If I remember nothing else about Aerobicide, I’ll remember it as the exact moment that David Winters, the evil genius who introduced Space Mutiny to a world unprepared to fight it, stepped up and became the No. 1 contender for Michael Bay’s “Director Who Deserves a Savage Beating” world championship belt. Coincidentally made in 1986, the same year as Night Ripper, Aerobicide – or, under its dumbed-down American alternate title, Killer Workout – makes a running, bouncing, jiggling stab at the distinction of being the worst slasher movie ever made.

The movie opens up with a woman being burned alive in a tanning booth, but soon we’re introduced to the main theme of the movie: leering, perverted close-up crotch shots of big-haired women doing aerobics. These shots take up more of the movie, and indeed my life, than I’m at all comfortable with. This is disgusting, not because of sweaty, stinky crotch shots, but because we’re expected to be turned on by them. This is akin to going to high school volleyball games and paying five bucks to stare at sweat-logged spandex wedgies and jerk off underneath a trench coat. Directors: please stop filming your sexual fetishes and expecting us to join you in an orgasm.

Our heroine is Rhonda (some of these characters have names, yeah!), the bitchy owner of a gym where people go to workout – no matter how many bodies stack up – and flash their sweaty loins at leering cameramen. Aside from a large pack of nameless, identity-less women, there is a small pack of hockey-haired male members who are there for reasons ranging from stalking Rhonda (such as Jimmy, a beef-faced dumb guy in a world of the same) to investigating a growing group of unsolved murders (such as Chuck, a dreamy private investigator, and Lt. Morgan, a dim-witted, hostile cop who does nothing but wander around and accuse everybody in his path of being the murderer – both characters, like most of the other males in this movie, sport happenin’ 80’s mullets). Oh, the murders? There’s someone going around killing aerobics students with a giant safety pin. The infuriating part is the way people keep coming no matter how many people are killed. I’d hate to introduce logic into the mix, but if people are being killed in increasing frequency at a health club, people would probably stop going there, at least until the murderer is caught. Toss in a barrage of fistfights between Chuck and Jimmy (Chuck, because he has the most menacing plumage, wins all the time), some creepy flirting, Lt. Morgan accusing people of being killers and, oh yes, plenty of leering shots of women doing aerobics to cheesy Flashdance music, and you’ve got a slasher movie so shitty it makes the outhouse scene in Sleepaway Camp 2 look like the strangulation scene in Frenzy.

Oh, in case spoiling the ending will stop you from seeing the movie, the killer is Rhonda, who is actually the same dumb bitch who was fried in the tanning booth. Her whole body looks like burnt cheese, she resents all beautiful people, blah blah fuck you movie blah. Tragically, the writers of this movie must have worked closely with the writers of Night Ripper in launching an insidious campaign to drop a log in the already heinous world of themed 80’s slasher movies.

Though it gave birth to one of my favorite Friday the 13th movies (No. 6: Jason Lives), 1986 must have been a dark year for horror, as Night Ripper and Aerobicide are simply too similar to be unlinked. They both look and sound worse than live-action sheep torture (aka the county fair), they both rely on the murder of non-characters for the bulk of the action and have twist endings so painfully obvious they make me yearn for the double-twist era that Saw helped usher in. NON-CHARACTER (Noun): Characters who show up in the movie for mere seconds before getting killed and have no actual role in the story – this to me is one of the worst sins a horror movie can commit, ranking just behind “it was only a dream” scare sequences, casting Cary Elwes in a dramatic role and the entire Leprechaun series. Anyway, there’s no putting it off any longer. It’s time to see Saw again for the first time.