Teresa Van der Woude | Through the Shattered Lens

It doesn’t get more 80s than 1987’s Aerobicide, a rather ludicrous slasher film that is also known as Killer Workout.

The clients and the staff at Rhonda’s Work-Out are in danger. People are being murdered inside the gym, left and right. One member of the gym is slashed to death in the showers. Another one is beaten to death with a barbell while his friend is killed with a very large safety pin. One instructors ends up hanging in a closet while another is stabbed to death in a locker room. A group of teens show up to spray graffiti on the outside of the club and they all end up getting murdered as well.

Most people would assume that, with all of those murders going on, that the place would be closed down or, at the very least, people would stop frequenting the gym. But no, the opposite happens. Every murder is followed by an aerobics class, in which the camera shamelessly lingers on the lycra-clad participants, none of whom seem to be particularly concerned about working out at a crime scene. ( If your body’s looking too big, one of the film’s many songs tells us, Like a hippo or a pig/ Gotta workout/ gotta work out….) The gym’s owner, Rhonda Johnson (Marica Karr), doesn’t seem to be particularly concerned about the gym getting a bad reputation as a result of all the murders. Instead, she’s more annoyed with her surviving instructors, snapping at one, “Stop showing off your tits and that tight little ass!” Personally, I would think looking good would be a top priority for someone working at a gym but apparently, Rhonda feels differently.

(Then again, if people were being murdered at my gym, I’d probably cancel my membership, despite the fact that my gym is only a few blocks away from my house and most of the people who go there are relatively cool. That said, the main reason why I signed up for a membership was so my sister could get a discount on her membership fees. Personally, I prefer running.)

Even if Rhonda refuses to close the gym, you would think that Lt. Morgan (David James Campbell) would make sure that the gym had a full-time police presence. Eventually, Morgan does assign one policeman to watch the gym but that’s only after several murders have already occurred and that one policeman’s presence doesn’t really do much good. Then again, Lt. Morgan never comes across as being a particularly good cop. Morgan is spectacularly bad at his job, which wouldn’t be a huge problem if not for the fact that Morgan is also the hero of the film. Eventually, he does figure out that the murders are connected to a tragic tanning bed accident but it’s hard to say how exactly he managed to do that. Rather than actually showing us Lt. Morgan gathering clues and drawing conclusions, the film just has him randomly blurt stuff out.

It’s all pretty ridiculous but, because the film is such a film of it’s time, it’s also rather fascinating. Killer Workout may not have been the only or even the first film to combine Flashdance with slasher chills but it is the first one to feature a song with lyrics like, “It’s the perfect body you’re looking for/it’s aerobocide.” This is one of those films where you come for the big hair and the 80s fashions and the bass-heavy score and you stay for the ludicrous plot twists, the overacting, the overheated dialogue, and the out-of-nowhere plot twists that dominate the film’s final 30 minutes. It’s not necessarily a “good” film but I defy anyone to look away once it begins.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Billy Colton (Derek Rydall) is a teenager who has a reputation for exaggeration. Lisa Grace (Shannon Tweed) is his next door neighbor, a high-priced prostitute who does not mind if Billy spies on her. When Billy tries to tell everyone about his wild new neighbor, no one believes him. Billy decides to prove his story by grabbing his camera and sneaking next door. Instead of getting proof that she’s a prostitute, Billy witnesses his neighbor being murdered by a robed Satanist, who just happens to be Zachary Willard (Allen Garfield), Billy’s hated science teacher! Billy goes to the police with his camera but Captain Crane (Richard Roundtree) points out that Billy forgot to take off the lens cap.

What can Billy do? He knows that Zachary and his strange brother, Stanley (Michael J. Pollard), are sacrificing prostitutes to Satan but he can’t get anyone to believe him. Working with his best friend (Teresa Van der Woude) and a burned out ex-cop (Elliott Gould), Billy sets out to stop the Willard Brothers.

Combine Rear Window with late 80s Satanic conspiracy theories and this is the result. Not as bad as it sounds, Night Visitor is an unfairly obscure movie about Satanism in suburbia. While it has its share of dumb moments (like when Billy uses a watermelon to end a car chase), it also has enough good moments that suggest that Night Visitor is deliberately satirizing the excesses of the Satanic panic that, at the time of filming, was sweeping across the nation. It also has a once in a lifetime cast. Along with those already mentioned, keep an eye out for character actor extraordinaire Henry Gibson and future adult film star Teri Weigel. Allen Garfield is especially good as the evil Mr. Willard. Any actor can say, “I sacrifice you in the name of Satan.” It takes a good actor like Allen Garfield to say it without making anyone laugh.

One final note: this movie was originally called Never Cry Devil, which is a much better title than Night Visitor.