells me absolutely nothing except that this movie apparently intends to do me bodily harm just by watching it, which, looking at this box, I fully believe.
I'm glad they give us a list of people responsible for this nightmare, but it's a rather weird decision to stick that list on the front cover right under your art. Still, it's nice to know who's house to torch. Also, along with a completely unintelligable and uninspired tagline, just the name of the movie of the alone is atrocious. You know how when everyone first heard of Axe Cop they were like, "That sounds like something a 6 year would come up with?" and then it turns out a 6 year old did come up with it, and it was brilliant? This feels kinda like that, except without the brilliant part. This box art, this box design even, its color palette and everything, is so goddamned eighties that I can feel myself preparing to Jazzercise as I write this. I'm a bit worried that I'm going to be gagging on a spoon before this is over.
And it's not even so much that the colors are bad, in and of themselves, but moreso that they're kind of just bad together? Which is impressive, because everyone knows that everything goes with black, so how do you fuck that up? I don't know, but these people certainly knew. Also, looking at the list of names on this, I will say one positive thing, which is one of the co-writers (if you wanna be generous enough to call this 'written') is named Mitch Paradise, which has to be the single coolest fucking name that I've ever heard. Like, that just sounds like a man from the 80s in a white italian suit cruising around snorting cocaine while listening to synth music. Actually, perusing the other names on the this box brings up a lot of questions. Let's just list off a few here, shall we?
- Merrit Buttrick
- James Bartruff
- Jamie Beardsley-Jones
"For a workout in hell, you'll sweat blood!"
Like that's almost a coherent sentence, right? Sure. But I don't even think that's the case. I think they just threw in both because fuck it, it was the eighties. I also realize how often I think on this blog I have now used the phrase, "fuck it, it was the eighties", but man, it's really the only way to describe the decade, especially artistically. The artwork, while not bad by any means, is downright confusing if nothing else. I get that the woman is supposed to be evil, but...but they still made her hot, but just gave her a horrible goblin face, so...I don't know. Maybe this awakened something in somebody? And I'm not here to judge you goblin fuckers, alright, you guys are welcome here. Fuck all the goblins you want. It's just a weird level of uncanny valley, and that's without the help of CGI. Contextually, as is usually the case, the screenshots on the back are of absolutely no help, and are just random one off semi interesting shots they thought would entice people, but I have a question about the front art. There's a man in the background, and he's clearly being tortured, but...but he's hung like Jesus.
Now, at first glance, this appears to just be your typical run of the mill bland but not bad technically box art for a really dumb movie. At that's pretty much what it is. There's no real interesting story behind it, and I doubt the movie itself is good, considering it ended up on an episode of the "How Did This Get Made" podcast, but boy, when I hit the wikipedia page, I was greeted with a few very special tidbits of information that cannot go unshared.
While it's not a very long wikipedia page by any means, it's got a few things that really do need to be discussed, and one of them really says a lot about the film industry as a whole I think. So, the first thing that caught my eye when I landed on the wiki page was this little excerpt, which really goes to show just how much a paragraph on the back of a box can distort your image of a film.
Like, correct me if I'm wrong, maybe you didn't have the same reaction I did when you read the back of the box, but I sort of assumed that his wife had been murdered and that was why she was taking revenge on all these beautiful (I'm assuming mostly) women at his gym, because she's an angry vengeful spirit, which is totally justifiable if that was how it went down. Unfortunately, according to the short blurb from the wikipedia, that's not how it went down. Apparently, his wife just up and killed herself, and then starts haunting them all. I mean...sure, I have no context for why she kills herself, maybe he mistreated her, I don't know, and I'm not one to want to make light of suicide in any way being someone who wants to kill herself every single day, but like...lady, you kind of put yourself in this position? Like, this is your doing, why're you mad? Did he not care enough that you died? Did he try and move on too quickly afterwards? I don't know, this just seems really baffling, but nowhere near as baffling as the next thing.
Apparently this movie came out 10 fucking MONTHS in Japan before it came out here, in the US. This is...just...why? What happened? Could they not find a distributor? They already found someone stupid enough to pay to get it made, so how hard could it have been to find someone stupid enough to distribute it? This makes so little sense to me. And why Japan? Like, why not another english speaking country? Why not Australia or something? Like, what? I don't even have an argument for this, it's that bizarre. I also feel slightly personally attacked that this movie came out the year I was born. Not cool, Death Spa. Stay the FUCK away from me.
But neither of these, neither the lame ass description nor the weird ass scheduling release, hold a handle to what I am about to show you. What I found at the end of all of this really said a lot to me about the state of the film industry itself, especially in that decade. So many times on this blog I've said something to the effect of, "You know this thing could ONLY have been made in the 80s" and this next screenshot vindicates each and every time that I said that.
Yeah. You read that correctly. This movie was literally made because a "health craze had blossoming in LA and health clubs were coming up like mushrooms, so we were like, fuck it, ghost health club, that might be cool". I know there's a running joke on this blog, and on the internet in general where we think of like a guy in a meeting pitching something to someone incredibly inane and ridiculous and it still gets bought as if its genius, but this is the actual literal manifestation of that moment! It's not a joke! It happened! This is what the 80s were like! You could DO THIS! You could walk into a film producers office, sit down with sunglasses on because only assholes wear sunglasses indoors, open an ice cold beer and say, "You know, people sure are caring about their health a lot more, what if we made a movie where a ghost kills people in a gym?" and have it BE. MADE.
They wouldn't laugh you out of the office, they wouldn't have you removed with security, they wouldn't tell you you're an idiot to your face, no. They'd hand you a big ol' bag of cash and call you a genius. And you know what the worst part is? As wrong as this should be, they are a genius. Only a genius is able to sell something that absolutely fucking stupid and have it be taken seriously. This is why people go into sales, folks. Because if you're good enough at it, even if it sounds ludicrous, you can still make money. You cannot walk into an office today and say, "I wanna put a goblin face on a hot woman in a gym leotard on an exercycle".
But you could in the 80s.
In the 80s, you were a genius.
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