By now, characters in horror movies ought to know that if you find a mysterious old game in a basement, you should definitely not play it. However, the characters in Canadian horror movie Game of Death have obviously not learned that lesson, and when the hard-partying teenagers discover the titular game at the back of a shelf, they immediately put their drinking and sex on hold so they can play. This is, of course, a very bad idea, and as soon as the seven friends activate the game, it pricks their fingers, drawing blood from each one and starting a countdown of 24 lives. As the instructions indicate, the players must take 24 lives, or the game will periodically kill one of them.
When the deadly consequences are right there in the instruction booklet, it’s kind of hard to feel bad for the people who go ahead and play anyway, and the characters in Game of Death are mostly vapid, self-centered idiots whose inevitable deaths are not particularly tragic. Directors and co-writers Sebastien Landry and Laurence Morais-Lagace focus on elaborate gore and stylized visuals over character development, so there isn’t much investment in whether any of these people live or die. There’s an almost nihilistic tone that is somewhat bracing at first before losing its shock value. The movie is drenched in blood and guts, but none of it makes an impact.
And it really is drenched. The main characters spend most of the movie walking around literally covered in blood, thanks to the manner in which the game kills people for not complying. At first, the players don’t pay attention to it, walking away after they’ve all had their blood harvested, and going back to their beer bongs and making out. But after the timer counts down the first life, suddenly one of the teens has a massive headache, and then his head explodes, splattering everyone around him. Landry and Morais-Lagace return to the head-exploding multiple times over the course of the movie, and they never shy away from showing the explicit aftermath.
It takes a second exploding head for the players to fully accept what’s going on, and at that point the previously only slightly creepy Tom (Samuel Earle) embraces their fate. “All we have to do is kill 21 people,” he says calmly, producing a handgun that he’s apparently been holding onto for just such an opportunity. Tom is sort of the villain of the movie, at least in the sense that a couple of the other characters are slightly more bothered by their consciences, although everyone eventually participates in one murder or another. The directors periodically cut back to cell-phone videos of the characters goofing off before they discovered the game, contrasting their carefree drinking and sexual antics with the grim violence that follows.
That violence is quite grim and intense, despite a darkly humorous tone, and some of the more extreme gore effects are pretty unnerving. The friends pile into pizza delivery driver Tyler’s car, and thanks to Tom’s sociopathic insistence, Tyler (Erniel Baez Duenas) hits a jogger and then runs him over several times. The sight of the man ripped in two, with his entrails connecting his top half to his bottom half as he’s splayed out on the road, is quite gruesome, conveying just how far the game has driven the characters in a short amount of time.
The teens become homicidal so quickly that the movie has to take a detour to come up with one likable character, a sweet park ranger named Marilyn (Jane Hackett), who dotes over her dog and is too quick to give the blood-soaked young people the benefit of the doubt. Marilyn’s lengthy introduction eventually just feels like padding, along with the periodic cutaways to a nature documentary about manatees that has questionable thematic relevance.
By the time that Tom and his sister/love interest Beth (Victoria Diamond) make their way to a palliative care facility for a spree of mercy killing, viewers are likely to be numb to the violence and the gallows humor. Even a brother/sister make-out session (yes, the edginess here includes incest) barely even registers at that point. Landry and Morais-Lagace use stylized animation, some of it resembling an old-school video game, to represent parts of that killing spree, and at other points in the movie they switch aspect ratios seemingly at random.
The creative visuals sometimes make up for the narrative emptiness, and with a running time of just 73 minutes, Game of Death generally moves quickly. Gorehounds may be amused for a little while, but when the epilogue uses a groan-worthy contrivance to set up a potential sequel, it’s unlikely that anyone will find that a particularly enticing prospect.
Starring Samuel Earle, Victoria Diamond, Emelia Hellmann, Erniel Baez Duenas and Catherine Saindon, Game of Death is available Tuesday on VOD.