Club Dead (2000)

Posted on Jan 22, 2003 under Horror |

Directed by Mike Bowler
Written by Dennis Devine and Mike Bowler
Starring
- Tommy Kirk
- Lisa Bawdon
- Ron Waldron
- Leonna Small
- Raymond Storti

The last movie I reviewed from Cinematrix Releasing/Unknown Productions, Amazon Warrior, was neither original nor technically proficient. It did, however, manage to avoid hard feelings by maintaining a sense of lightness in its recitation of cliches, just short of winking at the audience. That counted for a lot.

Club Dead is no more original or technically sound, and it loses more points by taking itself seriously. A satanic health spa is not a subject that should be treated with a straight face.

Vive le resistance!

The wraparound segment which introduces the plot has Doyle, a paranoid blonde woman (Leonna Small), hiring a private investigator (former child star Tommy Kirk, who gets top billing for two minutes of screen time). Her friend Cathy is missing, and she wants the P.I. to find her before “The Corporation” does. Why? Cue harp runs…

…And the rest of the movie will be a flashback that ostensibly takes place two years earlier, but which was actually shot in 1990, giving us a perfect snapshot of the world of fashion immediately pre-grunge. Doyle (then a natural brunette) is one of the three regular patrons of a failing health club, and fiftyish proprietor Mrs. Benson (Dierdre West) finally decides to throw in the towel. But when she’s alone… she’s approached by the mysterious Mr. Ex (Ron Waldron), a black-swathed spook representing a mysterious Corporation (excuse me, a mysterious The Corporation). He offers her unlimited success through her club, in exchange only for her loyalty. Not surprisingly, she accepts.

Doyle is also one of the principals of the campus newspaper, along with Cathy (Lisa Bawdron), jockish Ken (Raymond Storti, and I honestly didn’t recognize him as Steiner from Amazon Warrior) and a whole bunch of monochrome-monitored computers. Lisa, who has “Final Girl” written all over her, is worried about her friends Maggie and Marsha, who recently disappeared. It seems that their mother had owned an auto garage which was on the verge of failing, and then mysteriously hit an upswing in business. Unbeknownst to them, but beknownst to us, Mom (Crystal Chance, a blonde who looks less automotively inclined than the girls in a Playboy’s Wet ‘n’ Wild video) tried to leave her benefactor Corporation (excuse me, benefactor The Corporation), and met an untimely end at the hands of… Mr. Ex!

**“Now that The Phantom of the Opera is in the public domain, ANYONE can make their own version!”**

Walking home late at night from the paper, Cathy hears something… and hurries on… and hears something… and hurries on… and hears something… and hurries on… and just about the time I was ready to reach for the fast-forward, runs into missing friend Marsha (Heidi Gross), who nervously comes into Cathy’s apartment and tells her what she knows (their garage has a mysterious backer, Mom was killed suspiciously in her own garage, Marsha’s hair looks like a guinea pig den). Then while Cathy makes some tea, Marsha is snatched out through the windows that a paranoid person would never stand with her back to.

Soon, Benson’s Health Spa reopens, with crowds of people and a rejuvenated-looking Mrs. Benson (i.e., she washed her age makeup off). TV commercials tout a new “Plan Ex” (not to be confused with “Brand Ex”), an exercise/diet regimen which guarantees you’ll lose weight and look great, or you don’t pay a cent. Eyebrows raise around the newspaper, and Doyle takes it upon herself to join up and find out what the secret is.

Meanwhile, Ken introduces something which falls under the category of “Telegraphed Plot Convenience,” a computer program he made for his religious dad which randomly spits out lines from the Bible in computer language. Me, I can’t think of a single use for such a program, aside from, say, crashing a satanically-powered computer system… but come on, what are the odds they’re going to run into one of them? Huh? Huh?

(Snicker.)

Cathy and Ken also do some investigating on missing Marsha, and find that her apartment is rented to a man who claims to have been there twenty years, none of her professors remember her, and the cops have no interest in finding a missing person with no evidence of her ever existing. (The cop, by the way, insists on chopping his apples with a mini-battleaxe. Welcome to the nasty after-effects of ill-applied gun control, folks.)

Doyle, meanwhile, isn’t uncovering anything about Plan Ex except its resemblances to the smoking cessation program in Stephen King’s “Quitters, Inc.” (which was part of the anthology movie Cat’s Eye). She goes to the frozen yogurt store, but the cowed adolescent declares that he simply can’t sell her anything. And Roque (Augie Blunt), one of the other low-time patrons of the gym, has it even worse; when he fails to make his weightloss quota for the week, Mr. Ex meets him at his apartment and chops off a finger with an electric knife (just in case the flashbacks to “Quitters, Inc.” weren’t strong enough for you already). Roque, by the way, also runs the print shop which prints the newspaper, which gives him an excuse to show up in the movie’s other main location frequently.

When battleaxes are outlawed, only outlaws will have battleaxes!

And from here, we basically continue as already sketched in, with our intrepid newspaper reporters trying to figure out what’s going on at the spa, while Mr. Ex tracks down and punishes those who don’t fulfill their commitment or betray him. In between, we’ve got a world’s record number of what I’m going to dub “Spring-Loaded Friends” (you know, the kind who come up behind a person working alone at night, and only announce their presence by a hand on the shoulder). And then there’s the filler of choice: Walking… looking behind fearfully… walking… looking… walking… looking… Repeat as necessary to get the desired running time.

Technical concerns: I usually don’t rag on a movie for being shot on video, but I do have to point out that video is usually not the best medium if you’re going to have lots and lots and LOTS of nighttime or mysteriously-lit scenes, unless you intend for the movie to be murky and visually uncompelling.

But here’s my main complaint: It makes no sense. I mean, all of these people join the club, and the satanic rules basically say that we’re going to make sure you stay thin, even if we have to torture you. So? What’s in it for Satan? Is he getting souls from those who fail, or those who maintain the weight they want (and even roll back the years, like Mrs. Benson), and thus are happy? At least “Quitters, Inc.” had the premise of misapplied philanthropy (and was darkly comedic, too). Here… I don’t get it.

“But, doctor! Will I be able to play the piano?”

Especially because watching it allowed me to think of a much more interesting take on the same premise. Let’s not just call the mysterious Corporation “The Corporation”; let’s posit that Satan has given up the whole supernatural mumbo-jumbo schtick, and has wholeheartedly adopted corporate structure and tools for his neverending quest for souls, who uses nothing but material means to accomplish his nefarious goals because they simply work better. Wouldn’t a completly terrestrial Lucifer, fully satisfied with using the corporate materialist methods we’ve perfected on ourselves, have been wittier? (Yes, Satan uses computers here, but there are still those unexplained age reversals, and Mr. Ex’s intermittent ability to teleport himself, that give us the “oogah-boogah” factor.)

Bottom line is, for as slight a movie as it is, it demanded far too much of my time. By an hour and ten minutes, I was expecting a resolution soon. At an hour and forty-five, I was finally getting it. I’ll admit it, I was bored (which explains why I started imagining a more interesting version of the movie while watching it).