If there’s one thing I love more than fads-ploitation (movies based on short-lived and instantly dated cultural obsessions) or a good slasher flick, it would have to be terrible amalgams of both. Thank writer/director David A. Prior (Sledgehammer) for making me so happy with Killer Workout (also released with the much better title, Aerobicide), which is as wonderfully bad as a late-’80s movie about a maniac killing attractive people in an aerobics studio ever could hope to be.
Unlike other wannabe horror auteurs, Prior doesn’t feel beholden to such traditional cinematic crutches as suspense, character or plot. He’s happy instead to merely intercut random murders of folks we don’t give even the teeny-tiniest fuck about with extensive footage of hot, busty babes exercising enthusiastically in the kind of minimal outfits only the very fittest of us should ever be allowed to wear in public.
As fads-ploitation, Killer Workout is literally nothing more than 30-plus minutes of absurdly sexualized workout footage. As a slasher film, it’s a catastrophic failure. The secret identity of the scarred killer is obvious as soon as she appears onscreen and is the only one dressed in the aerobic version of a burka; nameless victims are introduced in the same scenes where they’re killed; and the hot instructor with the best butt and highest thong is clearly established as the probable protagonist until the screenplay suddenly forgets all about her and decides to kill her off-screen instead.
Combined, however, the result is almost hypnotic in its base appeal. Bouncing boobies. Kill. Thong-clad buttocks. Kill. Random karate fight. Kill. More boobies. Kill. More buttocks. Kill. Kill. Kill. And all I can say is, if you don’t understand the appeal of this, why the heck are you even reading this? —Allan Mott
This is the one with the badly timed cop speech and the Bobby Pin, right?
You are correct, sir!