Killer Workout / Aerobicide / Aerobi-Cide / Aerobic Killer (1987) -**½
Those of you who saw The Substance last year, but were too young to remember the 1980’s, might have been inclined to call bullshit on the exercise show at the center of the story, on the grounds that there was no way anything so openly softcore-porny could possibly have aired on broadcast television while Jerry Falwell and Edwin Meese walked the Earth. You’d have been about half-right. The aerobic workout shows of the 80’s used slightly more demure costumes, insofar as they didn’t show much actually bare skin, but those leotards were very revealing in their own way. Think of Harley Quinn’s original 1990’s costume versus her various 21st-century getups, and I think you’ll grasp my meaning. The camera angles weren’t as flagrantly lewd, but “flagrantly” is doing a lot of work there. Most of all, the exercise routines themselves were less strenuous, not least because pop music of the era was less strenuous as well, but also because TV-station bosses back then were just a little bit gunshy about letting all those spandex-clad women get too sweaty. Still, we’re talking about differences of degree here. Also, some locally-produced workout shows pushed the envelope of titillation more than others, cannily recognizing that it wasn’t just housewives looking to lose those last ten pounds of baby-weight watching.
So if broadcast TV was willing to exploit the sex appeal of women exercising, it only stands to reason that the movie industry, with fewer limits on permissible content, would exploit it even harder. Sure enough, aerobics movies formed a noticeable trend in 1980’s fadsploitation cinema, usually piggybacking onto some other, more established genre template. Teen-oriented sex comedies naturally got there first and stayed there longest, but for a few years in the middle of the decade, gyms and aerobics classes became fairly common settings for romances, “chasing the dream” melodramas, and even horror movies. Understandably, the aerobics connection in the latter context was often purely incidental, like in Demons 2. But there were plenty of mid-to-late-80’s fright films that made the gym the main focus of the proceedings. Killer Workout, the third picture from Alabama schlock auteur David A. Prior, is perhaps the foremost example. It turns a mad slasher loose on a fitness club whose members take an impossibly strict reading of the 80’s workout mantra, “no pain, no gain.”
Killer Workout’s slasher origin sequence is remarkable in that it’s recognizable as such only because of our expectation that this is a slasher movie. An up-and-coming fashion model named Valerie (whose face we pointedly never get to see clearly— although we are afforded long and very satisfying looks at both her tits and her ass) comes home to find exciting news waiting for her on the answering machine. Her agent has secured her a coveted slot on the cover of Cosmopolitan, for which she’s scheduled to fly out to Paris the following morning. (Prior seems to have confused the New York-based Cosmo with some other magazine.) Just one thing, though: the agent made a point of praising Valerie’s suntan, so it behooves her to make sure she actually has one before boarding the plane. With that in mind, the model immediately zips over to the Second Sun tanning salon to get herself a good full-body toasting. Alas for Valerie, the alarmingly coffin-like tanning bed succumbs to a freak power surge or some such thing in the middle of her session, and she winds up not so much toasted as charbroiled.
There’s nothing whatsoever to indicate the several-year jump through time that’s supposed to occur between that opening segment and the scenes thereafter. Again, Prior is relying on our familiarity with slasher-movie storytelling conventions even to communicate that he’s using them in the first place. This time, we’re introduced to a gym called Rhonda’s Workout, owned by Rhonda Johnson (Marcia Karr, from Maniac Cop and Savage Streets) in partnership with an unseen man called Ericson. Rhonda handles the day-to-day operation of the business, while Ericson makes the big, expensive decisions. In practice, that means it’s Rhonda’s problem when her party-girl sidekick, Jaimy (Night Visitor’s Teresa Van der Woude), is too hungover to teach her aerobics class, and when no-neck lotharios Jimmy (Fritz Matthews, of Deadly Prey) and Tommy (Richard Bravo) won’t stop sexually harassing the women of the staff. (I have no idea what those guys’ actual jobs are supposed to be. Maybe they’re personal trainers over in the weight room?) But when somebody develops a habit of murdering the gym’s customers just before closing time night after night, that’s a problem for Ericson. In the wake of the first slaying, the senior partner hires Chuck Dawson (Ted Prior, from Sledge Hammer and Surf Nazis Must Die), the buffest private eye in all Birmingham, to pose as a new jock-of-all-trades employee, so as to scope out the gym for any clues to the perpetrator’s identity.
Mostly what Dawson does is to annoy the ever-loving shit out of Rhonda, whom Ericson has decided to keep in the dark about the new guy’s true mission. Chuck also gets dragged into a one-sided romantic rivalry with Jimmy, who has long harbored an obsessive unrequited love for the boss. And inevitably, Dawson interferes at every turn with the belligerently inept work of Lieutenant Morgan (David Campbell, from Scarecrows and Futuresport), the police detective leading the official investigation of the Workout Murders. There are suspects aplenty at first, among staff and clientele alike, but since the killer keeps knocking them off just as the cases against them start really coming together, it’s obvious enough by the halfway mark that Rhonda herself almost has to be the culprit, in some way connected to Valerie’s tanning bed mishap in the prologue.
Normally I consider it a serious defect when a movie has neither any clear protagonist nor a central ensemble, but Killer Workout’s lack of both is precisely what makes it more engaging than the typically worn-out late-80’s slasher flick that it initially seems to be. That’s because each of the three characters vying inconclusively for protagonist status belongs in a totally different film from the other two, with results that manage to be both polyphonic and cacophonous at the same time. Indeed, Rhonda arguably belongs in two (or maybe even three) totally different movies all by herself! For the first half of Killer Workout, David Prior treats her as a prickly but legitimately put-upon businesswoman, facing a disaster that threatens to undo her life’s work. But he does so in ways that leave us constantly questioning whether that makes her more Preston Tucker or Mayor Larry Vaughn. ’Cause let’s face it— keeping Rhonda’s Workout open even after it’s firmly established itself as a magnet for murder is so insanely irresponsible as to point a tentative finger of guilt at the boss all by itself. But then once it becomes clear that Rhonda is the last credible suspect left standing, she starts turning into a sort of non-supernatural sister to Freddy Krueger in the weaker Nightmare on Elm Street sequels— a magnificent bitch whom you can’t help rooting for, simply because the characters who aren’t psycho-killers are vapid at best and repellant at worst.
Chuck Dawson, meanwhile, is a reasonable protagonist for the erotic thriller/murder mystery that Killer Workout flirts with being whenever he’s in the spotlight. The customers all want to bang him. Jimmy assumes that he wants to bang the coveted Miss Johnson. There are even some moments between Chuck and Rhonda that could be interpreted as feints in the direction of a Basic Instinct-like “sleeping with the suspect” plot thread, four years before Basic Instinct. But at about the end of the second act, Prior abandons that whole approach in favor of an altogether different mode, and Dawson, having served his purpose, meets the most unexpected fate of any character in the film.
That altogether different mode creates a natural habitat for Lieutenant Morgan, the last of Killer Workout’s main-ish characters. His version of the film is a weird mutation of the police procedural, pitting a cop with the instincts of a vigilante against a killer too clever to leave a trail of evidence that would stand up in court. I suspect that this is the movie Prior would rather have made all along, partly because these sequences (concentrated during the third act) show the most verve, and partly because the rest of Prior’s career reveals him to have been an action director at heart. Nevertheless, it’s very strange watching a slasher movie swerve so hard into Dirty Harry territory, even if the two genres’ subject matter has enough overlap that I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t happen more often.
Another respect in which Killer Workout makes something intriguing, seemingly by accident, out of what should be one of its worst features concerns the movie’s preposterous surfeit of aerobics sequences. Don’t get me wrong, now— I have nothing against two dozen thong-clad girls doing synchronized pelvic thrusts in front of mirrored walls, or humping the hardwood floors in somewhat ragged unison (although I’d probably like it better set to music less lame than the third-rate Pat Benatar and Patty Smythe impersonations that comprise most of Killer Workout’s soundtrack). But my God is there ever a lot of that shit in this movie, even after the corpses start piling up in the locker rooms. The thing is, though, that once Rhonda’s motive for exterminating her clientele comes into focus, it retroactively becomes thematically important that the movie devotes so much attention to its crassly eroticized exercise. If David Prior seems lewdly obsessed with the girls limbering up their hip joints and firming up their tuchuses at Rhonda’s Workout, well, so is the killer herself! Again, this doesn’t really seem to have been a deliberate effort to mirror character psychology in the film’s construction. More likely it’s just that Prior knew what anybody watching a movie called Killer Workout in 1987 wanted to see. But it kind of works, from an oblique, cockeyed perspective that I wasn’t at all expecting.
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