The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Games are very similar to Sports – both are competitive in nature, can be played solo or in teams, involve a series of rules regarding play and crown a winner at the end. The principal difference as far as dictionary definitions seems to be that sports are more physical and competitive, whereas games are more often played seated and for fun. However there are plenty of examples where this is not the case.
This listing concerns itself with ways in which games appear in fantastic cinema. Games included here cover card, board, gambling and role-playing games. Videogames get their own entry under Films About Videogames.
Card games turn up with regularity in various settings, most notedly in the various adaptations of Alice in Wonderland (1865). Chess seems to be a game favoured by serial killers. There have been a surprise number of horror films centred around deadly versions of party games.
Both board and role-playing games have a habit of spilling over into reality or unleashing demonic forces. There are some films centred around games that might be played in the future.
For occasions on which actual games such as Battleship and Dungeons & Dragons have been adapted into films see Films Based on Toys and Games.
Enjoyable sequel to Jumanji and actually a much superior film in the hands of Jon Favreau. This expands the idea of the Jumanji boardgame that brings things from a jungle to life to a space theme
An animated film based on the hit playing card phenomenon, which proves largely incomprehensible to anybody not versed in the game
After the disaster of X-Men: The Last Stand, the decision was made to give a whole film over to the series’s most popular character, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, and to go with a prequel that told his origin story. Largely a film that exists as a series of superheroic action scenes
The old party game about choosing between two difficult decisions is spun out into a rather lame attempt to make another Saw. Given a generic commercial handling, the film fails to get inside the psychological tension of its life and death decisions
Jeff Wadlow made the smart Cry Wolf, a slasher film about a campus game turned deadly. In this Blumhouse production, he has simply remade that with a different game where the killer is now a demonic curse
Animated film that is gore-drenched and certainly not for children. Imagine The Belko Experiment conceived as a videogame where the heroine has to survive an office of people trying to kill her while aliens bet on the outcome
I was very impressed with Daniel Stamm’s previous film The Last Exorcism; this was his follow-up – a brutal English-language remake of a Thai film where people are offered the challenge of engaging in increasingly more malicious and extreme acts to win large sums of money
Director Daniel E. Falicki’s Alien Implant made my Worst of 2017 list. This is one of his earlier, equally terrible films about a boardgame that possess its players
Film based on the popular campus mock killing game where one player snaps and starts to kill for real. Featuring the screen debut of Linda Hamilton
Unfunny comedy in which husband and wife John Ritter and Pam Dawber are trapped in Hell, which consists of various parodies of popular tv shows
Ingmar Bergman’s classic work where Max Von Sydow plays a game of chess with Death. A film that seems to carry the philosophical weight of the modern world on its shoulders
Extremely twisted Japanese film that plays out like a conceptual mix of Saw and Fear Factor (even though it predates either) wherein contestants are locked in a room and get to challenge each other to engage in more and more extreme acts against the other
Ready or Not was a reasonable hit with audiences. Now Samara Weaving and the same creative team are back with a sequel that expands the game and polishes the black humour to a point of perfection
This is The Most Dangerous Game in the setting of an Agatha Christie whodunnit. Samara Weaving marries into a family of privilege only to find her wedding night requires her to engage in a deadly game of Hide and Seek
The great Robert Altman’s most frustrating film set around an enigmatic dice game in a frozen future
Classic British adaptation of the Alexander Pushkin’s story about a soldier who seeks the secret of selling one’s soul for a winning hand at cards
Dennis Hopper plays a retired detective brought in to hunt a serial killer who targets victims via a campus game
Oddball German comedy in which a toy table footballer magically comes to life and becomes a star soccer player
The 22nd animated film from Pixar and also the least successful (being released only a week before theatrical chains closing down due to Coronavirus). This has an appealingly quirky and original concept not unakin to Bright that takes place in an alternate reality where magic creatures live in a world akin to our own
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. tv series was construed as lighter take on the James Bond films. This, the third theatrical film recut from tv episodes, is one of the most entertaining, creating a memorable super-villain and almost entirely consisting of over-the-top death traps and action set-pieces
Mind-twisting mini-series where videogame designer Stephen Dillane is wound into a series of reality and illusion games
The South Korean tv series Squid Games with people forced to play deadly versions of children’s games was a surprise international hit on Netflix. This is the low-budget horror copycat
This is like an online version of 13 Sins about an internet site that pushes people to take increasingly more outrageous and eventually deadly dares. One of the new thrillers centred around social media that seeks to adopt its visual look, this is slickly polished and aimed direct to the teenage demographic
Frustratingly enigmatic film where student Carly Pope is drawn into a game of mysterious clues where people are being killed
Spanish-Argentinean animated film about the miniature players of a table football game come to life. The animation is not the high-end quality of most theatrical releases but passable; everything plays out to to fairly predictable sports movies cliches
An epic Indian-made film based around the foundation text of Hinduism, concerning the saga of two warring and the intercession of the gods in these matters
This has a winning concept – live-action roleplayers are forced to face a demon they accidentally conjure. Only it becomes a one-joke film with characters delivering mock mediaeval dialogue in falsettos
Christopher Lambert and Diane Lane star in a thriller about a serial killer who treats his victims like a chess game and has turned an entire isolated island into a chessboard
A popular Robin Williams starring hit about a boardgame that unleashes jungle-themed chaos in a small town. A cute effects-driven idea that ultimately becomes an incredibly safe fantasy
Fascinating directorial debut from Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo about a man drawn into an underground society where people bet on the luck quotient of others
A dreary revival of the 1990s serial killer thriller. The surprise for a work that has no ambition beyond cable filler is that it has attracted a name like Al Pacino who mugs and showboats through the worst performance of his career
A serial killer thriller with Lou Diamond Phillips as a detective investigating a killer who challenges the police to games of hangman
Gore-drenched French-Canadian film where teens play a board game that forces them to kill a select number of people lest their heads explode
David Fincher film in which Michael Douglas is wound into a conspiracy that makes him doubt everything around him. Fincher creates paranoia but the story eventually becomes an improbably contrived house of cards
Sequel to the 2019 Escape Room. This repeats everything that its predecessor did but bigger and more elaborate to the point that basic believability goes out the window
The most high-profile of three identically titled films to come out around the same time all based around the popularity of escape rooms. This generates fair tension and has a certain WTF quality as the characters pass through each scenario
One of at least three identically titled films coming out around the same time based around the popularity of escape rooms. This has a group trapped in a room with an unleashed demonic force
The fifth and last of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films, the weakest of the series. Dirty Harry comes up against a betting pool on celebrity deaths and a killer who decides to help it along
Smart and intelligent slasher film in which a campus game among students turns deadly as it appears that a killer whose identity they made up may be eliminating their numbers for real
Drama with standout performances. William H. Macy is a loser with perpetual bad luck who is employed by Las Vegas casinos to cool tables that have a winning streak – only for his luck to change when he meets a woman
Bizarre Japanese copy of Battle Royale by way of American Idol where a group of schoolgirls from a singing competition are trapped on an island where they must play a deadly card game
A man offers two down-on-their-luck guys a series of increasingly more extreme bets for money. This sets out to defy taboos and good taste, largely succeeding by pushing into some alternately grotesquely funny and nauseating territories
Charlie Charlie was supposedly an oracular game that made headlines when a satiric site claimed that teenagers were being killed playing it and some news sites took this seriously. This is a pathetic and feeble film made exploiting the game’s five minutes of notoriety
From the era of Disney live-action comedies, this involves assorted slapstick tomfoolery as various parties try to aid or capture a telepathic alien cat that is stranded on Earth
A disappointingly tame giallo thriller from Dario Argento about a poker-playing serial killer. Disappointingly, Argento has cut back on all his customary extravagantly arty and sadistic murder set-pieces
Horror film in which a group of LARPers (live-action role-players) use a wartime bunker as a location and are trapped where the bunker appears to be haunted
Scathingly funny film where a party held by a group of self-absorbed twentysomethings turns deadly as it appears there is a killer in their midst
Norwegian comedy where two friends who were a champion laser tag duo in their teens are now in adult life where they are forced to pair back up to fight off alien invaders
Horror film with an interesting cast line-up about a group on a weekend getaway who play a boardgame that serves to bring out secrets and hidden desires
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the Edgar Allan Poe story but is a fascinating piece with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi skulking about engaged in a twisted plot involving revenge, Satanism and chess games played for human lives
The sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where the first film’s humour gets lost amid repetition and blown up by a big-budget. William Sadler’s Death however proves a scene-stealer
Horror film that has the interesting idea of paying homage to the 80s phenomenon of the video boardgame. A good idea given a so-so treatment
The original Battlestar Galactica tv series was an incredibly blatant copy built on the success of Star Wars. This is the pilot, which aired on tv in the US but was released theatrically to theatres in other countries
Teenagers in Salem are forced to play a game where their lives are forfeit and they become possessed by a cursed knife dating from the witch trials
A live-action film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that conducts a passable run through of Lewis Carroll with the supporting characters populated by an all-star British cast
Obscure animated children’s movie adaptation of Alice in Wonderland that commits the sin of modernising and Americanizing Alice
Tim Burton takes on Lewis Carroll but Carroll gets lost beneath Burton doing his usual quirky eccentric thing and a plot that seems to want to turn Alice’s adventures into a modern epic fantasy
A fairly reasonable tv mini-series adaptation of Lewis Carroll – a version that excels in terms of design and in using The Jim Henson Workshop to bring the Wonderland creatures to life
From Irwin Allen, the creator of Lost in Space etc, a tv version of Alice in Wonderland, conceived as an all-star musical that comes out as ponderous and leaden in Allen’s hands
Disney’s animated adaptation is usually hated by Lewis Carroll purists for its free and easy treatment of the story but for everyone else comes with a splendidly demented visual absurdism
Studio adaptation that freely mixes elements from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and features an all-star cast line-up, this works far better than the purists would have it
Following on from his reworking of The Wizard of Oz in Tin Man, this is a tv mini-series where Nick Willing rather fascinatingly reinterprets Alice in Wonderland in SF terms
A work of bizarre genius from stop-motion animator Jan Svankmajer. A surrealist take on Alice in Wonderland that is more Eraserhead than Lewis Carroll, filled with Svankmajer’s bizarre Claymation creatures
A children’s fantasy adventure that never strays beyond the environs of an American high school and comes with the lowbrow slapstick, excruciating comic caricatures and incredibly bad effects