Are you totally sure you want to join the gym this January?

There are more ‘gym-based’ horrors than you’d think. There’s Aerobicide (aka Killer Workout), Science Crazed, Fatal Fitness and many more, which indicate that 80s horror directors really wanted to skew the fitness culture that was booming at the time.

If you think about it, it makes total sense. Many horror films focus on beautiful teenagers get killed in a variety of manners and when you put that together with the gym-culture that sprung up in the wake of Jane Fonda and her workout VHS, it’s a natural next step.

One of the best is Death Spa, a campy cult horror classic from 1989 that is packed full of neon headbands, killer gym equipment and creative deaths. It’ll make you sweat blood!

Plus it stars Merritt Butrick (better known as David Marcus in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) and Chelsea Field (The Last Boy Scout, Masters of the Universe) and Karyn Parsons (Hilary Banks in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air).

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. This one is shapely, gorgeous, demonic – and dead. She’s also insanely jealous – and one by one, the beautiful people of her husband’s health club become victims possessed by her evil spirit.

When: 8.00pm, Thursday 23rd January 2020

Location: Bristol Improv Theatre, 50 St Paul’s Rd, Bristol BS8 1LP, UK

Tickets: £5 (all profits going to Rife)

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“If slasher movies of the Eighties were guilty of reducing the horror genre to an ongoing ritual of watching beautiful people die in elaborate agony then Death Spa might well mark the apotheosis of that mean-spirited trend.” – The Spinning Image

“Maybe it’s only because Death Spa was released just as the decade was slipping out the door, but every one of its 87 minutes feel like a concentrated effort to get the 80s out of its system. Even though I’ve probably said this about other films in the past, this shit is peak 80s: neon, spandex, the health-club craze, jazzercise, aerobics, gay panic, technophobia, big hair, buddy cops, and an ample amount of splatter to serve as the cherry on top.” – Oh, The Horror

“Death Spa is a glorified soap opera buoyed by a series of ludicrous death sequences, and when I say ludicrous I’m not fucking around.” – VHS Revival