Past Misdeeds: Arena (1989)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


In the future, an intergalactic, inter-species fighting championship is held in a shoddy looking space station. Since the contestants are kept on the same physical level (except for things like size and number of limbs which won't ever be important in a fight, no sir) by magicalscientific handicap beams, a level playing field should be guaranteed for all. In truth, the championship is in the hands of evil Rogor (Marc Alaimo for a change being the evil boss instead of the evil boss's first henchman) who cheats, lies and sucks the sportsmanship out of the sports wherever he can. Under these circumstances it comes as no surprise Rogor's rude fighter Horn (Michael Deak) is the Champion of the Universe right now, and there's no chance for the only honest trainer in the universe, Quinn (Claudia Christian), to ever lead one of her fighter to the title.

That is, until a series of complicated circumstances including a punch-up in a Space McDonald's, an illegal space gambling den and the human's four-armed buddy Shorty (Hamilton Camp doing his best Ernest Borgnine) turns Earthling Steve Armstrong (Paul Satterfield in the beginning stages of anime hair) into her main fighter. Steve is not just as pure-hearted as Quinn, but also, as it turns out, the fighter who will once and for all lay the space sports rumour to rest that humans can't fight. Even if he has to survive sex with and a poisoning attempt by Rogor's (space, one supposes) girlfriend and (definitely) space singer Jade (Shari Shattuck), and other evil plans of Rogor and his assistant Weezil (Armin Shimerman) to get and win his title fight.

People who know me won't be at all surprised to hear that one of the few movie genres that doesn't do anything at all for me is the sports film. Turns out I don't care who can throw the ball hardest or kick his opponent in the reproductive organs the most subtly, and find the whole ideological shtick of these films rather unpleasant. Hell, I usually don't even enjoy tournament martial arts films, unless they feature a yogi with retractable arms.

But put the sports film onto a space station and make most of the fighters cute little alien freaks, and I get all excited. It seems as if the best method to convince me the general silliness of sports movies is fun lies in transporting them into even more silly space opera SF surroundings. And who am I to complain about it, seeing as I get a very fun time out of it, at least in Arena's case?

One of the best features of Arena is how serious it takes its own silliness, with nary a moment going by where the film isn't decisively not winking at its audience, even if winking would be the most natural thing to do given the circumstances. However, delivering the weird and the silly with a straight face is often the best technique to make it fun to a viewer instead of just annoying. One doesn't, after all, go into a movie to witness how much the filmmakers look down on their own work (and implicitly the audience paying to see it). Here, the knowledge of the silliness of the film's basics is taken as self-evident but not as a reason to half-ass anything.

In fact, half-assing is quite the opposite of Arena's way of going about things. Instead, director Peter Manoogian (also responsible for the awe-inspiring Eliminators), working for Charles Band when Charles Band was still doing his best to be Roger Corman and not a puppeteer, scriptwriters Danny Bilson (also responsible for a few other fine bits of fun low budget movie writing before he became a videogame company suit) and Paul De Meo (Bilson's long-time writing partner), and the usual Empire Pictures gang do one hell of a job of piling weird, interesting and often funny detail upon weird, interesting, and often funny detail. There might not have been much money going around, but what these guys had, they put visibly on screen in form of a surprising number of different aliens with actually different body types (no Star Trek "facial lumps only” aliens here), sets that may depend on the audience's goodwill yet are also built with love and effort, haircut and make-up crimes that make for a distinctly 80s kind of future, and more sight-gags than anyone could notice in a single session with the film.

Arena is the sort of movie that goes so out of its way when it comes to creating its world (even if its is a very silly world), it even features two pretty alien musical numbers for its not-all-that-alien singer Jade where most films would have contented themselves with a mock swing number with synthies instead of horns. The film isn't creating a believable future (not that it's out to do that), but it sure builds a place out of cheap sets, concepts and ideas plundered from Hollywood films of the 30s to 50s, pulp SF, and energetic enthusiasm.


That the few fights the film contains aren't all that great to watch (it seems Steve's fighting prowess consists in his ability to actually move faster than a snail) isn't much of a problem in this context, for who cares about the quality of the fights when everything else that happens on screen is so fun to look at?

Death Spa (1989)

Terrible things are happening at the health spa of hunky – so says the script, at least - Michael Evans (William Bumiller): first his girlfriend Laura (Brenda Bakke) suffers burns and temporary blindness from a steam room accident (or was it?). Then all hell really breaks loose, with health spa goers not only tortured by aerobics but also hit by levitating tiles, murdered by fitness apertures running amok despite (or because of) the spa’s automated control systems, stabbed by stabby things and later on exploded and mutilated in many different ways when things come to a head on the place’s annual Mardi Gras bash.

Has the spa’s computer turned evil? Is the ghost of Michael’s dead wife (Sharri Shattuck) responsible? Or is her computer nerd brother out for vengeance? All of it? Something different?

Well, there’s only one way to find out, and that’s inflicting Michael Fischa’s mind-boggling Death Spa (the spa that kills?) on your unsuspecting brains. It’s candy-coloured like the 80s themselves! It’s sleazy with many a scene of female nudity that would be absolutely gratuitous if it weren’t the point of the film apart from the gore! It has a plot way too complicated for anyone involved to keep under control that tries its hardest to pull a Carnacki on the audience with a “natural” and a supernatural threat theoretically kinda-sorta happening at the same time (but don’t ask me which parts of the wild happenings are the responsibility of the ghost and which ones that of the other threat?)!

If that’s not enough to set the eyes of the kind of person (for example me) this thing was probably made for all a-glow, there’s much more to add, for this one is probably the most successful attempt (conscious or unconscious or through sheer incompetence) of a US horror film at becoming exactly like an 80s Italian horror film. So the plot makes no sense whatsoever: try the plan of the human bad guy that consists of making the spa so horrible Michael will lose it, so that bad guy and his partners then can easily acquire a spa nobody in his or her right mind would ever want to visit. Characters like psychic investigator (with a noir private eye sort of office) Dr. (of psychometry, I assume) Lido Moray are introduced with great fanfare, to then have nothing to do but to die. The dialogue sounds exactly like the sort of thing Italian dubbing studios would have come up with, full of non-sequiturs, bizarre phrasings and absurd declarations.

There’s also a case of possession that leads to in turns transvestism and bodily transformation into the other gender (twins, the film “explains”), smallish roles for Ken Foree, Rosalind Cash and Chelsea Field, and so much of treacly, sometimes rubbery gore I can only assume the influence of Fulci. However, to make that clear, Death Spa has little in common with the nightmarish atmosphere of the maestro’s best films – it’s much more like a hallucination induced by a bad combination of different kinds of alcohol and indigestion.


Not to put to fine a point on it, but Death Spa’s a horrible film by the standards of most sane people (though even they’d probably admit that some of the lighting is pretty rad in its way). By my standards, on the other hand, it is pretty darn awesome, mixing awkwardness, stupidity, and overambition with an increasingly hysterical tone that reaches the point of glorious absurdity once the Mardi Gras bash full of blind and deaf people who have their troubles seeing and hearing horrible deaths happening right next to them (which means they miss out on the undead fish that kill one of the cop characters, among many other things). I am convinced Death Spa is a major achievement; I’m just not sure what it achieves beyond blowing minds.

Immortal Sins (1991)

Susan (Maryam d’Abo) follows her husband Mike (Cliff De Young) to Spain where he is renovating the mansion his family once lived in before they went to the USA some generations ago.

Things for and between the couple seem fine at first, but Mike is plagued – well, perhaps not plagued exactly – by dreams and what amounts to visions of having sex with a beautiful woman (Shari Shattuck). These dreams do have a sinister undercurrent, and it becomes increasingly unclear if they truly are dreams. Particularly once Mike and Susan encounter Diana, who introduces herself as a very remote cousin of Mike’s. Diana, you see, does look exactly like the woman from Mike’s dreams. It doesn’t escape Susan’s notice that her hubby has the look of a guy on his face who just got a very enthusiastic physical reaction whenever he meets Diana, nor that he becomes increasingly withdrawn, sickly, cranky, and unwilling to fulfil his husbandly duties. That’s not just an opportunity for some fine rows between the couple. Susan also rather quickly decides something truly strange is going with Mike, some malignant influence hanging over him far beyond mere infidelity. Susan’s my kind of heroine, so she quickly starts on a campaign of research, and learns about a family curse.

On paper, this Corman-produced film shot in Spain by a Spanish director and with a Spanish crew, sounds a lot like a pure bit of Skinemax horror. However, while it does contain its share of sex scenes – which feel as if they were shortened by someone’s censorship knife in the VHS-based version I’ve watched - is actually a pretty serious and effective effort at evoking the virtues of traditional Gothic horror while adding quite a few Gothic romance tropes to the genre mix. Just, you know, Gothic horror with a few more naked breasts and more shots of Cliff De Young’s naked chest than you usually get to see. So if even one of these things floats your boat, you are rather in luck with the film. Generally, Immortal Sins’s approach to what amounts to a rather standard erotic horror set-up feels not so much like the US cable TV that probably inspired its existence but like a lost European horror film from the 70s, Spanish director Hervé Hechuel clearly putting quite a bit of effort into making the eroticism a bit more dreamlike than an American director would and well, actually, turning the rest of the film rather more dreamlike also.

Ironically, quite a bit of that dreamlike effect of proceedings is based on the director’s atmospheric approach to location shooting that turns an actual picturesque Spanish village, woods and roads (and a nifty building and cellar) into rather sinister places where the idea of a curse, a succubus, and the sins of the fathers coming down to first provide the sons with a lot of sex and then to crush them seem just par for the course.

While the dialogue is often – but not always – a bit rough, the acting is generally fine. Cliff De Young has always been good at playing this particular kind of libidinous asshole, while d’Abo does fine shouting matches with him but is also genuinely fun to watch when she goes on her research spree or when she starts seeing things. Sexploitation expert Shari Shattuck knows her stuff too.

This all adds up to a surprisingly effective low budget flick, certainly one of the more interesting Corman productions of the early 90s and a film I’d rather like to see uncut and with decent picture quality.

On WTF: Arena (1989)

Sports movies are kind of boring, aren't they?

But what a about a sports movie taking place in true space opera outer space, about an Earthling proving once and for all that humans are the best when it comes to physical violence?

That's a question this week's column on WTF-Film and Arena are going to answer.

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