You don’t get much more 80s than slasher movies and aerobics. Throw in big boobs, goofy mullets, neon leotards and cheesy, cheesy tunes, and you have a potent 80s cocktail. Yes, Aerobicide (definitely the best title for a film ever… its original title is Killer Workout, which, while still hilarious, pales in comparison) could be the most 80s horror film in existence. It is also a phenomenal piece of shit.

AEROBICIDE

original title: Killer Workout

USA, 1987, David A. Prior

Aerobicide ends with the film’s killer holding an oversized safety pin and looking straight down the barrel of the camera awkwardly attempting a sinister laugh. This 1980s slasher film that in no way is attempting to be a comedy – outside of some truly unfunny funny dialogue with lines so unfunny that they become really funny – breaks the fourth wall right before the credits roll. Breaking the fourth wall can be used to brilliant effect – take Harold and Maude (1971) or Funny Games (1997), for instance – here it is very uncomfortable and hysterically inappropriate. You can almost sense the actor’s eyes pleading with the director to call cut. This wildly silly ending is but a small sampling of the madness bad movie masterwork Aerobicide offers. Anyway, on with the plot.

Aerobicide opens as awkwardly as it ends. A woman fries in a fiery tanning bed accident. It’s clear from the start that, despite the red herrings tossed around throughout the film’s thankfully short running time, she is the film’s killer – we never see her face in this opening scene and why the hell else would we be shown an unrelated tanning bed incident? We cut from the sloppy set up to Rhonda’s Gym, a workout joint run by the bitchy and schizophrenic Rhonda (Marcia Karr). Thus begins the endless stream of workout montages featuring shamelessly sleazy shots of sweating jiggling tits, squatting asses thrusting violently at the camera and legs spreading graphically wide. Amongst the aerobic footage, a killer occasionally murders someone. Following the first murder, a hard-boiled detective, Morgan (David James Campbell), bursts into the gym accusing people left, right and centre, and a musclebound private eye (Ted Prior) goes undercover as a trainer and does an equally great job of not solving the case.

Aerobicide is quite special and is everything you could possibly desire from a shitty slasher from the 1980s. The kills are weak beyond belief and so uncreative that they even stoop to paying some sort of misguided tribute to Psycho. The murder weapon is a giant safety pin. A giant safety pin. Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, well, Dave, I’m sure there’s a reason for the killer to use such an obscure object, such as a giant safety pin to dispose of his/her victims. There isn’t.

As Aerobicide squats and star-jumps along, it’s easy to forget you’re even watching a horror film. With the tough guy posing and shoddy chase scenes, Aerobicide waddles its way into action territory. And that’s a good thing. Aerobicide features some brilliantly shit fight scenes. In a painfully funny scene, we witness the first interaction between undercover private eye, Chuck Dawson, and Jimmy (Fritz Matthews), a steroid fueled maniac who works at the gym. Jimmy instantly tells Chuck to “stay away from Rhonda” – keep in mind, this is the first time they’ve met and Jimmy has not even seen Chuck around Rhonda…





The next instance of Chuck beating the living shit out of another gym employee is even funnier, as Chuck lays punches into Tommy (Richard Bravo), Jimmy’s muscly co-worker, who is near impossible to tell apart from Jimmy…





You may have noticed the wonderful music pumping through these scenes. Aerobicide‘s soundtrack is relentless. The thumping pop songs used in Aerobicide sound like every other generic 80s tune you’ve heard, except horrible. In other words, this is one of the best soundtracks assembled for an 80s horror film. If you strain your ears to hear over the deafening workout tunes, you’ll find that Aerobicide does not skimp on terrible dialogue either. First we have Morgan, the stereotype tough cop, farting out nonsensical demands in his oddly high-pitched voice: “Tell that college boy if he doesn’t have that report in thirty minutes I’m going to come over there and do an autopsy on his face!” Or better yet… a mortified gym instructor who is recovered from finding a dead body sadly says of the deceased client, “she was so pretty”, to which Morgan delicately responds, “not anymore.” Not to be outdone, the film’s hero, Rhonda, is equally insensitive, spouting lines like: “Half of my customers are being killed off and the other half are cancelling their memberships!” Worst of all is a traumatising conversation between two nameless gym junkies who jokingly discuss whether they would have raped the a recently murdered victim before they chopped her into little pieces. Outside of the obnoxious dialogue is plain confusing dialogue – the best example being a pick up line from Tommy. He points to a girl’s chest where the zipper of her outfit is located and says, sexily, “I just got one question… what’s the zipper for?” Uh… it’s a zipper…

Where Aerobicide really shines is its unintentional touches of stupid weirdness. In one of the films most bizarre scenes, a female gym employee breaks into a male co-worker’s locker and goes through his stuff pulling out a filthy jock strap and giggling as if turned on. Moments later, we get another insane scene as a locker bangs open giving the same female employee a fake-scare. This is a classic staple of the slasher genre – something jumps out to scare a character, it turns out to be something harmless, then the real scare kicks in – but instead of the fake-scare being an overexcited cat or clothes falling out of the locker, a mechanical rubber arm flies out. (Set up, we can assume, as some sort of extremely convenient prank.) As if to rub this stupidity in the audience’s face, the mechanical arm makes a second appearance in the film. And don’t get me started on this fantastically unnecessary dream sequence of a disposable character with hardly any screen time (sadly, I couldn’t upload the whole thing due to YouTube’s issues with boobs)…





Going hand-in-hand with these mad moments is Aerobicide‘s demented editing. While the film’s plot twists can be seen a while away, the film’s cutaways to workout shots are totally random and unpredictable. I love the way the film cuts from scene to scene. My favourite sequence is this transition from death scene to body bag being zipped up to aerobics…





There is a shot in Aerobicide that sums up the film perfectly. During the film’s first lengthy aerobic montage, after many, many shots of big breasted 80s babes, we get a cutaway of an obese woman (or man? I’m not sure) working out on an exercise bicycle and struggling in the process. And that’s it. That’s the gag. She doesn’t fall off. She’s not eating while she works out. It doesn’t cut away to some jocks pulling faces. It’s just a mean and stupid cutaway of an overweight person struggling on an exercise bike. And what really sums up Aerobicide, during the film’s end credits, we are shown this shot again. That is Aerobicide for you. Stupid, insane and amazing.