Welcome to B-Movie Enema. Here, we care a lot about your well-being and your desire to not look like a complete goblin in the summer. So, with that in mind, I’m going to pull a classic David A. Prior film from the vault to hopefully help us all get into shape. Killer Workout goes by a couple titles, with the aforementioned one the more popular, but it’s also known as Aerobicide. I have the version called Killer Workout, so we’re going with that title.

We’ve dealt with David Prior before with Deadly Prey. He hooked up with David Winters to form Action International Pictures (AIP). Now, we’re also quite familiar with Mr. Winters as I had a whole month of his pictures earlier this year. I don’t think I need to say too much about what Winters has done. But, back to Prior, he was quite well known for making kind of cheap-ish action schlock, but he stepped outside that on a rare occasion. Most notably, he dabbled in the slasher subgenre of horror with Killer Workout, and he dressed up a pair of action schlock films in a veneer of science fiction concepts with Future Force and Future Zone, both starring David Carradine.

Now… I don’t want you to think these movies made by Prior were just a bunch of dudes, some of which would be beefy, some would be more like David Carradine, going around and blasting things for a full 90 minutes alone. Oh no. Prior liked trying to make the same types of movies people would tune into on cable or rent each weekend at the video store. The easiest way to keep them coming back for more?

Tits. Lots and lots of tits. Well, and ass too. We mustn’t ever forget the A in T&A.

That’s really one of those things that kind of keeps Killer Workout somewhat memorable. The film got awful reviews. It was more or less slammed for being a pretty amateurish production. But this movie will tell you exactly what it plans on doing as we watch girls in aerobics classes moving their bodies in tight leotards and the camera is just getting right up in there. It kind of gets sleazy pretty fast. But – and you have to understand this is a universal truth – Prior knew what sold. Slashers, tits, and… Well, that was it in the 80s. Every single film made in the 80s was about a slasher killer chasing women around who were totally tits out the whole time. Ever see Out of Africa? Well, now you know what it’s about.

I digress.

The 80s were also when the aerobics craze took hold. Suddenly, gyms were popping up everywhere as people were convinced they needed to get in shape and become ideals of what men and women should look like. Los Angeles was the epicenter of this whole thing too. I think it was because it was easy to sell the California look because most of us corn-gobbling yokels in the midwest thought that was the peak of human looks and physique.

Sure, there were workout places that were your weightlifting type of gyms like Gold’s Gym or the people who would be pumping iron out on Venice Beach and what have you. That’s been around for a long time. I’m talking about the gyms that specialized in toning and slimming your body, not pumping iron and bulking you up. Arnold Schwarzenegger types would be at Gold’s Gym adding muscle. Your Barbie doll types would be at aerobics classes at these other types of gyms and making her waist as thin as possible while nearly killing herself in these routines for hours a day before going to a tanning bed to bronze her skin.

These were image-maker types of places. There was a whole mindset and culture around it. Think the Pelaton and various other kitschy types of workout routines today, but not sold to you online or through a membership that comes with equipment you purchased. This was all done in high-end parts of town with sweaty, smelly rooms full of (what movies told us) babes and hunks doing everything they could do to beat back bad nutrition choices or genes to obtain a body that would make them stand out to potential mates and suitors. It’s all kind of gross and a lot of work that very very few people had the constitution for if they had anything else going on in their world other than themselves.

And… yes. I’m not going to ignore the fact that the all-time greatest movie ever made, Heavenly Bodies, also was part of this era of films and focused on similar ideas. But, you see, that movie was perfect in every way. No other movies, including the John Travolta/Jamie Lee Curtis aerobics movie Perfect, were anywhere near as expertly made as Heavenly Bodies.

What’s funny is that this isn’t even the only horror slasher that takes place at an aerobics gym. Probably the first one most people think of is Death Spa. That has bigger stars in it and has a hell of a behind-the-scenes thing going on with basically almost everyone fucking each other in all sorts of different combinations across the sexuality spectrum. Angel III: The Domination also has a health spa element. However, the best of the best, the one that I’d bet not many people even realize is a gym or spa horror film is Lloyd Kaufman’s masterpiece, The Toxic Avenger. I’ll have more to say about that later this year so stick around.

Killer Workout begins with a girl coming home from a long day and she checks her messages, puts some dinner in the toaster oven, and so forth. One of her messages tells her that she got a job and she’s headed to Paris to be on the cover of Cosmopolitan. She immediately tells her TV dinner to fuck right off, as you do, and goes to the tanning salon to give herself that fresh coat of skin cancer that drives everyone wild when they flip through a Cosmo. However, things don’t quite work out for her…

Somehow, something goes wrong and the tanning bed lights on fire and burns the girl up. Now, I would think you would be able to sue that place into oblivion for the faulty tanning bed, right? I would even argue it might be more lucrative than that Cosmopolitan shoot she has coming up. Or, well, the shoot she had coming up. I’ve never seen the “all burn victims” edition of Cosmo at the supermarket. I’m just musing here out loud, but I still think she could sue the place to a pile of rubble pretty easily and win.

Or… Maybe she did.

Anyway, the movie shifts to Rhonda’s Work-Out where classes are in session and babes are working hard on their figures and sweating and everything is super tight and what have you. Seriously, it’s all bouncing boobs and camel toes. It’s like a music video too. I mean… It’s like Olivia Newton John’s “Physical” music video grew up and became a pervert. David Prior’s camera is so close to these girls, I’m drenched in their sweat. And now I have a fetish I never knew I had.

Anyway, there’s a guy, Jimmy, who is intently watching Rhonda (Marcia Karr, who was also in Savage Streets as Stevie), but she seems more annoyed by him than anything. After her class, he hits on her and asks her out, but she shuts him down. She storms away from him and he gives this look that will likely mean he’s a red herring. Rhonda is especially annoyed that her employee, Jaimy, was mega late and she had to teach her class. Rhonda is a bit of a ballbuster. She’s hard on Jaimy (to be fair, Jaimy was, like, over an hour late), and she has no fuckin’ time for Jimmy. She just seems like a hard-edged business lady.

Oh, and, yes, we have a Jimmy and a Jaimy in this movie.

One of the girls who worked out at Rhonda’s gets in the shower to clean up. She apparently takes super long showers for some reason. Well, she says she thinks better in there, but she’s in the shower for so long that the place closes and she is still in the shower. Jaimy closes the place up and as she does that, someone goes into the shower room and turns out the lights, and then murders the girl with a large safety pin. Yeah, you read that right… The killer uses a safety pin to stab the girl repeatedly until the killer eventually gets her in the throat and she dies.

Oddly enough, Jaimy, after checking out the place and cleaning up some towels in the men’s locker room, decides to open a guy’s locker and play around with his jock strap. She’s entranced by this thing too. It’s like letting a 14-year-old into a really hot friend of his older sister’s and he has unfettered access to the girl’s panty drawer. She’s inspecting every millimeter of this thing. Rhonda finds Jaimy and startles the jock fondler. Then, appropriately, she laughs at Jaimy and asks her what she’s doing. Those are both good reactions to what she caught her doing.

Rhonda tells Jaimy to get a move on with closing up so they can go to a dinner thing. Jaimy makes her way to the girls’ locker room. There, in one of the lockers, she finds the dead girl from the hours-long shower.

The cops come to investigate. This falls to Lt. Morgan, played by David Campbell. When Rhonda gives Morgan grief over how long she spent with other cops answering questions, he tells her that she’s going to have to get used to him being around to give information. Morgan asks about the girl whose locker the body and safety pin weapon were found in. Apparently, this girl whose locker this was all found in is known for being shy and always keeping to herself. Morgan ultimately leaves and says he’ll be back.

Rhonda goes back to business as usual. There are whispers around about the murder, but things are mostly back to normal. A new employee by the name of Chuck (the Deadly Prey himself, Ted Prior) arrives after being hired by Rhonda’s mysterious senior partner. When Jimmy tells Chuck to stay away from Rhonda, Chuck beats the shit out of him. I want you to realize something that I have to try pretty hard to explain since you are not currently watching this movie. Chuck was taking out trash from the gym when Jimmy comes pulling in and nearly hits Chuck with his car. Jimmy comes out of the car hot and tells him to stay away from Rhonda. Rhonda was not in this scene. Jimmy has never seen Chuck and Rhonda interact. He just is there to get the shit kicked out of him by Ted Prior, the director’s awesome brother.

Oh… I suppose it’s there for Ted to kick the shit out of a weirdo character AND for a babe from the gym to watch and, presumably, in the middle of his workday, ask him to go for a ride with her back to her place where they can have Diet Pepsi and fuck.

He does learn something for the benefit of us viewers. She tells him about Jimmy. She says she was stupid enough to date him once. Okay. Fine. But apparently, Jimmy likes to do kinky shit. He ties girls up and does things to them. He gets Jimmy’s address from this girl and we learn that he’s a bit of a ringer. He’s there trying to find out about the murder and so forth.

This movie is a horror movie… Or so I’m told. I mean we’re 30 minutes in and there has been a girl lit on fire in a tanning bed. A dance aerobics scene breaks out. Then a girl showers for hours and gets slashed. Another dance aerobics scene happens. Ted Prior shows up to kick ass and get laid. Then another aerobics scene. It’s almost like the aerobics scenes are there to transition from one scene or sequence to another. It’s like everything starts with an aerobics class then we follow someone from that into the next plot point. I can see why David Prior didn’t venture too long outside the realm of action because this horror film is anything but.

Okay, so from this most recent aerobics class, we follow Diane, the shy girl whose locker the dead girl’s body was found in. She tries hitting on Jimmy but he kind of blows her off. She goes home and checks her dating voicemails, but nothing there either. I instantly feel sorry for this girl. She’s pretty, but not quite like the other featured players like Marcia Karr (Rhonda) or Teresa Van Der Woude (Jaimy). But she’s just wanting to meet someone and, you know, rub her bits on their bits. She’s totally set up to be this sad character.

Morgan follows her home to question her about the dead girl. His banging on the door scares the girl. Instead of identifying himself as a cop first, he bangs on the door and demands she open the door. He eventually breaks in, but not before the killer arrives and slashes up poor Diane. He almost catches the killer but they jumped out the window before Morgan can get to them. The killer eventually comes back to the gym and washes their hands and the weapon.

Now, here’s the thing about this movie. The killer has returned to Rhonda’s to clean up, right? Well, Rhonda is there, just as she was the night of the first girl’s murder. Jimmy is obviously being played as a real bad dude. He is deadset on getting Rhonda in the sack to the point that he is seething with rage whenever she turns him down. We also know how he feels because the soundtrack tells us so. It’s very clear that these are our only two suspects. The whole thing about Diane was really stupid. It was only there so she would die right before Morgan could possibly save her and remove her as a suspect. In fact, we only JUST met Diane the scene before she dies. So, if they really thought anyone would by the shy, quiet girl was the killer, they haven’t seen many movies. So to introduce Diane as a possible suspect, to begin with, is not a good idea. Just have her be another member and give her those quirks we were given in the exposition. This is almost shockingly bad in how it’s constructed.

But also, I do like that some people come by Rhonda’s to graffiti the place. It’s like the guys who made Death Spa came over to this set and tried to muscle the production to shut down.

One of the graffiti people is killed with the usual safety pin weapon. Another is throat slashed and the third is killed by a car that won’t start. I should mention that we know one of these characters. Yeah, the girl whose car wouldn’t start so she could avoid being killed was the girl who took Ted Prior home. So, I guess she’s dead. Things ramp up quickly. Those three are killed, and the next day two guys are killed inside the gym. One was smashed in the face by a dumbbell and the other was stabbed straight through the forehead by the safety pin.

A guy who likes Jaimy, Tommy, finds the bodies. Soon, Jaimy comes in and sees the scene, and screams. Ted Prior immediately jumps into action and punches Tommy repeatedly. Like… Repeatedly without asking a single question. He’s taken to a room to be questioned but is ultimately safety pinned.

You know… Ask for murders after a horrifically badly paced first 30 minutes and, goddamn, I get my request fulfilled. However, there’s a big problem here. Well, there’s one big problem and lots of little problems. The big problem is that most of these murders can only really be done by a single person, and it would seem highly highly highly unlikely that this person can do these killings without being immediately found and/or fingered as the killer because SHE is highly recognizable and always around. Yeah, it has to be Rhonda. She would have everything she needed to do the killings – access and opportunity. We have no idea why she would do this as that’s going to be saved for the final act’s big reveal, I’m sure, but she has everything else she needs. The problem, though, is that there cannot be any possible way for her to kill Jimmy without the cop guarding him or Morgan or anyone else in the middle of the business day seeing her go to him unless, somehow, she is hiding out in that locker room Jimmy was left, but she would also have had to be able to hide somewhere no one could see her until she struck. That’s not possible in that scene.

The whole Jimmy red herring doesn’t work either because if he’s still alive, then neither Ted Prior nor Lt. Morgan is doing a good job at going to him immediately and finding out if he’s more than just a sex weirdo. Rhonda has a cold detachment to these killings happening at her business. That last one surely led to a body bag being carried out into the spa where people would have seen it. That’s even if you can possibly believe that the whole place wouldn’t be immediately shut down and now you have rubbernecking members outside waiting for the police to bring out bodies. There’s just too much here that doesn’t make any logical sense in a real-world scenario.

And then there’s another real problem I have with this movie. Each time we’ve seen nudity it has been linked directly to something violent that happens. I get that Prior looked at this genre and thought to himself, “Oh, okay. So, titties out, then the killer comes and kills the girl and boy who had the sex. Got it.” While that is the incredibly reductive way to explain how those who fuck in a horror movie are doomed to be killed by the killer man, it’s, as I said, reductive. It’s not that simple. We saw someone get naked and get into a tanning bed, and it blew up roasting the girl alive. We saw a girl get in the shower and she’s killed. We then see that same girl’s whole tits covered in blood as she’s zipped up into a body bag. Tommy had a nightmare before his death that Jaimy came to him while he was detained to fuck him and shortly after showing those girls, and as we are soaking them in, she gets her throat slit by Jimmy. Even Diane, that poor mousy girl who just wants to get someone’s rocks off while she got hers off, was dressed in red satin lingerie when she died. All of the sex has been completely linked to the violence and it isn’t coming with that whole underlying sin thing that a lot of 80s horror injected in subliminally. I don’t think David Prior understood his assignment.

While Morgan leaves a uniformed cop at the spa to keep an eye on things, that night, after, again, being rebuffed by Rhonda, Jimmy decides to angrily do some bench presses. As he does that, Chuck sneaks into his house. While Jimmy rocks out on that bench press, Chuck finds a wide range of various guns lying around. He also has a shrine to Rhonda. Then, all of a sudden, Chuck is at Rhonda’s house watching her swim and he gets jumped by Jimmy and the two have another fight.

This whole Jimmy/Chuck thing is crazy in this movie. It’s insanely violent. Like, Jimmy instantly wanted to run Chuck down with his car in their first scene. Then Chuck beat the shit out of him and wanted to get his address to go over and continue to beat the shit out of him. Then, when they show down at Rhonda’s, there’s a fucking rake involved that’s sharp enough to stick into Jimmy’s thigh when Chuck connects with it. Like, seriously, these guys want to literally kill each other. And, before the other day, they didn’t even know each other. One guy just thinks the new hunk at the gym wants to fuck the girl he likes. Seriously. I don’t know what world this movie takes place in, but it’s clear this is David Prior resorting to having these fight scenes because he’s an action guy. No other slasher movie has fight scenes like this one between these two characters.

So here’s the deal with Chuck… He’s a private investigator hired by Rhonda’s partner to check things out after the first girl was found dead. He immediately zeroed in on Jimmy because he’s a creep. Chuck stumbled upon a bunch of stuff in Jimmy’s locker and his apartment. He ended up over at Rhonda’s because he thought that Jimmy is definitely the killer and he had all these pictures he took of Rhonda doing normal everyday Rhonda things, she would be next. So he went there and they had it out. Morgan tells Chuck he’s done and tells him to go back to San Francisco because he’s going to take care of everything now.

I guess that means Ted Prior is no longer consequential in this movie. In fact, he’s killed by Jimmy in a few scenes anyway.

Anyway, so Jaimy is off-screened at the spa. Yeah, ain’t that a bitch? One of the lead characters in this movie is just killed off-screen. That’s not how a horror movie works. And, get this… She’s not the only one off-screened either! The girl who found her was only trying to get her shit and get out before she was killed like the others. She finds Jaimy and then the uniformed cop who was stationed there finds her.

Morgan is told to get to the station because something was found out about the case. He takes off and we get our transitional aerobics class where we watch girls do sexy things. What’s great about this workout scene is that the girls are dancing and sweating it out to a song called “Aerobicide” where the following lyric is sung: “Working out until you die!”

Anyway, Morgan discovers that Rhonda Johnson used to be Valerie Johnson. Valerie was the up-and-coming young model who suddenly couldn’t get any gigs after 70% of her body was burned in that tanning bed accident. The way he sees it, she killed all these pretty girls out of some sort of psychotic jealousy. Rhonda doesn’t deny that she was once Valerie. She also doesn’t deny her accident. In fact, she shows him that she’s indeed who he says she is.

She tells him that none of this about her past means she killed those girls. He says he thinks it does because she hated the thought of those girls being able to look and do the things she no longer could. He arrests her and when he puts her in his car to take her downtown, he gets the report that Chuck was killed by Jimmy and he sets her free. He then chases Jimmy in classic horror movie action sequence form. Eventually, Morgan tries getting answers from Jimmy about why he’d take the fall for Rhonda and whether or not if Rhonda did the killings. Jimmy knocks Morgan out.

At the spa, Rhonda is clearly having a bad day. She looks at herself in the mirror but then gets mad and smashes it. She takes her wig off and stashes it in a locker while Jimmy makes his way into the spa and tries to find her. When she comes out showing all her burns and stuff, Jimmy is surprised to see her like this. Rhonda shoots him. Before dying, he reveals that he killed Chuck so he would be blamed for her murders, but she shoots him one more time to put an end to him.

Later, Morgan takes Rhonda out into a field on “urgent business”. He tells her a story about his father and how he tracked down a serial killer but the courts let him go. The killings started up again and then, one day, the killings stopped. His father never said anything, but Morgan knew what happened. He’s going to do the same thing. He plans to kill Rhonda and bury her in this field. However, he’s an idiot. He’s talking and talking and not doing the killing. He keeps talking about how he wouldn’t let her go if those killings will just start back up again… That’s when Rhonda decides to use his own shovel to knock him out. Later, Rhonda returns to work and goes to her office where she picks up her…

Giant safety pin!

It’s wild how bad this movie is. I guess, in hopes to distract us from noticing how fucking insanely bad this movie is, we are treated to sexy girls doing sexy aerobics during the credits. In fact, it’s even featuring Jaimy. She might be dead, but her sexy aerobics moves will live on forever.

Look, you want to see something fun and halfway decent from David A. Prior? Check out Deadly Prey. It even has Ted Prior in it. That’s David Prior’s wheelhouse. His action stuff is the right tone of schlocky and fun and it passes muster. In fact, even Invasion Force, which is part action and part comedy, is a fun watch. Do that one too.

Alright, I think I said all I can about Killer Workout. It’s time to move on and look upward and onward to our next review. Coming next week, I think it’s long overdue to look at another of those movies like Fritz the Cat that had this aura and mystique around it whenever someone uttered its title. Join me as I go balls deep into the sex comedy parody that is Flesh Gordon!