Census Bloodbath: The Game Of Death

Year: 1982
Director: Scott Mansfield
Cast: Alexandra Morgan, Jo Ann Harris, Sam Groom
Run Time: 1 hour 32 minutes
MPAA Rating: R

No, I'm not going to open another one of these reviews lusting after how spectacular the poster for an 80's slasher movie is. No way. Not gonna do it. So, um... Deadly Games (not to be confused with the 1989 French home invasion film Dial Code Santa Claus, which was released under the same title) is... actually you know what, there's almost no information out there about where the film came from or why it exists, and there's certainly no evidence in the film to answer the latter question. So let's get right into it!

That poster's real cool though, innit?

So. Deadly Games. After Linda (Alexandra Morgan) is menaced in her home by a masked man and falls out a window to hear death, her music journalist sister Clarissa Jane Louise Lawrence (Jo Ann Harris) AKA Keegan comes to town. She is reunited with some old friends and frenemies, including waitress Mary (Denise Galik of Don't Answer the Phone) and her diner owner husband Joe (Dick Butkus, a name created to give playground bullies so many options that their brains melt right out of their ears). She begins a romance with cop Roger Lane (Sam Groom), whose best friend is injured Nam veteran Billy Owens (Steve Railsback of the same year's Trick or Treats among other things you're more likely to have heard of), who skulks around the local abandoned movie theater watching old monster movies and playing a monster-themed board game.

You'd think, given the title, that the board game has a huge part to play with the killings by a ski mask-clad maniac that strike this small town, but you would be wrong.

You would also be wrong to assume that a movie with a poster that awesome couldn't be bad.

I guess I should start with what Deadly Games gets right, because that's a pretty quick conversation. Well, it's actually quite good at jump scares, especially for a slasher movie of this budget and vintage. The killer is always lurking in the the corner of the shadowy frame (very shadowy if you watch a bad VHS rip like I did) that you least expect, grabbing at our victims in sudden jolts of shock. Unfortunately the kills that follow are unfailingly bland. I don't think there's even a drop of blood present in this entire movie, and not one creative weapon spices up the slew of bog standard drownings, strangulations, and whatnot. I might feel like a sociopath for writing a sentence like that, but it's true, dammit! A slasher at this budget level can't dream of having effective gore, so it needs to spice the kills up with literally any amount of imagination. Why not go with the "game" motif the film so obviously could and should have been built around? Shoot spiked dice at people or something, I don't know.

It's probably telling that the one paragraph that contains a compliment about something other than the poster devolved so quickly.

Deadly Games fails as a slasher movie in pretty much every way. Literally every character looks alike so you're too busy asking yourself "Is that Carol? Or Chrissie? Ruby? Was there even a Ruby?" to actually care about whether or not they live or die. And the body count is just pathetic, taking a severe dip after a pair of opening kills, briefly flirting with becoming a cheesy romantic comedy more than anything else.

Complete with a cheesy "Beauty and the Beast" esque love ballad over a montage.

No, not an effective slasher. But it's the things that make Deadly Games an ineffective film that are the most interesting. Remember the kinds of movies I make myself watch on any given day so you can let the full gravity of the statement I'm about to make really sink in: This is one of the most incoherent films I've ever seen.

Deadly Games puts on a good show at first, arranging genre tropes in such a way that it almost disguises itself as a normal movie, albeit with some jags into weirdness like the fact that Linda stands on the front porch of her house topless and massaging her own breasts but then puts on a shirt when she needs to go inside to answer the phone. Or the endless circuitous conversations about people we'll literally never see onscreen (the cavalcade of names making it even more impossible to tell who is onscreen at any given time) filled with lines that are almost, but not quite, like things actual people in a small town might say.

It's at the halfway point that this facade crumbles away, and Keegan emerges from her cocoon of bland competence and performs the rest of the film like she's a drunk baby. She babbles to herself in high pitched voices, performs entire scenes as multiple characters all interacting with one another, and laughs and claps gleefully at every boring thing she, Roger, and Billy get up to. Her truly bizarre energy permeates the rest of the film, and suddenly every character is going off on unmotivated Tennessee Williams monologue rants, or casually pointing guns at their wives over the dinner table, or saying lines of dialogue like (and I quote) "rag mops with towels on their head don't normally go out until at least March or April."

This all culminates in a finale that feels like every other scene was accidentally cut out. Characters just sort of arrive places, knowing things we never saw them learn, and rushing the film to its dramatic [sic] conclusion with literal seconds to spare. It is pure chaos, and while it was somewhat fascinating to watch unfold, it certainly doesn't equal a good movie in any sense of the word.

Killer: Roger Lane (Sam Groom)
Final Girl: Clarissa Jane Louise 'Keegan' Lawrence (Jo Ann Harris)
Best Kill:  Chris is buried alive in a setpiece that is neat first because it's lit well enough for you to actually see it.
Sign of the Times: There is a long conversation about the women's husbands maybe having "homosexual tendencies."
Scariest Moment: Keegan rushes to answer the telephone in the dark and when she reaches for it she discovers that a man is sitting on her bed by the phone.
Weirdest Moment: One of the gals hanging at the diner orders a low cal burger plate with a side order of spaghetti and a Tab. You know, as one does.
Champion Dialogue: "I haven't told anyone my name in ten years..."
Body Count: 5

1. Linda falls out a window.
2. Annie is drowned in a pool.
3. Carol (?) is strangled.
4. Chris is buried alive.
5. Billy is shot.

TL;DR: Deadly Games is a completely incoherent mess that manages to disguise itself as an only slightly incoherent movie for about half the runtime.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 1156

Census Bloodbath: Guten Morgan

Year: 1982

Director: David Schmoeller

Cast: Morgan Fairchild, Michael Sarrazin, Andrew Stevens

Run Time: 1 hour 44 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

When you're reviewing a Morgan Fairchild slasher movie, do you really need to go much further than the phrase "Morgan Fairchild slasher?" It's not good, folks. But oh, we do find ourselves in a pickle when David Schmoeller's name pops up on screen. Attention must always be paid to the director of Tourist Trap, even if the highest peak his career did ever manage to reach was Puppetmaster. So here we're stuck with The Seduction, an early entry into the erotic thriller genre that is neither erotic nor thrilling, so is it even a movie?

Unfortunately, it takes 104 minutes to prove that yes, in fact, it is.

The Seduction takes a very familiar tack to anyone who has watched early 80's porto-slashers as closely as I have. Los Angeles news anchor Jamie Douglas (Morgan Fairchild in her first feature film) has found herself a stalker in Derek (Andrew Stevens of 10 to Midnight), a photographer who seems to be her neighbor but the geography of the movie isn't exactly clear on that front. And thus does the movie announce itself as a Windows-esque obsession movie rather than an out-and-out slasher. Although he does torment Jamie with knives in tow, and she is reporting on a chain of serial murders that have literally nothing to do with the plot, the body count remains resolutely, frustratingly low.

Among the cast members that Derek refuses to kill are Jamie's best friend Robin (Colleen Camp in an early role), a struggling model and commercial actress with the greatest outfits ever designed by cocaine; her assistant Bobby (Kevin Brophy of Hell Night); and her boyfriend Brandon (Michael Sarrazin), who seems positively elderly when placed next to Morgan Fairchild. So yeah, Derek makes threatening phone calls and follows her around and does stalker stuff. You pretty much get it.

Yeah, you get it.

Now don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Morgan Fairchild. I just think she only works as a reaction to who she used to be. She's great as a Chandler Bing's aging sexpot mother on Friends and in her cameo as maybe an actual angel in the gay comedy eCupid, and those roles wouldn't have existed if not for her early work, which they exist as a winking comment on. But let's admit that that early work isn't exactly the stuff of legend.

Transferring her skills from the TV drama Flamingo Road to the thriller genre involves a lot of sexy pouting in life-threatening situations and almost nothing else. She's easily outstripped by every other character, including Brandon - who is just a cardboard cutout of a vanilla extract ad. Honestly, Colleen Camp should have been the lead here, because she turns in a performance that's intriguingly prickly and angular, embodying the desperate need for attention and hardened, defensive exterior of someone who is totally failing at being famous. Even Kevin Brophy, who could rightfully call this a career high point, exudes charm and charisma in spades. They all run circles around Fairchild, who needed a couple more years under her belt to get perspective on what exactly her place was in the entertainment sphere.

ACTING!

The Seduction is at least trying for something in the scenes with Maxwell the cop (Return to Horror High's Vince Edwards), which comment on the fact that stalker situations weren't taken seriously in the 80's, just barely brushing up against how crimes against women were more normalized back in the day. But let's not pretend that The Seduction had some grand agenda here, it was just using real life facts to underscore how helpless and alone its sexy, sometimes topless protagonist truly is.

And there are a couple helpfully weird scenes that pique the interest every now and again. A pop psychologist character who appears randomly in one scene and never shows up again has a delightful turn, seeming to channel Zelda Rubinstein's future breakout role in Poltergeist. Plus. there's that line where Morgan Fairchild objects to getting a gun, because "what am I gonna do, pack a gun, take karate, and become some kind of street thug?" (Obviously her only reference for gang life is a bunch of early 80's TV movies). But these brief moments of incoherence don't make up for a total lack of interest in any of the proceedings onscreen.

I've already mentioned the fact that this film isn't in the least bit scary, and in spite of a couple nipples sprinkled in, eroticism is so far afield that it's sending postcards. There aren't even any kills to whittle down the surprisingly ample cast while we're waiting for the story to kick in! (spoiler: it never does) But on top of that, The Seduction isn't even particularly well-made. The final scene (AKA the only sequence where anything actually happens) is bizarrely edited, placing the killer inside the house to do a kill, then teleporting him back to his apartment so he can approach the house again to drum up some tension [sic]. It makes not the slightest bit of sense geographically or from a character standpoint, and the muddy cinematography elliptically swooping around to avoid showing gore they can't afford just makes the whole thing even more scattered.

If I wanted to watch a bunch of interchangeable men in tight pants and feathered hair run around not being scary, I would just watch an aerobics video. And if I want to watch an early 80's celebrity stalker slasher with an obnoxiously low body count, I would just put on The Fan. At least that movie has Lauren Bacall, a shirtless Michael Biehn, and some glittery musical numbers. The Seduction couldn't even dream of anything that interesting.

Killer: Derek (Andrew Stevens)

Final Girl: Jamie Douglas (Morgan Fairchild)

Best Kill: This really isn't much of a decision, so I shall abstain

Sign of the Times: Jamie has to use a phone booth to check her messages.

Scariest Moment: A threatening letter is slipped into Jamie's teleprompter and she automatically starts to read it aloud until she realizes what she's saying.

Weirdest Moment: A department store salesman attempts to sell Jamie a 55-pound solid silver cigarette lighter shaped like an elephant, and if it had come back in any capacity during the third act, this would have been a 10/10 movie.

Champion Dialogue: "What rattled your cage? Did you get a facial by mail or somethin'?"

Body Count: 2, oh so disappointingly

1. Brandon has a knife thrown into his back in a hot tub.
2. Derek is shot in the gut.

TL;DR: The Seduction isn't so much seductive as it is entirely stultifying.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1122