Death Game
Death Game
R | 01 May 1977 (USA)
Death Game Trailers

George Manning is a well-to-do businessman, husband, and father. While his family is away on his birthday, he invites a pair of rain-soaked young women into his house to wait out an evening thunderstorm. The two girls seduce Manning and ultimately kidnap and torture him in his own home.

Reviews
Coventry

What to do when you're a happily married man but your beloved wife is out of town on the night of your fortieth birthday, yet two sexy young girls show up at your doorstep, literally throw themselves at you and invite you for a threesome in your own sauna? You kick them right back out on the street, of course! That'll teach them to interfere with a perfectly happy family! Well, that is what you should do in order to prevent guaranteed catastrophes to happen the next morning, but admittedly very few male individuals are likely to respond like this. Neither does the handsome George Manning in "Death Game", so he's stuck up with two obtrusive chicks in his house. Their behavior gets more psychotic with each hour that passes, until they even set up a fake trial against poor tied up George. "Death Game" is not a very good movie, but that's merely because there was too little money available for the execution and because Peter S. Traynor has no clue how to direct a suspense movie. The basic premise is quite unusual for a 70's exploitation movie (usually slavering hillbillies terrorize poor young girls instead of vice versa) and the whole concept is actually very much ahead of its time! Especially nowadays, the horror genre brings forward a lot of movies revolving on brutal home-invasions. People are subjected to fear and torture in their own houses and it's a very popular and money-making concept at the moment, like for example in "Funny Games" and "The Strangers", but this crazed little movie already did something similar in the 70's! The 40 first minutes of "Death Game" provide silly entertainment (Sondra Loncke at the breakfast table) and irresistible trashy goodness (that soundtrack!!), but unfortunately the second half of the film is incomprehensibly boring and unexciting. It shouldn't be, since the girls get more deranged and all, but it suddenly feels as if the writers' inspiration had vanished and only padding remained. There are still two fantastic highlights to experience near the end, though! One involves a pussycat (did you know glass windows aren't cat-proof?) and the other is a stupendously laugh-out-loud hysterical ending. Even a threesome wouldn't have such a fantastic climax! Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to search for that awesomely catchy "Good Old Daddy" theme song on YouTube!

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Robert J. Maxwell

A text prologue warns us that we should not allow evil to enter our house, but I think the more apt word is "entropy." Good grief, what slobs these two babes are!George (Seymour Cassell) is alone in his San Francisco office and his monstrously expensive home in Tiburon while his wife and child are away in San Diego. Two girls (Sondra Locke as Jackson and Colleen Camp as Donna) knock on his door, asking directions. Well, it's raining, and they're shivering like two drenched pitiful kittens, and they're not sure of the address they're looking for, and, what with one thing and another, George invites them to come in and partake of his pizza by the fire. All three of them wind up in George's bath tub and there follows about five minutes of mostly undifferentiated nudity in double exposure, triple exposure, quadruple exposure, and dodekakuple exposure. They spend the night in a threesome and the next morning the girls fix him breakfast. But something has gotten slightly cockeyed because Georgie's guests gobble everything down with their fingers and pour ketchup and syrup all over the linen and -- "You eat like ANIMALS!", George exclaims and tells them to get out. In his dreams. Now, don't get me wrong. Sondra Locke is an extraordinary looking young blond with cobalt-blue eyes and Colleen Camp bounces around like a superball. You gotta say, they breed 'em mighty cute down there in Shelbyville, Tennessee, where Locke comes from, and they breed 'em with bodacious tushes too, as we can't help but note after the first five or ten minutes.But when the girls go berserk, so does the movie. The film is thereafter bathed in a garish green light. The pair put on ghoulish makeup and make gargoyle faces at themselves in the mirrors. They brain a delivery boy and then drown him to make sure. They cuss up a storm and smash windows and furniture. They have one of those scenes in which two people sit across the table from one another, licking food and then jumping each other's bones. And Georgie? They first render Georgie unconscious with mace (which contains nothing that you can't find in that little red bottle of McIlheny's Tabasco sauce in your kitchen cabinet), tie him up, pour flour and milk all over him, subject him to a psychotic trial, put him through one of those Tolstoy-type semi-executions, slap him around, dress up in outlandish costumes, then prance out on him and his virtually destroyed upper-middle-class home, and are dispatched by a delivery van ex machina.As for the acting, it's as if someone had told Georgie, "First act polite to these girls, then act panicked after you're tied up." And to the girls: "First act shy, unwilling to impose on anyone, then act crazy." And that's it. The photography and location work are straight out of a 1970s porn movie. I'm not sure that suggests a total lack of skill. It takes effort and talent to turn San Francisco ugly. The score gives us two Leitmotivs. Georgie's is some pop tune with lyrics about "being free" and "giving in." Jackson and Donna's is a catchy rinky-tink thing called "My Good Old Dad." I approve of the moral lesson behind the story, though. There are some things you should simply not give in to, even though they might look like a lot of fun at first. All very educational.

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Nikolaus Maack

It's a bad movie from the 70s about killer lesbian hippies taking on the establishment. Sort of like a "Thelma & Louise" without any feminism. Both painful and compelling, the film had tense and giddy, while also wishing it would just end.And then the end came and I was utterly baffled and amused. The final 10 seconds of the movie over, I blurted over and over, "What the hell was that?" I backed up, watched it again.Then I forced my girlfriend (who had not seen the movie) to watch it."That is pretty weird," she said.Pretty weird? It makes no sense at all! Wow! If you enjoy odd, bad film, I think you'll love this movie. Even when it's at its worst, it's fun. There's the 1970's moustache "wakka-chikka" aspect. Then there's the campy screaming semi-naked young women. And then there's the goofy, straight-faced, comical horror movie aspect.Given the ending, I assume the people making this film knew they were joking. They had to know. Or else they thought the ending was deep. I don't know. But I am forced to admit that I really, really enjoyed this film a lot.

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dmuel

This is an atrocious movie. Two demented young women seduce and torture a middle aged man. There's not much to give away in regards to a plot or a "spoiler". I would only comment that the ending is nearly the most preposterous part of the flick. Much of the film involves Locke and Camp cackling obnoxiously, all the while grinning psychotically at the camera. Add to this a soundtrack that repeats again and again, including a vaudevillian song about "dear old dad" that suggests an incestuous quality the viewer never really sees. The music is annoying at first, then ends up subjecting the viewer to a torture worse than that depicted on the screen. The theme here is of youth run amok, understandable as a reaction to the '60s, but done with little imagination or style. Avoid it!

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