As everyone discusses whether the ultimate Oppenheimer viewing experience requires IMAX, allow me to introduce you to a film that will be an experience no matter when or where you watch it. That film is 1977’s Death Game.
Death Game is sort of like Cat in the Hat if you fucked the cat. Cinema is rife with cautionary tales of ill-advised affairs, but few are as harrowing as Death Game, which dares to ask the question, “What if you had an impulsive threesome, but the two other people turned out to be really, really annoying?”
George Manning is about to find out. George (Seymour Cassel) is the man who has everything, and the satisfied smirk beneath his mustache suggests that he knows it. He has a happy, undemanding marriage: he and his wife play croquet in the backyard before breaking for a little afternoon delight, and when their young son gets appendicitis, guess who’s on sick kid duty and who gets to sit at home with his top-of-the-line stereo and massive record collection? His house is so sprawling and elaborate that both Clue and the animated Beauty and the Beast could, for all we know, be taking place just off-stage.
Into George’s orderly, complacent life come two agents of chaos: Donna (Colleen Camp, speaking of Clue) and Jackson (Sondra Locke). The young women are drenched and, it seems, all the way on the other side of town from the party they’re supposed to be at. It’s only natural to let them in out of the rain to use the phone. Then it’s natural to let them wait around for a ride. Then to join them in the hot tub for a steamy softcore threesome.
Except in the morning, Donna and Jackson are still there. It’s like George has a hangover, and last night’s striking blonde fantasies are revealing themselves to be a total headache. Donna is a wild-eyed romantic who turns out to be using him for her own fantasies, clinging to him as the ideal lover even as she punishes him for reminding her of her own once-beloved stepfather, who, like George, passively allowed her sexual advances while denying any real responsibility. Jackson is both chillier and more anarchic, and Locke plays her as a grinning gremlin who lets milk slop down her chin and hawks chocolate-y spit on treasured family photos. Jackson and Donna have a relationship of their own, and Death Game gains some electric, unexpected emotion from its violent, tender lovers on the run.
George’s dream has curdled. The hot younger women who are up for anything are indeed up for anything, and they don’t exist for George’s amusement: he exists for theirs. And their youth is no longer titillating, it’s a monstrous, loud, frenetic hassle of dress-up, food fights, and murder. When George lies helpless and bound on the floor, soaked with milk, pelted with tomatoes, and covered with powdered sugar while the girls above him belt out Christmas carols, he’s in the worst kind of hell. His own tormentors don’t even take him seriously. They’re ruining his life–by the end of the movie, it looks like a bomb has gone off in George’s once-fabulous house–but hey, can’t he take a joke?
Death Game is nothing but oven cats all the way down. (Including “shot-put cat.”) Its wildness and intensity, and the absolute commitment of Locke and Camp, make it a must-see if you have any fondness for exploitation films. It has real depth and rewards analysis, which isn’t something you can say about most movies that involve this many panty shots.
There are downsides, however, and one of them is huge. This is one of the worst-paced 90-minute movies I’ve ever seen in my life, full of ridiculous padding like “long take of a car driving across the Golden Gate Bridge,” “long take of a car driving the other way across the Golden Gate bridge,” and “Colleen Camp fails to successfully eat a bagel.” At one point, the young women vow to execute George at dawn, and the movie decides that that six-hour wait really needs to feel like a six-hour wait, dammit. Everything is stretched out longer than it needs to be. And that creepy, bouncy song “Good Old Dad” that plays over the children’s drawings during the credits? Get used to hearing that, because it will show up three or four times and also haunt you for the rest of your life. Death Game is going to get its money’s worth, dammit!
At the same time, again, if you like this sort of thing, you want to see this movie. And even if you don’t like this sort of thing, you may still need to see it in order to marvel at the ending. I recommend it to all future filmmakers as a device to use when you can’t decide how to end your movie.
Death Game is streaming on Shudder.