The Victim aka Autopsy (1975) / Death Spa (1989)

The first flick I watched was 1975’s giallo/horror Autopsy, aka The Victim (Italian title is Sunspots). It begins by showing a series of suicides throughout the city, interspersed with clips of the sun emitting strong bursts and flairs. Then we cut to the main plot, showing a woman named Simona who works at a morgue and is doing her thesis on authentic suicides vs. simulated ones.

It seems that Rome is experiencing a heatwave that seems to be the explanation for the sudden increase in suicides. Simona is shown to be cold and neurotic, rejecting the advances of her boyfriend, and having hallucinations where she imagines the corpses reanimating and attacking her. One night she meets a redhead who it turns out has a relationship with Simona’s father. The next day the redhead is found dead on the beach, the victim of an apparent suicide by self inflicted gunshot. Her brother, a priest named Paul Lennox, is convinced that his sister did not kill herself, and begins to stalk and harass Simona, proclaiming that her father knows more about his sister’s death.

From this point, the movie goes all over the place, and ends up a confusing mess. They clearly set out to give it red herrings and twists like all the classic giallo films, but it’s done in such a bad way that it completely loses the plot until the end, where it seems the filmmaker remembered that this was supposed to be a murder mystery, and randomly tosses in blackmail as the reason for the suicide murders. The main character, Simona, is unlikeable, walking around like she’s about to have a nervous breakdown, her mood all over the place. Considering she’s doing a thesis on simulated vs. authentic suicides, she doesn’t even bother looking further into the death of her father’s girlfriend. Father Paul also seems to be a few cans short of a six pack. It’s revealed that he used to be a race car driver who killed a bunch of spectators when his car ran off the track and hit them. Now a priest determined to prove his sister did not commit suicide, he’s prone to random bits of rage, attacking and threatening others. Even more ridiculous is when Simona, who’s spent most of the movie irritated by Paul’s harassment of her, regarding him with contempt, suddenly professes her love for him. You keep waiting for something interesting to happen, or for all the random elements to come together for an “A-Ha” moment, but they never do.

Autopsy aka The Victim is a forgettable giallo. It tries to be lurid with the footage of sunbursts, suggesting that the heatwave is causing people to go insane and off themselves, as well as a few scenes of carnage in a morgue, but the plot loses itself by focusing on a bunch of other random things. It’s not even a fun bad movie, mostly just a bore fest. I even paused the movie and made myself a cocktail, hoping the booze would get me in the spirit to enjoy its nonsensical storyline, but no dice. The score by legendary Italian composer Ennio Morricone is good, but that’s about it.

The next flick was a schlockfest that was anything but dull. 1989’s Death Spa, about a health fitness club that’s being plagued by mysterious accidents and deaths.

A guy named Michael is the owner of Starbody Health Spa, a fancy gym that is run by a computer and features saunas, pools, aerobics classes, and it’s own bar that serves healthy smoothies for the customers. The computer program is run by Michael’s ex brother in law, whom he has some animosity towards. Several years back, Michael’s wife Catherine died when she doused herself with gasoline and lit herself on fire. This was because she ended up in a wheelchair after she had complications while giving childbirth. She became depressed and insanely jealous of all the time Michael was spending at the club, so she killed herself. A bunch of strange events begin to occur at the spa, starting with Michael’s new girlfriend almost getting scalded to death in the steam room. Michael argues with his brother in law that there must be a glitch in the computer program that caused the accident. Soon enough, more strange accidents happen, and Michael tries to get to the bottom of it.

It turns out that the spirit of Michael’s dead wife is the one behind the accidents, possessing her brother (they were twins) and using him to wreak chaos throughout the spa. Michael calls in the help of a parapsychologist, while 2 detectives investigate the spa and its employees to solve the strange accidents. This flick is absolutely hilarious, with the retro 80’s dance music, awful fashions, entertaining murders, and cheesy script that speeds by, jumping from one development to another. There’s a subplot about 2 of Michael’s business partners that want to steal the club from him, but the storyline jumps so fast that the rest of this plot quickly gets forgotten. The carnage and supernatural shenanigans take center stage, leading to an outrageous climax where Catherine’s ghost tries to kill everyone at the club during a masquerade party. One guy gets thrown through a window, another girl gets her hand sliced up by a smoothie machine and screams in agony, but the party goers just go on as if they didn’t notice any of this, until the doors get locked and they find themselves trapped in the burning building.