Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)
Bimbos in a Planetary Adventure
Easily dismissed because of its deliberately cheesy title, this is a modestly enjoyable relocating of The Most Dangerous Game on another planet
Human Bloodsports
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.
Spare Parts (2020)
Girl Punk Band Become Gladiators with Weapons Attachments
I was sold from the point of reading the premise where an all-girl punk band is abducted, surgically given weapons attachments and forced to fight in an arena
Stake Land II (2016)
Post-Apocalyptic World of Vampires
Stake Land, set in a beautifully wintry post-holocaust world where vampires had taken over, one of the best films from Glass Eye Pix. This is a sequel that reunites most of the same elements from the original but fails to ignite them as memorably as the first film did
Star Hunter (1995)
Alien Sportsman Hunts Human Game
An incredibly cheap ripoff of Predator (and even more so that film’s real source The Most Dangerous Game) relocated to an urban area. Incredibly tatty and dull on all counts
The Starving Games (2013)
The Hunger Games Parody
Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, behind parody films like Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans and Disaster Movie, turn to The Hunger Games. There is all the usual inanity and celebrity mocking of their films, although they do seem to make a film that is only marginally less moronic than usual
Stream (2024)
Livestreamed Murders
Horror film with a substantial cast of genre veterans where Jeffrey Combs imprisons guests in a hotel and livestreams as a group of killers compete to rack up the most creative kill
Surviving the Game (1994)
Human Hunting for Sport
Blatant copy of Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Hard Target and both in turn from The Most Dangerous Game. Here Ice-T is a homeless man forced to flee hunters and survive with his bare hands.
The Swordsman (1992)
Mystical Sword/Action/Reincarnation
Action film starring Lorenzo Lamas as a detective drawn into underground fight clubs while discovering a mystic sword owned by Alexander the Great
Teen Titans Go! vs Teen Titans (2019)
Animation/Comic-Book Superhero Team
Here the less-than-serious Teen Titans Go! conduct an Into the Spider-Verse-type crossover with their serious counterparts from the multiverse
Tekken (2010)
Videogame Adaptation/Combat Tournament
Another videogame adapted film, this has almost entirely been conceived around a series of slick fight sequences and little else
Temmink: The Ultimate Fight (1998)
Future Gladiatorial Combat
Dutch film set in a future where Jack Wouterse is a prisoner who is offered a chance to fight to the death in televised gladitorial combat
The Tenth Victim (1965)
Killing as a Future Sport
Satiric film set in a future where contestants hunt and kill one another on a tv show. The first film on the theme of human bloodsports later popularised by The Hunger Games and others
13 (2010)
Russian Roulette Gambling
The English-language remake of the Georgian 13 Tzameti about underground Russian Roulette gambling. This has an impressive cast line-up but lacks the stark tension of the original
13 Tzameti (2005)
Russian Roulette Gambling
Starkly effective Georgian-made film about a young man in need of money being drawn into an underground gambling ring that bets on games of Russian Roulette
31 (2016)
Human Hunting Survival Game
Rob Zombie featuring people abducted and forced to play in a deathsport game. This is largely a re-run of House of 1000 Corpses, while both films in turn draw heavily on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As always, Rob Zombie has a following but also switches large swathes of his audience off
To Your Last Death (2019)
Animation/Brutal Survival in an Office Building/Alien Game
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
Turkey Shoot (1983)
Future Prison/Human Bloodsports
Ridiculous, splatter-heavy Australian-made film about a prison camp where prisoners are offered their freedom in a run while pursued by armed hunters
Turkey Shoot (2014)
Human Hunting/Near Future Reality TV Show
Remake of the Ozploitation film where the original’s Most Dangerous Game scenario set in a dystopian future is lamely rewritten as a reality tv show and another Hunger Games ripoff. The original was fairly terrible; this has a lack of conviction in most regards that makes it even worse
The 12 Slays of Christmas (2016)
Christmas Horror Anthology
From Troma films, this is an anthology made up of twelve Christmas-themed short horror films for what supposed leading indie directors – so acclaimed I’ve only heard of two of them before
Without Warning (1980)
Alien Sportsman Hunts Human Game
One of the first copies of Alien, this essentially acts as a slasher movie but with an alien instead of a hockey-masked killer. It also manages to predict the essentials of Predator in many ways. A B-movie but the cast list makes for eye-opening reading today
Zombie Fight Club (2014)
Zombie Outbreak
It is mind-boggling to think how you could combine zombies with Fight Club, the classic anti-capitalist manifesto about brawling clubs and split personality … Such an idea proves too challenging for this Taiwanese effort but we do get a solid zombie version of The Raid