The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Human Bloodsports refers to games whereby people are forced to fight for their lives (usually with their bare hands). There is the popular Most Dangerous Game scenario where unarmed people are pursued by armed hunter(s) only to end up turning the tables.
This also covers gladiatorial combat where armed combatants are required to fight to the death in an arena for the sporting pleasure of others. Central to treatments of the theme is the idea of humans treated as game and hunted usually by bored aesthetes and elites.
There have been a reasonable number of films set in futures where to-the-death games are staged for televised masses, most recently with the hit of The Hunger Games (2012). Another variant is where people are forced to compete by aliens often where the fate of the Earth hangs in the balance.
For a more detailed overview of the topic see my essay Films About Human Bloodsports and Death Games.
Unique anthology that offers 26 episodes from different directors, each ending with a death. The episodes vary wildly in quality but a sufficient number ignore all good taste and/or travel waaaay across taboo lines
Sequel to the hit multi-director anthology has a less high-profile line-up of directors, nor hits the astonishingly perverse heights of its predecessor. As always some entries never do much but the film finds its stride in the last few episodes
A group of people whose memories have been blanked wake up in a mysterious labyrinth and have to survive death traps and each other. A promising mix of Cube and The Hunger Games killed by clumsy storytelling
Another of the last films that Bruce Willis made before his mental deterioration forced him to retire. A variation on The Most Dangerous Game where Bruce plays a bad-ass facing hunters with his bare hands
Charlize Theron is on a wilderness adventure in the Australian Outback when she is hunted by Taron Egerton. A variant on The Most Dangerous Game with Egerton seemingly cast as Mick out of Wolf Creek
Action film from Cannon Films with Michael Dudikoff forced to undergo a Most Dangerous Game scenario and be hunted through the bayous by white supremacists
Beginning as fan mill speculation, 20th Century Fox finally brought their Alien and Predator franchises together on the screen here. The result is an okay effort in the hands of Paul W.S. Anderson, even if it never has the grueling intensity of the early entries in either series
An entertainingly violent Japanese comic-book of a movie in which a classroom of school pupils is abandoned on an island with weapons to eliminate one another. Frequently cited as the inspiration for The Hunger Games
This was the sequel to Battle Royale and ups the scale of the conflict but somewhere loses the gleeful fun of the original and strays off to become a war film
Japanese film clearly inspired by Battle Royale that has a wonderfully appealing premise where a high school baseball game that has been turned into a deathsport
Greg (Wolf Creek) McLean directs from a script by James Gunn. The Office by way of Battle Royale as 80 employees are locked in an office building with orders to eliminate one another
This has the interesting idea of a group of people selected to take place in a live-action videogame only to find themselves trapped in a The Belko Experiment scenario.
Mickey Keating makes a Backwoods Brutality film that has borrowed a good deal from The Most Dangerous Game about a woman abducted and forced to make a survival run through the desert with her bare hands
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
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
This Australian thriller has a captivating premise – pregnant women are abducted, C-sectioned and imprisoned where they must fight to the death to get their children back
An action movie where the toughest criminals are forced into a barehanded survivalism competition against one another while this is livestreamed. As the hero, wrestler Steve Austin has zero charisma
Film about a tough guy detective settling into the destined role of a monster hunter. With lots of dark streetwise urgency and Corey Feldman proving unexpectedly entertaining in drag as the lead vampire
This exploits the topical fascination with the darknet in a story ostensibly about making snuff videos for sale there. In actuality, this telescopes down to being no more a variant on The Most Dangerous Game
Another variant on The Most Dangerous Game with an unarmed man on the run against armed hunter(s). This was made just after Rambo came out so it becomes one lone man fighting an entire army with his bare hands.
The first of three sequels (actually a prequel) to Paul W.S. Anderson’s Death Race, this gives the origins of Frankenstein and the Death Race. This rehashes much of the first film as generic direct-to-dvd fodder
By tthis third film, the Death Race series is straining trying to find something original to do with a ry limited premise. The Death Race now takes place in the South African desert but the action scenes prove monotonous
Satiric hit produced by Roger Corman, a spoof of Rollerball, with David Carradine as a driver in a futuristic road race where points are won by running down pedestrians. Also featuring a young unknown Sylvester Stallone
Paul W.S. Anderson’s remake of Death Race 2000 strips the satire from the original and turns it into a modern action movie – a to-the-death car chase film set in a near-future prison
Death Race 2000 was a hit for producer Roger Corman. It was remade minus the satire as a straight action film with Death Race; here Corman remakes the original (albeit very cheaply) and restores the satire
The third sequel to Death Race and the most interesting of the series. This sets up an Escape from New York scenario and has fun with bad-ass posturing in depicting the interior of the prison as a open air biker bar
Another action movie variant on The Most Dangerous Game with Chuck Norris’s son Mike facing hunters on a remote island. Featuring a cast made up of the relatives of more famous actors
Terrible film made to exploit the success of Death Race 2000 with David Carradine as a mystical post-apocalyptic Range Guide. This is however a post-apocalyptic action film that prefigures much of Mad Max 2
Alfonso Cuaron’s son Jonas makes a film about Mexican illegal immigrants being hunted by a white vigilante in a Most Dangerous Game scenario. The film came out just after Trump’s famous wall campaign speech
A head-scratching oddity from the people behind Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey with people enter in a reality tv show where they are hunted by dinosaurs within the confines of a hotel
Solidly effective work of post-holocaust survivalism with a couple on a 400 mile journey where they have to pass through territories held by various gangs
Film in which a dying Karen Gillan has a clone made of herself only to make an unexpected recovery and be forced into a televised duel to death with the clone for ownership of her life
Joe D’Amato directs one of the numerous 80s Italian Mad Max 2 copies. One of the very first films to depict televised human bloodsports later popularised by the likes of The Running Man and The Hunger Games
One of the key films from John Carpenter with Kurt Russell giving his best ever performance, a slick exciting action film that imagines a future Manhattan Island having been transformed into a lawless prison
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
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
Not to be confused with The Final Girls that came out earlier this year, this is an extremely original work, neither quite slasher nor a vigilante film, yet turning the expectations of either on their heads
A modestly effective action film written by/starring stuntman Corey Michael Eubanks where he is forced by backwoods hicks to compete in bare-knuckle fights
A rather funny comedy about four misfit youths on a wilderness survival course in the Scottish Highlands who run afoul of human hunters and pagan sacrifice
Film from the muchly underrated Peter Watkins about a future where nations maintain peace by holding televised war games. As always with Watkins, this is stark, potent and highly politicised
Solid, well made variant on The Most Dangerous Game human hunting scenario with an alcoholic man fighting for his life in a small border town that holds an annual hunt to eliminate the socially worthless
Hard Target was one of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s better films, featuring an on-fire John Woo as director. While most have forgotten it, we get a sequel here that copycats Woo’s moves to a point of tedium
John Woo made his US debut with this Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle, which is essentially an urban version of The Most Dangerous Game. Woo’s stylised action set-ups give a slight script a dynamism that blows his contemporaries away
This feels like one of the numerous copies of Saw with eight people locked in a warehouse with video cameras implanted in their foreheads and told to that only one of them can leave alive
Another variant on The Most Dangerous Game scenario. This has the amusing idea that the British aristocracy, having had fox hunts cancelled on them, have taken up hunting the working class and immigrants
Fascinating film about a group of people who are abducted by aliens and forced to run around a course where their heads will explode if they stop or are too slow
A Young Adult box-office hit that does little more than competently shuffle around ideas from other SF films. Jennifer Lawrence makes an impressive showing but the film also soft-pedals the moral reality of its scenario
The first sequel to the box-office juggernaut. The surprise is that it spends defies most of the things that made the first film, not to mention has made one of the year’s biggest box-office hits into a parable for Marxist revolution
The Hunger Games was one of the biggest franchise of the 2010s. Here a number of the key talents return to make a prequel to the events, telling a story from the early days of the Hunger Games
In the vein of the Scary Movies films, this offers the amusing idea of a mash-up between The Hunger Games and The Hangover where the characters are forced into a death match against characters from other media franchises
Controversial variant on the human bloodsports plot of The Most Dangerous Game but where liberals hunt conservatives. A film with a darkly satiric bite that sets out to offend people on both sides of the political fence
A variation on The Most Dangerous Game that comes with a nasty feminist agenda where women are hunted by men who feel a disappearing sense of entitlement
A quite reasonable Backwoods Brutality item with a group who go hunting in backwoods Oklahoma but stir up the inbred poachers and end up being hunted themselves
A decent variant on The Most Dangerous Game with a woman forced to survive with her bare hands while pursued by a hunter, this places emphasis on the psychological interplay between hunter and hunted
This comes out like a comedy version of The Purge almost, where a future California lottery awards the winner millions if they can avoid every other person trying to kill them
The action film has largely died off in the 2010s. This is very much a throwback with a set-up reminiscent of Predator about an action team fighting an alien in the jungle
Another of the animated DC Comics films in which various of their regular characters find themselves incarnated in simulated combat arenas
From they heyday of the 1970s martial arts film, karate champion James Ryan must reunite the old gang to take on a super-villain who wants to enslave the world with a mind control drug derived from potatoes
Like a version of David Fincher’s The Game rewritten for the mobile user generation where a slacker is forced through a series of scenarios that mess with his sense of reality
An adaptation of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman novel set in a future where youths compete in a race where they must walk hundreds of miles without stopping or else be shot
The famous Swiss children’s character gets a sarcastic puncturing in this amusingly gonzo OTT exploitation take where she becomes an armed revolutionary against a cruel dictator
A miracle of no-budget filmmaking made on a budget of $1000. A homage/parody of 80s/90s cyborg action films with some extremely accomplished effects posing and a sidesplitting ear for the era’s dialogue
A spinoff film from The Mandalorian tv series, this is the best film set in the Star Wars universe this side of the 2000s for the simple reason that it has invested in characters rather than slavish fanboy callbacks
This comes with an interestingly different premise wherein characters are abducted and wake up inside a simulation of Night of the Living Dead and realise they are meant to replay the roles of the people in the farmhouse at siege from the zombie onslaught
The second of the Mortal Kombat animated films, this continues into another tournament, introducing a bewildering array of characters from the games amid a high degree of violence and bloodshed
An animated film revival of the Mortal Kombat videogame franchise. This does a quite reasonable reworking of the basics, while leaving you blown away with the ultra-violent excesses of the action
The first and best version of the oft-told story in which shipwreck survivors are forced to survive with their bare hands while being hunted by a mad Russian aristocrat
Remake of the oft-filmed story wherein a couple are forced to survive with their bare hands while hunted by a sportsman. This has been updated where hero John Hennigan is now a reality tv star
A new version about the classic human bloodsports film where a group of shipwreckees are hunted across an island by a mad aristocrat
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
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 reverses the sympathies of films like Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Rather than having people tortured by backwoods hicks, one man is forced to survive on a brutal run for his life through the more disreputable parts of L.A. while hunted by homeless.
Yeon Sang-ho makes a sequel to his international breakout zombie film hit of Train to Busan, appropriating the basics of Escape to New York to good ends
Animated adaptation of the one of the biggest Marvel Comics event storylines of the 2000s – the same one also used in Thor Ragnarok. Essentially Spartacus recast with The Incredible Hulk
Slasher film where a girl is hired as a housekeeper in a remote location only to find she is being stalked by a masked killer and forced to survive with her bare hands. Two sequels followed.
This takes the previous year’s big hit of Aliens and fuses it with The Most Dangerous Game, swapping that story’s bored aristocratic hunter for an alien hunting Arnold Schwarzenegger and a team of soldiers in the jungles of South America
Shane Black, a writer-director with a reasonable cult following, makes the sixth Predator film (he also appeared as an actor in the original). Black shakes the series up, introduces a number of new ideas and makes an okay entry
Predator was one of the better Alien/Aliens copies of the 1980s. This sequel does little more than serve the same up all over again bar the substitution of a near-future L.A. for the jungle but manages to generate a reasonably intensive ride out of the action
The Predator series continues. Dan Trachtenberg, the director of Prey, makes an animated offering that tells three stories of encounters between human and Predator in different eras of history
Despite being hamstrung with Adrien Brody in Action Hero mode, this is a hard-edged film that goes some way to rescue the Predator franchise from its novelty crossovers with Alien(s)
Not to be confused with the recent Predator sequel. this is a German survival horror where a group of trampers abruptly find themselves hunted in the woods
The seventh film in the Predator franchise. This received some of the best reviews of any film in the series and comes with the unique idea of pitting Native Americans up against a Predator
A fascinating lost world/alien lizard people stop-motion animated film that has been in production for a record 56 years, eventually pieced together and released by Charles Band several years after its creator’s death
French film about a tv gameshow where contestants are pursued by armed hunters. Much of this was copied by the subsequent The Running Man but this conducted the idea first and better
From Peter Watkins, a remarkably stark and brutal film set in a near-future USA where political prisoners are allowed to run for freedom through the desert while hunted by law enforcement officials
Film based around the improbable concept of a future where on one night of each year all crime including murder becomes permissible. While this promises a rich vein of satire, the film only emerges as a variant on Straw Dogs
Slightly more interesting than its predecessor in that it takes the action out from gated communities into the streets, otherwise this offers just the same as The Purge – much in the way of heavy artillery and a patina of contemporary politics that have all the depth of a protest placard
Fifty girls have been abducted and are paired off and forced to fight to the death with their bare hands in an arena – essentially Saw by way of Girlfight. A tautly streamlined and grittily effective effort that succeeds modestly well at everything it sets out to do
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
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
Classic work of dystopian SF set in a future where an ultra-violent sport has been created to pacify the masses
Remade, the 1975 dystopian film about future sports is stripped of any of its big message (even of its future setting) and is turned into no more than a formulaic action film
Lucio Fulci was a cult Italian horror director. This was the only occasion that Fulci visited the SF film, a low-budget ripoff of Rollerball by way of Mad Max featuring futuristic gladiatorial games
A Hunger Games wannabe with elderly people forced to eliminate one another while inhabiting young avatar bodies inside a virtual simulation. It is a long time since I have encountered a film where the fundamental premise makes no sense whatsoever when you look at it logically
This adapts one of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman novels but the book is sidelined to become an Arnold Schwarzenegger action comic-book on the oft-used theme of a future where people compete in televised gladiatorial games
Edgar Wright conducts a remake of The Running Man and takes it more back to the original Stephen King book than the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film, while adding a level of biting modern commentary
Blackly funny film that predates the advent of reality tv about a tv show where people are licensed to hunt each other
Film where recovering addict Balthazar Getty is dragged into an underworld of vice by mysterious stranger Peter Weller
Killer shark film from The Asylum in a plot where a druglord forces people to fight various sharks – sort of Survivor but with sharks instead of elimination rounds
Thriller where Nikolaj Coster Waldau is the alcoholic manager of a game preserve who becomes drawn in to the search for a serial killer who hunts girls