Death Game (pan and scan/1976)
Picture: C-
Sound: C Extras: D Film: C
In the “what were they thinking” and/or “what are they
doing in this film” category, VCI has released the 1976 exploitation film Death
Game with otherwise respectable actors Seymour Cassel, Sandra Locke and
Colleen Camp. Essentially, “the girls”
pick his house at random to “visit” and seduce him. After a silly pseudo-sex sequence in his hot tub, they attack
him, tie him up, wreck his house and torture him.
The obvious goal of Peter Traynor’s film is to capitalize
on the phenomenal success of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(reviewed elsewhere on this site) and Last House On The Left, which
launched a cycle of deservedly forgotten (except for genre fans) films about people
being abducted and tortured.
Unfortunately, had it not been for the stars, this viewer would have
felt most tortured of all.
This is more stupid than violent, but the curio factor may
make it enough for more than a few people to want to check out, though they
should only expect some unexpected laughs.
This is one of the first titles in VCI Home Entertainment’s “Cinema
Pops” series, intended on purpose to showcase lower-grade B-movies for fans,
fun and completists. No matter how bad
a film is, especially if it is from the last golden era of American filmmaking
(which slowly died off in the 1980s), then it should be out on DVD. That especially applies to films of the
1960s and 1970s, since so many now-little-seen works were issued. Key works like Ganja & Hess and Space
Is The Place (both reviewed elsewhere on this site) have already been out
on DVD from this period, and even the least respectable films (like the Horror
classics previously noted) are or should be out, and not just because they are
hits or well-known.
One disadvantage is finding good prints of these films and
this one is sadly a strange pan and scan print, where the 1.85 X 1 image was
squeezed into a 1.33 X 1 frame, then the rest of the film is essentially tunnel
vision. Add the problematic image
quality throughout and this is definitely an old analog master here, but who
knows where the negative is. The film
was from First American Pictures, with its now politically incorrect “Indian
head” logo. The sound fares a tad
better, somehow, with background noise and being a couple generations down, but
the score and title song in particular are demented and has to be heard to be
believed. An odd popcorn film indeed.
- Nicholas Sheffo
