Death Game (also known as The Seducers) is a 1977 American psychological thriller film directed by Peter S. Traynor, and starring Sondra Locke, Seymour Cassel, and Colleen Camp.
Production was allegedly plagued with on-set disputes among the first-time director and the cast, and eventually halted due to a federal investigation into Traynor's financing methods.
Death Game made unremarkable box office returns during its limited theatrical run, but found a greater audience with its home media releases in the years that followed.
In October 1975, George Manning, a successful San Francisco Bay Area businessman, is left home alone on his 40th birthday while his wife Karen tends to a family emergency.
He stops when Jackson claims that the two are underage, and if caught he could face charges of statutory rape, a lengthy prison sentence, and the dissolution of his family life and career.
George drops the two off at a city bus stop on the opposite side of the Golden Gate Bridge and makes the trip home that night, glad the ordeal is seemingly over.
The duo ties George up with bedsheets and subject him to physical and emotional abuse while continuing to trash the inside of the house, and painting their faces with his wife's makeup.
After George cries for help to a grocery delivery man, the girls usher the unfortunate courier into the living room, bludgeon him, and drown him in a fish tank.
Literary critic John Kenneth Muir found an underlying feminist theme in Death Game stemming from its depiction of male infidelity and suggested immoral father-daughter relations.
Muir explained that the film's narrative consistently points to this motif, including the opening sequence featuring the song "Good Old Dad," the female leads constantly calling George "daddy," and Jackson admitting to being a victim of child sexual abuse at the hands of her father.
He further elaborated that the pair dish out a twisted form of justice against the average family man George, who is not only being punished for his own deeds, but is also serving as a surrogate for the society that made them that way.
After initially collaborating on a script dealing with a kidnapping at a girls' school, Ross proposed that they write a psychological thriller in the vein of Roman Polanski's Repulsion during Overman's final two weeks at Capitol before being laid off.
The primary inspiration for the story was an incident Ross had experienced in 1969, when he brought a hitchhiking hippie named Donna to the Laurel Canyon home that he was subleasing for Harry Nilsson, where she gradually outstayed her welcome, left candle wax everywhere, called all sorts of strange people, and burned "every" spoon in the household for the purpose of cooking drugs.
[7] After Devlin and Albert S. Ruddy passed on the project to work on The Fortune and The Godfather respectively, Mrs. Manning's Weekend was optioned in 1972 by Bill Duffy, the husband of screenwriter Jo Heims.
Pryor was interested, and so was Fred Williamson, but Duffy instead sold the option at the last minute to Centuar Films, led by Peter S. Traynor, a California real-estate magnate and former life insurance salesman who had entered the motion picture industry as a producer only a few years earlier.
[13][14] As with Traynor's real-estate developments, Death Game and his two previous movies, Steel Arena and Truck Stop Women, were funded largely using limited partnerships with California physicians as investors.
[18][19][20] Actor Al Lettieri was originally set to play George Manning but he demanded a few thousand dollars for living expenses from Traynor and then left the production.
[21][22] David Worth, the editor-cinematographer hired after the first one was allegedly fired for trying to boss Traynor around, claimed the scene where Donna and Jackson sexually excited each other while playing with food was not actually shot that way.
Director Peter S. Traynor said he wanted an erotic scene between the women, and Worth went to the unused and now-lost footage of when comedian Marty Allen was playing a delivery man.
They had their original script, so they won the dispute, but Ross claims he never saw the movie until he was doing liner notes for VHS tapes in the early 80s and came upon the video version retitled The Seducers.
Though initially reluctant due to the seemingly chaotic production, Worth took the job after learning that the cast included Locke and Cassel, both of whom had been nominated for an Academy Award for previous works.
[1][34] Due to a limited budget and tight schedule, Worth found it more effective to simply sit down in a nearby chair to shoot close-ups of the actors rather than arduously set up a tripod each time.
[5] Thanks to the financial aid from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and distribution handling by Levitt-Pickman, Death Game was considered by Traynor as "a safe bet for drive-ins and as an urban cult attraction".
Delisle labeled Death Game as an "antithesis of much of the rest of today's cinematic gore", noting that the film strives to depict pain that is personal rather than physical.
Delisle stated that even with several plot holes, the film is "engrossing" and "extremely well-made" despite its modest budget, and that all three lead actors present "splendidly vivid and realistic portrayals" of their characters.
[5] Muir echoed this, proclaiming Death Game as "a riveting, sexual psycho-thriller, and well-directed and acted", finding it to have "the same discomforting adrenaline surge one feels in The Last House on the Left or Fatal Attraction".
[17] Rich Osmond of Cashiers du Cinemart stated that although he found much of the narrative "laughable and inept," he credited the lead actresses for conveying "genuinely creepy" moments in the film's second half.
Critic Leonard Maltin denounced the plot entirely, calling it as an "unpleasant (and ultimately ludicrous) film about two maniac lesbians who—for no apparent reason—tease, titillate, and torture a man in his own house.
"[41] Variety similarly dismissed it as "another grisly try at horror exploitation and, as such, looms as possibly a fast-turn-over item in a situation afflicted with the severest case of product shortage.