AEROBICIDE (1987)

DIRECTED AND WRITTEN by David A. Prior

STARRING  -  Marcia Kerr as Rhonda Johnson,  David James Campbell as Lt. Morgan,  Fritz Matthews as Jimmy,  Ted Prior as Chuck, Teresa Van der Woude as Jaimy.

PLOT  -  Five years ago a beautiful young model was hideously burnt in a tanning bed accident. She survived...just.

Fast forward to five years later and theres a top gymnasium opened in town - a place called "Rhondas Workout" run by ex-model turned business woman - Rhonda Johnson. Here the young and the beautiful can make themselves yet more glamorous by attending aerobics classes and working out all day.

However, the young and the beautiful soon become the dead and the mutilated for there is a killer stalking the saunas and changing rooms of  "Rhondas Workout". Armed with a giant metal safety pin, the killer slashes and maims thier way through the health and fitness fanatics. 

A tough cop - Det. Lt. Morgan is called in to catch the deranged killer,  Also investigating is a Private eye/Martial artist called Chuck. Can they catch the killer before more bodybags are filled with the young, healthy and dead...

DIALOUGE  -  Jaimy (describing one of the victims) -  "She was so pretty."  Morgan - "Not anymore."

Morgan -  "Tell that college boy that if he doesn't have that report ready in 30 minutes, I'm going to go over there and do an autopsy on his face !!!!"

PERFORMANCES  - It's an 80's B-movie slasher film, so don't go into this expecting Oscar worthy acting  - it is what it is. The acting ranges from absolutely inept to functional at best.

The most noteworthy is Campbell's performance as Morgan. Its very much in the standard tough and cynical cop mould seen in many other crime dramas. He seems to have two settings - angry and shouting or calm and sarcastic - he's massively unpleasant to everyone he meets, he's also one of those cops who basically accuses every single person he meets of being the murderer. I'm guessing that's how he got his Detectives badge - he just pointed his finger at everyone in the room and when when he inevitability hit the right suspect by sheer law of averages he then claimed the glory. It's pretty amusing to see him in action, made doubly so by his face... It never moves !!! He has pretty much one facial expression throughout the entire movie - a weird, slackjawed scowl that looks like its hewn from granite. Bizarrely, this works in his favour, enhancing as it does the hard-boiled cop exterior.

Kerr is OK too as Rhonda. She comes across as pretty hard-nosed herself, being incredibly bitchy and venomous to most of those around her.

 Matthews does an adequate job too as Jimmy, the creepy bodybuilder who is so obviously a Red Herring in the murder mystery that it's absolutely no surprise at all when he turns out to be just that - a Red Herring.

Ted Prior as Chuck does little except get off with various lycra clad women, pump iron in sweaty close ups and have several overly choreographed punch ups with various suspects. The best of these is when he gets into a brawl with Jimmy who suddenly starts doing kung-fu dropkicks out of the blue. Was everybody in the 1980's a secret Ninja or what ?

The fight scenes are hilarious - as I said, they are REALLY over choreographed and staged looking,  and also, strangly slow moving - its like every move is performed with an exaggerated physical pose built in, just so the actors can look "cool"... It doesn't work.

SFX -  Lots of Heinz Ketchup was spilled in the making of this movie, no actors where harmed.

SEX & VIOLENCE - The sex aspect is where this movie really comes into its own. There are lots, and I mean LOTS of lingering extreme close up shots of various female body parts sqeezed into Lycra, bouncing around to bad 80's pop music whilst engaging in the act of Aerobics.

 It's like a pervert with a video camera broke into a 1980s leisure centre and decided to film everything he was letching at. Boobs, crotches and especially the arses. I don't think I've ever seen so many arses paraded into a camera lens in my entire life.  Its a SMORGASBORD of arses, its a scientific fact that if you where to take a shot of Alcohol for everytime an arse appeared onscreen in this film, your Liver would look like mashed roadkill after the first fifteen minutes. It's a veritable galaxy of arses, in fact they should have just called the film "ARSES" and have done with it.

Did I mention that there where a lot of arses ?

Another thing there is a lot of, is people being brutally murdered by an oversized safety pin.

Quite how this works I'm not entirely sure. I mean, yeah, it could give you a nasty scratch, but this flimsy looking, eminently bendable piece of metal actually PIERCES A MAN'S SKULL at one point. HOW ? WHY ? Who knows.

The killer uses somewhat more conventional weapons at some points - a carving knife, and in one scene they stove a weightlifters head in with his own dumb-bell, but the giant safety pin is by far the preferred weapon.

 Its insane, it's genius in its way. I'm not sure what type of genius exactly, but it's definitely genius of some variety.

RATING - This is an utterly ridiculous film.

In parts it's a 1980's aerobics Workout video, in other parts it's a murder mystery, a bad Kung-fu movie and in other instances, it's just a whole lot of arses bouncing up and down. It really has to be seen to be believed.

I'm awarding this -  3 arse fetishists wet dreams out of 5. Enjoyable rubbish.