Deadly Games

I somehow thought this movie would turn out to be an undiscovered treasure, but no such luck! Visually murky and poorly plotted, this is basically an oh-so-familiar retread of "Halloween", though the director shows some talent and tries to surpass the limitations of the script. The lousy ending does not help. (*1/2)

While not a bad movie, the only memorable parts were the deaths and the ending. The bright spot, however, was Colleen Camp's performance. While not the best ever, it was nice to see that she was acting as well as she was. Unfortunately, the movie was confusing and a lot of it made no sense for a while and even until the end... that's what I get for falling asleep through it, huh? It was pretty boring...

After the death of a young lady in a quiet town, Keegan the sister of the victim shows up and gets tangled in the daily life of the town inhabitants. Soon there's another victim, and Keegan takes upon herself to figure out who the killer is while wooing with the cop who's on the case.

Aggravating! Here's another case where the video artwork does a good enough job selling what is a generically spineless and tedious slasher fare of the 80s, where it deserves to languish in obscurity. It's a mystery story at heart, but director Scott Mansfield looks like he was influenced by the slasher craze (with certain set-pieces) that formulated in this period to deliver an indistinguishable feature of too many spontaneous changes in its patchwork direction. This would go on to devoid the structure of tension.

What starts off amusingly decent (some lady stripping and fondling her breasts in the front doorway of her house?!), transcends in to a sluggish (if peculiar) melodrama of redundant sequences involving endless interactions (like a playing a board game, while sharing the good times with a trite sounding song accompanying) and vacant characters, only to be broken up by some tame and non-suspenseful killings. The two elements never entirely gel together. The premise is cluttered with predictable and perplexing details, which only made me yawn and look at the clock. The mystery/or the slasher side of the story is half-baked that when it comes to the reveal of our ski-masked, glove wearing killer it's quite unsatisfactory. That's if you've made it that far, but the ending is an unusual choice.

Not helping the slight story and turgid script, was that the visuals were poorly lit and cinematography looked dusky (however there are moments like the pointless football game that's extremely well shot). I thought maybe it was the video, but the lighting in certain scenes was non-existent, which leads to the assumption that it was due to the production's low-budget. Was this the case of trying to rally up mood and atmosphere? If that was so, it didn't always work despite the best efforts by director Mansfield. Were it seemed to pay off was the choice of some eerie, high-pitched sound effects and music score. These were well executed.

The performances are somewhat acceptable with leading actress Jo Ann Harris making head-way with her quick-witted attitude and sincere appeal, even with that somewhat squeaky voice. Colleen Camp is fine, Sam Groom is laughably unconvincing in his role and a disinterested Steven Railsback is pretty much wasted.

This mundane and diluted effort can only roll up a 2 on this dice and leaves you thinking maybe it should have discarded it's slasher strokes.

This is a pretty messy movie. I saw it on cable when I was young and new slashers appeared every week on cable. It appealed to me at the time because the character who played "Keegan" was spunky and interesting, and the premise was, if I understand it correctly (somehow hinging on a gay subtext...?) unique for its time. There was also little else to watch back then.

The story, such that it is, involves the murders of young women in a town, and the solving of those murders by the spirited Keegan, who has just moved there, and at least starts OUT as a character that isn't an empty-headed cliché.

But who can tell what's going on? This movie just flaps along, presenting one disjointed scene after another, and characters you're never encouraged to care about in scenes that fall flat and look drab and ugly. The presence of the dynamic and almost always insanely fun Steve Railsback (soon to appear in "The Devil's Rejects") is barely noticed. It all becomes dull as a white color crayon very quickly with no gore, no tension, no logic and no story to speak of. This is why God invented the fast forward button. Or better yet, the "Stop" button. Put in another movie--any other movie--and enjoy a good evening's entertainment.

I have a feeling this was cobbled together from the remains of several other movies somehow, like how Roger Corman's "Hollywood Blvd," which this resembles in a weird way, was assembled. I hadn't seen this for years, saw it for a buck on VHS and promptly recorded Scooby-Doo cartoons over it so it would have SOME value anyway...

"Deadly Games" a.k.a Who Fell Asleep, which to be honest I did as it just dragged mostly for me. It started off well with a young woman getting disturbing phone calls and then getting attacked by a man in a ski mask, which was quite tense and exciting, but the outcome was rather tame.

The aspect that I did like about it was the characters, especially the core female cast which I did find rather interesting and blossoming romance between the female lead and the cop, which was actually kind of sweet and they had decent chemistry together. But after a while it did get rather tedious, like for a start none of the other murders had any real spark or tension to them. But the lead actress Jo Ann Harris was rather likable as the female lead, and quite refreshing to have someone real and plucky in the role.

It's just everything else in this movie just lacks, for a start the killer was just too easy to figure out and when it came down to the final scenes, it was just well dull and total lack of proper motive, just made everything that came before it rather disappointing.

All in all there are glimmers here and there of a decent slasher movie, but sadly not enough of anything special with a mystery element that just doesn't work, despite good performances, this movie was just way too boring to keep me that interested.