Sometimes your instincts steer you right and sometimes they steer you wrong. And sometimes you aren’t quite sure about the end result. That happened to me with Deadly Games, a film released onto shiny disc format that, much like my says of browsing in the video stores, drew me in with an intriguing cover design.
The plot is very simple. A masked killer is picking off women in a small town. He also seems to spend a lot of his time playing a home-made board game that can help direct his urges (I guess). Can Roger (a police officer, played by Sam Groom) and Keegan (Jo Ann Harris) catch the killer before it is too late, and before Keegan suffers the same fate as her sister? And is it anything to do with the strange Billy Owens (Steve Railsback)?
With some gratuitous nudity early on, and a couple of impressive and deadly set-pieces interspersed throughout the runtime, Deadly Games is certainly a film that most slasher movie fans will want to check out at least once. Whether it is worth a repeat viewing, however, is a different matter entirely. There’s something worthwhile here, an attempt to play by the rules while also toying with viewers, but there are also numerous scenes that have characters chatting to one another in a way that feels like it is just being done to pad out the runtime.
Writer-director Scott Mansfield doesn’t have much in his filmography at all, and this was his first film, but he shows a certain degree of competence when it comes to a few of the more memorable moments. There’s a swimming pool scene here that ranks up there alongside the best in the genre, for my money, and it is clear that Mansfield tries to make the most out of what he has available to him. If only Mansfield the writer was as good as Mansfield the director, this could have been a minor classic of the sub-genre.
Harris is a fine leading lady, although she’s weighed down by the weaker performance from Groom. Railsback does just fine, despite the limitations of his role, and certainly adds value to genre fans. Elsewhere, the cast is eclectic enough to include Colleen Camp, Dick Butkus, Denise Galik, Saul Sindell, and many others. Very few people are doing their best work, but most of them are just fine for what the movie is.
A mixed bag of good and bad, with most of the bad coming from the script, what you have here is a lesser slasher movie that has enough curiosity value, and strangeness, to make it worth your time.
6/10
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