The Murder Game (2007)
Review by Siko Mike
In the 80′s and 90′s, the teen slasher films became very popular but then decreased by not having the same cheesy yet fun feel for the genre. Most of today’s so-called “slasher” films only care about the gore, usually overdoing it by placing it at times when it is unneeded and erasing the suspense that make the older films so much better. There haven’t been good slasher films since the mid-late 90′s except for some of the backwoods kinds or brilliant low-budget works that just couldn’t compete with big studio budgets.
I was browsing through horror movies at Best Buy yesterday and came across one called The Murder Game. The cover art made me have doubts about the film, but I decided why not and gave it a shot. I got home and watched the trailer and just knew that it was most likely going to be a dumbed-down straight-to-DVD release. As it turns out, I ended up loving the film and being glued to the screen. This is one independent slasher film that grabbed me by surprise!
The Murder Game is about a group of high school kids who like to play a game more like hide and seek but with a twist. They each pick a card from the deck and don’t tell anyone which card they picked. Whoever has a Queen is the killer and the others are the victims. The goal of the game is to stay alive. Eric’s mom won’t let them play their game at his house and they have basically been kicked out of every house where they have played the game. A dad of one of the guys owns a garage storage warehouse, so they decide to sneak in after closing to play the game. Oh, and they are locked in until the store opens the next morning.
Everything is going great at first until they are really killed off one by one by an unknown killer. Eric suspects his friend Lucy’s gothic cousin Colin is the killer. Nobody knows much about Colin because he doesn’t talk much and was recently expelled from his last school. The only people that are actually nice to Colin are Trish and his cousin Lucy. Could it be Colin exacting revenge on Eric and his friends for giving him a hard time or has a psychopath followed them inside the warehouse?
So the story is your typical teen slasher but that is why it’s fun. The acting is kinda cheesy in some areas but it’s supposed to be that way. Murder Game is the first film that I’ve seen since Bloody Murder that did the Friday the 13th theme where you don’t actually see the killer until the end. You basically just see the weapon hit the victim or have the POV shots that give respect to the 80′s slasher films. The movie starts off kinda slow but once they get to the warehouse everything goes insane from there. I loved the suspense in this film because these days most films make things way too predictable. Murder Game tricks you with several possibilities of who the killer may be.
The thing that attracts me to these slashers is the fact that the killer is almost always the person that you would have least expected, like the original Saw movie. This film is like a combination of Friday the 13th and Saw because this killer wants to play a deadly game.
Now let’s talk gore FX; there really wasn’t that much gore in this film, at least not when compared with recent horror films. It’s basically the same amount that we saw in Friday the 13th. There is a decapitation, stabbing, pole through the throat, and so on. My favorite death scene is where the killer rams a pole through the back of a girl’s head and out of her mouth. There is a major twist at the end when the killer is revealed and lets just say the evil grin on that person’s face was a picture that was imprinted into my subconscious and brought a chill down my spine! Another thing that worked for this film was the set, which gave out a very creepy atmosphere and is the kind of place that you don’t want to be alone in.
Despite the cheesy acting, Murder Game is a really good and entertaining low budget slasher film that is pretty satisfying. I recommend a rental or purchase for this film. This film is a treat for slasher fans including myself to sit down on a Friday night and watch late at night. Highly recommended!
Available on Amazon
The Murder Game – Official Site
The Murder Game on Myspace
Popularity: 3% [?]
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