The Game

Afoot

The Game
USA 1984 Directed by Bill Rebane
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: The usual spoilers.

Okay, yeah... The Game is another one from Arrow’s recent Weird Wyoming - The Bill Rebane Collection that I kind of liked. I mean, it’s no The Alpha Incident (reviewed by me here) but it’s better than Monster-A-Go-Go (reviewed here), Invasion From Inner Earth (reviewed here) and The Demons Of Ludlow (reviewed here). I mean, it’s not gobsmackingly brilliant but it’s certainly watchable and... cheap looking but entertaining for the most part. For a Bill Rebane film, I’m taking that as a win.

It starts off with a nice but brief credits sequence comprising a series of static shots of various title and credit cards placed on some mostly well known board games. We then get into the plot which belongs to that relatively small but tried and true genre of the eccentric rich person inviting a number of guests to his/her house to try and survive the weekend. In this case, it’s three eccentric multi-millionaires... as told by an opening narration performed mostly in rhyming couplets... and their hotel resort The Northernaire in Wisconsin (which is now torn down, in real life, it would seem).

They invite a bunch of people to play their ‘game’ for the next few days while they themselves are absent (aka controlling things from a locked off, boiler room grotto at the centre of a hotel). The game is called ‘Game of Fear’ and it’s basically the cookey rich folk piling on horror and death scenarios in an attempt to get each player to leave the grounds... with the last player standing receiving a million dollars. Don’t ask me to highlight any of the actors or actresses in the movie specifically because, as usual with a Bill Rebane movie (and a surprising number of movies actually), the IMDB is no help at all in providing photos of the actors in the movie so, I have no real way of matching them up and I don’t remember names so well.

Anyway, it’s typical of this kind of movie up until a point and I had no problems with it, for the most part. The various scenarios on offer by the millionaires are things like a tarantula on a plate, a shark fin in a swimming pool, blasts of fog and freezing cold air, a stalking but pretty unthreatening hunchback (who later turns out to be a well spoken hired hand in a neat little twist before a more elaborate reveal) and some kind of bed burster reminiscent of the chest bursters in the Alien movies... just less well done and surprisingly hard to rig. Which is where things get a little different to a lot of movies of this type... I’ll touch on that in minute.

The film has the usual trimmings such as the various hotel guests either gelling (and having sex) or arguing about what the heck is going on, even at one point getting into a stalk and kill gun fight with each other when the pressure gets turned up. The actors are, mostly, fine and overall the film has a comfortable vibe to it. There are a couple of things which set it a little off kilter though.

For instance, there’s a scene where somebody puts a water snake in a swimming pool. Then we see one of the ladies sitting up in her bed to go for a swim... but double exposed on the camera so she steps out of her body and leaves herself laying on the bed still. This is a strange enough occurrence by this point of the movie but she then goes for a swim and gets attacked by the water snake... until she wakes up back in bed and that sequence was all a dream. However, if it was all a dream, then why did we see someone putting a water snake in the pool before she went to sleep. Hmm?

Another strange thing is, when the last three surviving people are each promised a million dollars and taken away from their resort to meet the others, who were transported to a nearby hotel, only one of the former guests is there. It turns out that, more than just The Game was going on and real supernatural forces have also been actually killing the guests, finishing with the three millionaires. They are killed but wake up from death near the end, in a kind of afterthought moment, which might be just leaving the camera running after the scene was finished and then using it or... well, it’s a double rug pull that doesn’t quite make sense by the time we know there are real supernatural shenanigans going on also, I would have to say.

Most of the music for the film, credited to composer Bruce Malm, is completely not what you would expect for a horror/thriller picture. It’s mostly ragtime style piano music in the style of Scot Joplin and it puzzling why some of it was used the way it is... it’s a pleasant enough listen but does pretty much nothing for the atmosphere of the piece, that’s for sure.

And that’s me pretty much done on The Game. As I said, entertaining enough and one of the highlights, I suspect, of Bill Rebane’s filmography but, it’s probably not going to be for most folks, I would have thought and it’s not something I would be happy to recommend to most people unless they have a specific reason for wanting to visit something like this. For my money, The Alpha Incident is still the jewel in the crown of this Arrow boxed edition but, I still have one more movie in there to watch.