Night Game - Partita con la morte

Surfing Tubi in the middle of the night, I originally turned it on mainly for Roy Schneider and Astros baseball. But when the opening credits started, I instantly recognized shots of the causeway, Flagship hotel, east beach and then a house in the east end historical district. I gave up thoughts of going back to sleep and settled in for a watch. Roy Schneider was very good with what he had to work with. Terrible accents, lame script and poor editing. But seeing an intact Balinese Room is worth missed sleep any day. Many locations are gone or don't exist in the same form. My family was in the bar business in the late 30s and war years and my bedtime stories were different, to say the least. Schneider"s character talks about his Dad also being part of this world. My extended family includes descendants of the island famous Johnny Jack Nounes. Anyone from the Gulf Coast or even other parts of Texas should enjoy it just for the scenery.

Roy Scheider plays a Galveston, Texas police detective trying to catch a serial killer. It seems when a popular Houston Astro pitches a winning night game, a beautiful blonde winds up dead near the beach.

This crime drama also stars Richard Bradford, Paul Gleason, Karen Young, Lane Smith and Rex Linn. This movie quickly becomes predictable, but keeps your interest to the end.

I wondered if anyone could come along in the '80s and be more verbally blasphemous than Brian Dennehy. He seemed to be the "Babe Ruth" of using the Lord's name in vain. However, in this movie, Richard Bradford stepped up to the plate and becomes Barry Bonds! Bradford must have set the record for the most usages of the Lord's name in vain by a policeman in a Hollywood film, as well as being in the Top Ten for any role at any time. He was so ridiculous that I watched this with a TV Guardian the second time and four of his profane tirades skipped by the machine in less than seven minutes. Most of what he said, sentence after sentence, had to be edited. What a classy guy!

Too bad, because I enjoy films with sports angles, particularly baseball. It wasn't just Bradford's mouth, however, that turned me off. This entire film had Class B dialog throughout it, along with sub-par directing.

One reviewer here might have said it better than anyone with the comment, "If you liked I Know What You Did Last Summer, I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, and Candyman, go ahead and rent this from your local video store."

Well, that's some testimony. I didn't like those pieces of crap, either, and so this aptly belongs with them.

Who needs rain?? This "night game" should have been called in bottom of the first inning on the count of incompetence.

Thanks to brilliant genre classics, such as "Jaws", "The French Connection" and "Sorcerer", Roy Scheider is one of my - admittedly many - cinematic heroes, but it's nevertheless quite difficult to take him seriously here in this film. Roy depicts a police detective in a coastal Texan town, who asked the daughter of his high-school sweetheart to marry him (!), and meanwhile he tries to solve the case of a serial killer who slays beautiful blond women with a hook. His modus operandi also seems to be linked to the calendar of the local baseball team. Neither the plot nor any of the characters are very plausible, but luckily there are other things to enjoy in "Night Game". There's a lot of misplaced humor, for instance one of the deputies gets sick upon the discovery of a new body whereas another one orders pizza to the place of a crime scene. The killer cuts the throats of victims with a hook; hence the murders are reasonably gory and sadist, and the stalking that he does before killing them results in a couple of suspenseful moments, notably at the mirror-palace at the carnal or on the construction site near the beach. Scheiders' quarrels with his future mother-in-law are often funny, and there are pointless supportive roles for familiar faces like Lane Smith and Paul Glaser.

Someone is going around killing blondes along a beachfront in Texas possibly with a hook. Former baseball player now detective Roy Scheider is on the case.

Heavily criticised on its release, it's not hard to see why. The story is rather lumpen, drawing us into various cliched storylines eg big political / jurisdiction issues, Scheider's forthcoming nuptials to a blonde, numerous blonde girls walking alone into isolated places when there's a killer on the loose and the killer and their rationale for the killings when it finally emerges are bonkers.

That all aside, I watched this because of my fondness for Scheider who is a real class act. Certainly after Jaws and All That Jazz, he settled into a busy career of making generally below par films like this one. He is though a star and a good actor who keeps you watching and his scenes with the Richard 'Man in a Suitcase' Bradford are fun, well written and acted. So yes it's a disappointment, an unremarkable serial killer 'thriller', but it does have its charms.