Workout videos are known for often over-promising results, but when Linnea Quigley’s workout video warns that it might kill you, it delivers. The fifty-nine-minute workout only features about twenty minutes of actual exercise, but in that short window of time, I did manage to hurt myself!
I learned so much from this workout, but I think the main thing I learned was that there is no governing body that determines what constitutes an exercise video. This workout video red-pilled me. What even is exercise, man? Exercise isn’t REAL. It’s just wobbling your bits all around and hoping something good happens.
Calling Linnea Quigley’s workout video a workout video is like when you live in the midwest, and a bowl full of mayonnaise and Chili Cheese Fritos is called a salad. You might want it to be that, but it’s just not. What it is, is something supremely of its time. It’s a cool prop for when you want to have a VHS tape that doesn’t say pornography on it but is clearly fulfilling the function of softcore pornography. What I’m saying is I’ve never seen so many tits in my life, and I have them.
The “workout” begins with Linnea taking a three-minute-long shower during which she washes her breasts and butt almost exclusively. Taking a shower before a workout is just bad hygiene practice, but it’s ok because the amount of working out that actually happens in this workout tape is so minimal. With her breasts and butt now clean, Linnea Quigley steps out of the shower and screams, apparently as horrified to be in a workout video as I am to be doing one.
It cuts to an empty living room, and we’re formally introduced to Linnea Quigley, a woman whose hair is always frightened.
We watch clips from some of Linnea’s movies, the longest of which is another shot of her fully nude in a shower. This time she’s making out with a guy. I’m concerned that Linnea doesn’t understand the primary use of a shower at this point. The clips continue until we’re a full ten minutes in before working out is even mentioned, and even then, it immediately cuts to another clip of Linnea having sex in one of her movies as if the video is apologizing for bringing it up. After that clip, Linnea finally starts stretching.
She’s wearing a leather studded bra, and fishnet stockings, which she acknowledges is not typical workout wear but asks, “face it, would you want to watch me workout in a baggy sweatsuit?” The answer to which is yeah, I would Linnea. You don’t look comfortable at all. I’m getting a wedgie just looking at that leather bikini. I’ll gladly pause the video so you can throw on some proper workout attire.
While this would be an excellent workout for someone with no arms or legs, those of us with pesky extra limbs are left yearning for instruction on what to do with them. Linnea doesn’t explain her exercise moves or their benefit to your body. She just wordlessly humps the floor for about seven minutes as we close up on her torso.
Now that we’re thoroughly stretched, the workout can finally begin! Except it doesn’t. Instead, we cut to Linnea, going for a jog while wearing an outfit that looks like it’s been through a werewolf attack but in a sexy way.
She jogs by a cemetery, and a bunch of zombies rise from the dead for some unspecified reason. She defeats the zombies by body shaming them into exercising with her.
There are a lot of reasons that zombies make bad exercise models. It’s way more fun to do zombie stuff than work out stuff, so most of the actors are focused on the zombie part of the job and not at all focused on the workout modeling part. They’re not worried about demonstrating proper lunges. They’re worried about how a zombie would do lunges, which is, of course, badly.
They stuffed so many zombies into this scene that it’s hard to fit them all in the frame. Two zombies would have been plenty of zombies! They clearly didn’t hire any kind of fitness expert to plan a workout for their workout video because they blew their entire budget on ten zombies. Then they put them all so close together it’s difficult to move around enough to do the workout.
Anyway, the whole zombie workout thing is obviously entertaining, but lest we forget the actual purpose of this video, they make sure to throw in a brief cameo from Linnea’s boob. It flops out of her workout shirt a couple of times as she furiously does the monkey (for exercise). The majority of this workout could accurately be described as dancing but angrier.
Having completed her goal of showing you her boobs in a spooky way, Linnea proceeds to kill all of the zombies by tricking them into jumping in a pool. Is it zombie cannon that they can’t swim, or did Linnea just happen to find a group of dead people who never took advantage of their local YMCA? Also, if you can’t breathe, you can’t drown, right? So even though Linnea leaves the zombies in the pool, she’s just made a mess that she’ll have to find a new way to clean up the next time she wants to go swimming.
Anyway, it’s sleepover time. Linnea has invited some friends over to watch exclusively movies that she’s starred in. They are all pretty confused about the concept of a horror movie.
It’s ok, though, because they aren’t really there to watch horror movies. They’re there to pillow fight in lingerie, exercise in lingerie, and then die like everyone else who has attempted this cursed workout.
Once again, Linnea doesn’t explain the exercise at all, and if she did, I’m guessing all she would have to say is, “pay careful attention to what your vagina should be doing during this part” since that’s the main focus for a lot of this segment.
The exercise party is interrupted by the lights going out. Linnea goes off by herself to find the problem, screams and never returns. One of Linnea’s friends peels off alone to look for her and surprise surprise! She gets murdered.
Each girl proceeds to die in long dramatic death sequences that take up so much time you can almost hear the producer yelling, “Stab her like ten more times. It needs to be sixty minutes long, and Linnea can only dry hump so much.” One girl gets decapitated, and her head flies into a toilet. God, this exercise video really hates anyone who tries to do the exercise.
Once we watch all of the girls except for Linnea die, the killer is revealed to be…goth Ronald Reagan, I knew it all along!
Just kidding, goth Ronald Reagan is Linnea Quigley herself! She looks directly into the camera and gives a deranged villain speech that, honestly, elevates the whole thing from an exercise video to some kind of bizarre feminist high art.
“You, you on the sofa. I know what you’re doing when you’re watching my movies!” She says. Implying that she knows you have masturbated to this workout video that was clearly made to masturbate to and it has driven her insane. This is chilling and also fucking awesome.
Finishing this video feels like being dommed across time and space by Linnea Quigley. She dares you to look at her body and then shames you for it. I don’t know if any twist ending has ever satisfied me so much. Looper has nothing on this shit. That’s right, The Looper.
Sure, this exercise video has its flaws. Is it so difficult to follow that you could realistically injure yourself trying to perform it? Yes, but it’s also got everything you could ever want in a workout. There are zombies, pillow fights, humping the floor as a mode of exercise, hairstyles I will have nightmares about, goth Ronald Reagan, and Linnea Quigley making me feel like a nasty pervert for daring to try and do her exercise video.
My nasty pervert ass is on Twitter @YouKnowLydia.