DEADLY GAMES – So strange to remember that there was a 1989 equivalent of internet creepos. It’s not really important to this film, just an odd little detail. ‘Deadly Games’ is full of those. It’s a genrephobe’s nightmare – how would you even describe it? Festive actioner, seasonal slasher, ‘Home Alone’ clone, Santa-themed coming of age flick? It rams together all of these with merry abandon. It follows tech-obsessed Thomas, who lives out his Rambo fantasies in the chateau he shares with his mum and grandad. Everything is fine until mall-owning mum sacks the resident Santa and thereby inspires him to pay a visit down a certain chimney… and when Santa lets the beard slip, turns out he’s a right arsehole. Summing up ‘Deadly Games’’s uniqueness would require some doing, but essentially it takes the ‘kid with gadget knowledge versus baddie’ template and twists it into a hymn to eighties horror aesthetics. There’s the trap doors, the trip wires, the surprising devices, but also enough filtered lighting and dry ice to fill out a feature length Bonnie Tyler video (more on that later). Even though it’s decidedly light on exploitation – somehow, after all the freaky Santa antics, it remains a family flick about a kid’s touching devotion to his grandfather – there are so many uncomfortable moments, such as the one where Thomas cries on the roof of his castle, convinced he’s about to die alone in the snow. And Patrick Floersheim does something interesting with his ‘evil’ Santa, framing him more as a capering man-child who just wants someone to play with and can’t understand why all the kids have run away. Beneath the stylistic overdrive is the thoughtfulness of a film about the end of illusions, enough to invest the sentimentality the survives to the end with a real sense of unease. And it has a Bonnie Tyler theme tune!
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