News
A Masked Killer Uses a Board Game to Select Victims in ‘Deadly Games’ Trailer
Steve Railsback and Colleen Camp star in the creative and effectively terrifying slasher, Deadly Games. Arrow Video once again digs up an underrated gem and gives it a nice upgrade to blu-ray quality picture and produces a load of special features to go with it. This ‘Namsploitation picture features Railsback as a loopy soldier returned home from war. He picks up work at a theater as a projectionist. Unfortunately, the women of a small town all start getting murdered.
Deadly Games is a genuinely creepy slasher that has a host of well-fleshed out and memorable characters – such as the above-mentioned Railsback. I also really love that the central piece of the film is a board game that is the device that the killer uses to randomly select his victims via dice. Deadly Games also really piles on creative jump scares. It has a lot of them, but it really does work magic with the scares. It manages to pull off these effective scares again and again. Just when you think you figured out where the killer is going to be coming from, the film surprises again. In the day in age where haunted house films go way overboard with jumpscares Deadly Games really put the art into the jump scare and can act as a class in effective jump scares.
The official synopsis for Deadly Games goes like this:
Steve Railsback (famed for his unhinged performance as Charles Manson in 1976’s TV mini-series Helter Skelter) is at his sinister best as a troubled Vietnam Vet in 1982’s Deadly Games – a tale of madness, murder and adultery from writer/director Scott Mansfied. A masked maniac with a penchant for a horror-themed board game is playing his own twisted game with the women of a small American town. Each time the dice is rolled, another victim meets a grisly end. Returning home to mourn the death of her murdered sister, Keegan (Jo Ann Harris) befriends local cop Roger and oddball cinema projectionist Billy (Railsback) – but soon finds herself in the killer’s sights. Originally entitled Who Fell Asleep, Deadly Games is an intriguing early ’80s slasher oddity which benefits from focusing as much on the development of its female-led cast as it does on its scenes of stalking and slashing. Available for the first time ever on disc, Arrow Video is proud to present this long-overlooked creepy gem in a brand new restoration from the recently-unearthed camera negative!
The special features for Deadly Games blu-ray go like this:
- Brand new 2K restoration from the original camera negative
- Original uncompressed mono audio
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Brand new audio commentary with The Hysteria Continues
- Sooty’s a Sh*t – a brand new interview with actor Jere Rae-Mansfield
- Practical Magic – a brand new interview with special effects and stunt co-ordinator John Eggett
- Extensive image gallery featuring never-before-seen production photos and promotional material
- Original Trailer
- Original screenplay under the title Who Fell Asleep [BD-ROM content]
- Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly-commissioned artwork by Ralf Krause
- FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Fully-illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing by film historian/author Amanda Reyes
Make sure to head over HERE To place your pre-order for this underrated slasher gem.
Note: This is not to be confused with the Christmas horror film by the same name. They are much different pictures.
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Movies
‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments
It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.
We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.
“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”
That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”
Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:
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Movies
‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening
Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.
Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.
Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.
Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.
Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.
The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.
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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date
Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.
Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.
These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:
According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”
Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.
Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.
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