Each October, the Unsung Horrors podcast does a month of themed movies. This year they will once again be setting up a fundraiser to benefit Best Friends, which is working to save the lives of cats and dogs all across America, giving pets second chances and happy homes.

Today’s theme: 1990s

If Killer Workout and Death Spa weren’t enough for you, Hell Spa is a shot on video 1990s film (shot in 1992, released in 1992) that has the best line I’ve heard in a long time: “There’s someone out there and they stole my beans!”

A woman is stalked and killed, at which point we see a computer monitor that tells us that her children, Maggie (Betsy Ryan) and Marcia (Heidi Gross) have to also be murdered so that they’re aren’t any loose ends.

Mr. Ex (Ron Waldron) is such a strange character. He buys into mom and pop shops by giving people their fondest dreams, then begins to kill their customers and finally the owners, like a combination of Needful Things and Blockbuster to your favorite local video store in the actual 1990s that no one remembers, feeding nostalgia into a beast that destroyed the actual stores that kept interesting movies on the shelf. Mr. Ex is something like a vampire or Man In Black or demon and the movie never really explains his plan of buying auto parts stores and gyms. It’s an odd Satanic business plan, but it seems like he’s getting somewhere with it.

The Hell Spa is owned by Rona Benson (Deirdre West), an older woman who is losing ground to a corporate gym that destroys every small workout place in its way. Mr. Ex shows up and offers an interesting plan. He will save her beloved gym, make her look young again and she can sign people up at her gym for free and lose weight, as long as they sign up for life. Plan Ex, as it’s called, is on all the scales in the form of stickers, which seems kind of budget for someone who is either a monster from another dimension or some higher form of demon, but who am I to tell Mr. Ex how to do what he does.

Catherine Clark (Lisa Bawdon) is the editor of a local newspaper that no one likes other than to write letters telling her how bad the paper is. She learns about the spa when her friends, yes that would be Maggie and Marcia, go missing. There’s a whirlwind of plot, as Mr. Ex buys out one of her reporters, Doyle Shakespeare (Leonna Small), by giving her the mental illusion that her sick mother is better, all while Catherine falls for hunky but kind of dumb — or so he appears — computer guru Ken Brock (Raymond Storti). But then Mr. Ex takes those two pieces off the board and even cuts the finger off — he didn’t lose enough weight — of the owner of the print shop that the newspaper comes out of, Roque Jarvis (Augie Blunt), Catherine becomes in deep with the conspiracy that is swirling about her city.

Mike Bowler, who directed this, also was behind Things (not the Canadian one) and its sequel, as well as writing Fatal Images. The co-writer of this was Dennis Devine, who has been making movies since Fatal Images like Dead Girls, Things II, Vamps In the City and so many more. In fact, if you liked the theme from Dead Girls, good news. You’re going to hear it again.

“God made a fatal error when he gave men free will,” says Mr. Ex at one point, just after he’s show Catherine that large computers from another time and place — their computing power would fit into your phone these days — are behind his empire. Then, he giallo kills the other writer by stabbing her right in the brain.

This just gets wild, as there’s an underground lair filled with computers, as if this has become a Halloween 3 cover movie, except that it’s really about how Walmarts and Dollar Generals stripmined small towns across America, putting up stores every two minutes, until anything unique or special has been torn away while taking what they need, whether that’s money or blood or souls.

Those are some big ideas for a microbudget shot on video horror movie — and maybe I’m filling in the holes with my own concepts as I savored this — but you have to love a bad guy who says things like “I am the dark in every man’s soul” before describing how he will use sin to unite the entire world.

Also: This movie is way longer than it should be, yet I wanted it to last like another hour. You might find that it drags, but I could live in the world of Hell Spa for some time.

In 2000, Bowler took footage from this and made Club Dead, which is almost the same movie but now it has Tommy Kirk as a cop. This is a move that I can’t help but applaud. He should have remade it with little bursts of footage every few years, like a Satanic small business Star Wars prequel.

You can watch this on YouTube.