The notorious stories surrounding its tumultuous production would suggest that Peter Traynor’s Death Game was a farce – a trash film by a wannabe director who only got the opportunity because he had a large sum of disposable money to make a schlock product that titillated and shocked on a surface level but collapsed underneath its own director’s incompetence. Yet many years later, looking upon Death Game with fresh eyes and its new 4K restoration, the movie seems to be a cult success. Its failures rendered into an idiosyncratic concoction of delirious sadism and feminist angst. The editing and restoration lend a new clarity, both physically and spiritually, to Traynor’s film that allows it to be enjoyable on the surface as a pulpy, sexy, psychological horror film and open to various interpretations of its age and gender dynamics.
Peter Traynor, the film’s director, was a California real-estate mogul and essentially entered into his first and only directing gig with nearly no experience. This didn’t sit well with established actress Sondra Locke who became frustrated with Traynor’s aloofness on set. His direction was unfocused and undetailed, which led to Locke and Seymour Cassell directing themselves in many scenes. Cassell verbally and physically fought with Traynor and ended up leaving the production without doing ADR. He had his lines dubbed by editor and cinematographer David Worth, who would later become more well-known for Bronco Billy and Bloodsport.
Worth was brought in with thirteen days left to film, basically to patchwork a movie that was fully coming off the rails. In an interview with Daily Grindhouse, he mentions, “The whole thirteen days was a big challenge. We worked sixteen hours a day because we were always trying to catch up with what needed to be done and to get it done on time and under budget. It was horrendous. I don’t even think there was a wrap party at the end, we all just said ‘we made it’ and went our separate ways!” Worth’s contributions to the production make a huge statement in the new 4K restoration, with the layout and editing of the film closely resembling his original intention. The movie’s various delirious sequences feature a chaotic and, at times, post-modernist editing style, especially in the jacuzzi scene, that lends to a dream-to-nightmare arc in the story, which descends from a male fantasy sex-romp into a night of pure psychological anguish.
One of the first striking and ultimately important foreshadowing elements of Death Game is its opening credit sequence. “Good Old Dad,” a song by Iris Rainer and Jimmy Haskel, is sung by The Ron Hicklin Singers while we get a montage of crayon drawings of a family, a house, the sun, and generally happy scenes. For much of their existence, horror films have incorporated children and eerie nursery-rhyme songs to evoke a strangely offputting feeling. Most famous is perhaps the “1..2… Freddy’s coming for you” chant in The Nightmare on Elm Street, but even as far as back as Jack Clayton’s The Innocents there’s been a fascination of using children’s songs, often thought to be innocent and evoking joy, as the siren for incoming dread and death.
But Death Game’s song is not just a cute little sing-along for the credits. It plays a few times throughout the film and evokes the gendered and familial dynamics between the story’s two female antagonists and the man they hold hostage and torture. Both Agatha (Sondra Locke) and Donna (Colleen Camp) are young (they claim to be 15 and 17, but it’s never certain whether they’re saying this purely as leverage for a statutory rape charge or not), and George Manning (Seymour Cassell) is a family man. Their impromptu orgy in a jacuzzi leads to uncomfortable moments the rest of the way, with George realizing he has jeopardized his marriage and the two girls realizing they can use that to initiate their hostage situation.
The father-daughter toying they do with George is deliberately morally disturbing – especially with Donna, who at one point keeps calling him daddy and sucking his toes. The psychosis inherent in the girls’ behavior and the scattershot plot rapidly descending into a string of hijinks reflecting a dark and violently inclined version of Vera Chytilova’s Daisies would come across to some critics at the time as perhaps braindead or mindless. But critical reception of this film was fractured in many ways, with many interpretations which led to a deeper consideration of the movie’s themes. This is not an uncommon conundrum with horror cinema. Questions often asked include, is there a point to the violence? Should there be a point to it? Is it exploitative, or is it secretly feminist? The answers depend on who you ask.
On its surface, Death Game can be seen as a nihilistic account of human depravity and boredom. For seemingly no reason, two girls spend a night making an innocent man’s evening miserable. A lot of escapism in horror movies serves as a catharsis, either in seeing vengeful justice or just a morbid fascination of chaos with the moral safety of knowing it’s fictional. Death Game certainly delivers all of this in good measure. From a formal standpoint, the movie’s camerawork and editing, both by David Worth, emphasize facial expressions and sharp cutting between characters, relaying the changes in their relationships throughout the movie. Worth points out that because Agatha and Donna’s relationship with each other is never explicitly addressed as sexual until much later in the movie, he wanted to lead or tease the viewer in that direction beforehand. He says, “I took the shot [of the girls looking at the delivery guy] and flipped it… so it looks like Colleen and Sondra are looking at each other.”
Below the surface, the technical decisions manifest into deeper themes of gender and power. Because Agatha and Donna were both victims at one point of either neglect or sexual abuse by their fathers, the movie could serve in a sense as a comeuppance of men’s traditional role as the sadistic and violent character, instead becoming the submissive one, with George being a cypher for “men”. However, it must be noted that George is innocent, making it hard to consider Agatha or Donna as justified or protagonistic in any way. Agatha and Donna are troubled, and the film suggests, more explicitly for Agatha, that this stems from their fathers, also foreshadowed by the opening credits song. Ultimately, what goes on in Death Game can be surmised as an unbridled explosion of reckless abandon for morals – a cathartic release for pent-up angst by two women at the edge of their sanity. Their victim, of course, a symbol. It didn’t really matter who, as long as he reminded them of the source of their anger.
The legacy of Death Game in its 4K restoration lives in brighter visuals, a stunningly restored canvas that elevates the stark contrast between the comforting abode of George Manning into the dark and shadowy dungeon it becomes after the arrival of Agatha and Donna. Cassell is dour and sympathetic, and Locke and Camp effectively toe the line between playful immaturity and all-out mania. With a 4k restoration and its newfound legacy as a ’70s horror gem, regardless of whether Peter Traynor had any talent or know-how about filmmaking, Death Game succeeds despite it.
