17th July 2015, 09:51 AM
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 | Cultist on the Rampage | | Join Date: May 2011 Location: Leeds, UK | |
DEATH GAME - Aka 'The Seducers', is a neglected delight from the seventies which packs a lot of fear, loathing and oddness into its slim runtime. It's about a Californian businessman who finds himself home alone for his birthday. Before he can turn down the lights, retrieve his old porn collection and slip into some nostalgic post - bachelorhood wank fantasy, he answers a knock at his door to find two nubile youngsters who claim to be lost in the night. As you can guess, its not that hard for them to charm their way into businessman's mansion, but what follows isn't really what he had in mind... 'Death Game' plays a lot like a nightmare. I say that sort of thing quite a lot, because the kind of films I review do tend towards, well, the nightmarish, I guess. But there's something specific about 'Death Game', something about the insecure underside of the alpha male's psyche which feels exposed in this twisted little day dream. Business guy is gradually drawn into hot tub sex games by the girls, but their menage runs increasingly off the rails as the newcomer's antics become ever more shrill and their teasing come-ons turn into mind games. An incestuous tone, never explicit but somehow inevitably there, curdles the atmosphere. Violence erupts before long, cats fly out of windows and business guy finds himself trussed up and given hours to live by his seducers-turned-captors. The alpha male is deposed, undone and f*cked up by his courtesans. The whole thing feels like a product of some pick-up artist's afternoon nap, the one he had after some dodgy crab paste sandwiches. The one where he woke up screaming. 'Death Game' isn't such a great film by any objective standards, but what are those anyway? It's powerful, intermittently, and intriguing. It's also grating, dull, obnoxious, weird, intoxicating, hilarious. Maybe it never quite coheres as the sum of its parts, but those parts, inconsistent and patchy as they are, are sometimes pretty amazing. Words can't really express my reaction to sequences such as the one where we get to see a seemingly endless shot of some tomato ketchup slowly dribble from a prone bottle whilst a blitz of mismatched and multitracked music plays in the background... this then segues into a shot of one of jailbait duo rubbing a banana against her thigh. Another highlight is the threesome in the bath segment, a soft focus montage soundtracked to pitch perfect seventies porn vibes, so much so that it feels like parody avant-la-lettre. Which, for all I know, may have been the intention. There's more, so much more. The theme music. Music hall homage to the wonders of patriarchy played by sarcastic feminists with a piano and a bloopy seventies synth, Chas'n'Dave bound and gagged in the background. The hysterics of the last half hour, face paint and everything. The fact that most of it seems to happen in just a couple of rooms. The jaw dropping last shot – revenge for that moggy who got dissed so badly. So, with its nasty intentions, weird claustrophobia, inconsistent attitudes and general histrionics, 'Death Game' is a must for me. Shame it's only available as a kind of VHS-rip standard throwaway. It really needs to be polished up a bit, it's far more worthy of a release than some of the stuff Arrow or 88 put out. In fact, Grindhouse were going to do it at one point, but I think that's all been and gone. It would be perfect for an outfit like Vinegar Syndrome. Anyway, I can dream. Until whenever, its up on Youtube and is available as aforementioned cheapo DVD and you should see it.
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