Keep the Deadly Games, You Filthy Animal

Over the last decade or so, there have been more than enough articles and video essays on how Home Alone can be interpreted as an extreme horror movie. Whether you see it as a John Jigsaw Kramer origin story or nightmare about adults abandoning children, it has some pretty notable darkness lurking just under the crowd-pleasing exterior. There's a reason it inspired the excellent and twisted pure horror flick Better Watch Out some twenty years after its blockbuster debut.

And yet, just one year before Macaulay Culkin became a household name and millions of kids broke limbs trying to sled down their own stairway, there was an even darker Christmas story about an intrepid little boy enlisting his own gaming skills to protect his mini-mansion from an invader. Long known in the genre film community, Rene Manzor's Deadly Games was one of those hard-to-find legends that now finally has a streaming home on Shudder. In honor of the season, let's roll the getting ready montage and have at it.

Quick Plot: Thomas Fremont lives a charmed life with his wealthy business owner mother, ailing grandfather, and loyal dog (don't get attached). A computer genius who still believes in Santa Claus, Thomas fires up his Minitel to summon the big guy, only to actually engage in dialogue with a psychotic vagrant. Later that day, that same nameless man gets a quick job as a mall Santa, only to be fired for lashing out at a child in front of Tommy's mom.

Bad Santa doesn't take this lightly. When he overhears the Fremonts' address, he makes his way there with blood on his mind. Once Thomas figures out that the white bearded man outside isn't there to give him gifts, he springs into full booby trap-setting action.

That's all you really need to know about Deadly Games, aka Dial Code Santa Claus. Manzor nails a very tricky level of horror that puts our child hero in full harm's way but also gives him plenty to fist pump about. Thomas may be a bit of a spoiled prodigy, but he's also, at the end of the day (in this case, Christmas Eve), just a child. Manzor makes the danger real but never quite mean, which keeps the tone in balance and the energy just right.

I don't know that I'll put Deadly Games on the same seasonal rotation as my beloved Christmas Evil or any Silent Night, Deadly Night (though this is a far superior film to anything in that franchise) but I can fully understand this being a holiday tradition for a lot of genre fans. It's a weird little combination of sweet and naughty, as Christmas should be.

High Points
As Thomas, Alain Lalanne is so perfect at channeling the full gamut of emotions in a kid his age. Bratty, cute, playful, smart, and most importantly, just a little boy who needs his mother

Low Points
It's needed to spur Thomas into action, but by golly, I could have done without the beaten to death dog

Lessons Learned
Once you start doubting Santa Claus, the history of man is next

Nothing moves a plot faster than a need for insulin

Life-sized knight statues are the original panic rooms

Rent/Bury/Buy

I had a good seasonable time with Deadly Games, and will likely add it to the loose list of Christmas-set films that I cycle through every few years. Any genre fan (or Home Alone enthusiast) has no reason not to give it a go. Papa Noel orders it. 

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun...& Maybe Worship the Devil

From glaring gender politics to its tragic record of sexual abuse, there are many reasons a perfectly sane person can posit that the world would have been better off without the ascension of Catholicism. Yet for all the Unborn dybbuks or Baptist Last Exorcisms, has there ever really been a better source of inspiration for horror movies?

Though not a typical genre film, 1971's Don't Deliver Us From Evil is blatantly unsettling and infused with the kind of spirit that can only be found in someone raised with a taste for Communion crackers and rosary beads. You know the type.

Quick Plot: Meet Anne and Lore, two best friends forever who giggle their way through Catholic school making fake confessions to priests and naughty unions with Satan. Both come from well-to-do families but are completely bored by the dullness of their lives and rigidity of their religion. When Anne's parents go on vacation and leave her mostly unsupervised for two months, she and Lore gradually begin to experiment deeper and deeper into their dark nature.

40 years before the teenage girls of Megan Is Missing could flirt with serial killers online, a pair of 15 year olds were stuck with the ho-hum prospects of poisoning a servant's prized pet birds (one at a time, to make each kill more painful) or teasing the dim-witted farmhand with the prospect of statutory rape. Once they hold a DIY black mass using pilfered Eucharists, it's only a matter of time before Anne and Lore cross the point of no return to their innocence.

Directed by Joel Seria, Don't Deliver Us From Evil was inspired by the infamous New Zealand Parker-Hulme murder, the same basis for Peter Jackson's more famous, yet equally unnerving Heavenly Creatures. Both films share an uncanny ability at capturing the thrills and dangers of female friendship at that vital age of need. Anne and Lore are not necessarily bad girls and on their own, they would probably never come close to committing some of their more nefarious acts. But when you put them together, it becomes all too easy for the scandal-seeking Anne to raise hell, especially when the shyer Lore offers nothing but unadulterated support.

With a title like Don't Deliver Us From Evil, you're probably expecting an exploitation-heavy romp into Catholic school girls gone wrong. But Seria's film is far closer in tone to the theater of the absurd from Jean Genet than anything generally found on a Mill Creek pack. This is far less a horror film than a pre-youth-gone-wild tale from a female point of view. Without its shocking climax, flirty title, and sexual freedom, I almost wonder if it would have a far more respectable reputation.

But make no mistake: this is a disturbing film in both its content and execution. Seria riddles his soundtrack with long stretches of angry organ music accompanied by the devilish high pitched giggles of his ill-meaning characters. Anne and Lore are capable of very bad things, more so because they’re too young to understand that they ARE too young. Flashing your buttcheek to the sexually frustrated cowherd might be a game to you, but the sexually frustrated cowherd ain’t playing by your rules.

High Points
The whole of Don't Deliver Us From Evil is quite well-acted, but it's definitely Jeanne Goupil's Anne who takes the show. In her early 20s during filming, Goupil displays a complicated balance of innocence and danger yet never betrays her actual age. Catherine Wagener is also quite good at portraying the quieter Lore, but with her dark features and inner command, it's hard to take your eyes off of Goupil

Holy finale Batman!

Low Points
I suppose one can only watch a girl playfully tease a man only to be shocked by his lechery so many times before it gets a tad old

Lessons Learned
Dim-witted cowherds and easily manipulated servants are not the best babysitters for your wayward teen daughter

You shouldn’t watch people pee

If every man you sexually tease proceeds to try to rape you, perhaps you should stop sexually teasing men

Rent/Bury/Buy
Don't Deliver Us From Evil was released by Mondo Macabre with a nice set of special features, making it more than worth a physical rental and possible buy. This isn't a light-hearted romp in exploitation, but I think its odd tone and undeniable quality lend it to rewatches. This film stuck with me long after I placed it back into its Netflix sleeve, and the more I think about how it created such a unique but sympathetic portrait of these girls, the more eager I am to revisit their tale.

Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Bloggity!

Missed Bastille Day? There’s always alternative ways to celebrate France’s favorite summer holiday, especially when it comes to horror movies.

Prison Breaks

Since the Bastille was primarily used as a high security fortress, it makes perfect sense to kick back with, say, Stuart Gordon’s Fortress. As a bonus, it even stars a pseudo-French Christopher Lambert! Not into early 90s sci-fi horror? Zombies are the universal language for making a stand against society, so why not queue up an internationally friendly undead film set during a prison riot? Of course, I’m speaking of 1987’s John Saxon directed Zombie Death House. It’s the most holiday appropriate viewing since Santa Clause conquered the Martians.

Rich vs. Poor

Without royalty and peasants, there would be no cause for fireworks this 14th. How does horror celebrate the tragic beauty of class division? Generally, with the poor kicking the rich’s ass or better yet, eating them. Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs has a nice ghetto vengeance on oppressive slumlords plot, while George Romero’s still underrated Land of the Dead teaches the wealthy a fine--and final--lesson on oppressing the poor from a glass house. 

I Love a Parade

The French like to honor Bastille Day with a parade and thankfully, so does horror. Scariest parade ever? The coulrophobes among film fans will rightfully cite Killer Klowns From Outer Space, where the full-blown devastation of the titular villain invasion is revealed via ticker tape marching. Alternative watches? I suppose I Know What You Did Last Summer could suffice (especially since it’s so seasonal). Except it doesn’t have cotton candy. And it kind of sucks. 

War...What Is It Good For?

National change, societal fixings, and occasionally, good movies. Sadly I come up empty in identifying official French Revolution-set horror, but its American counterpart The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has a nice flashback colonial touch. Something more current? Choose your battle. Class of 1999 features good old fashioned gang warfare (and psychotic robot teachers, natch). Something more epic? Three films in and those werewolves and vampires still can’t get along in the Underworld series. For a simple wartime setting, there’s always the historical--if still 70 years past the original 1789 anniversary--Dead Birds, an eerie and incredibly well-cast (Michael Shannon, Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, plus more) ghost story set during the American Civil War.

National Pride

Perhaps it’s a resurgence of past mentality (this is the birthplace of the Grand Guignol, after all), but something in the Seine is causing France to produce some of the best--and most brutal--horror films of the decade. High Tension, Martyrs, and Inside are easy recommendations but to best capture the political spirit inherent in July 14th, check out Xavier Gens’ Frontier(s). Part torture porn and part backwoods horror, this 2007 film is set in a near future dystopia where a few petty criminals flee a rioting urban French society (get the connection?). Of course, this gory little slice also features evil Nazis, mutants, and slashed Achilles tendons, If that’s not revolutionary, what is?

It should be noted that I have not one drop of French blood in my veins, so if you have any of your own celebrations, add them in the comments section and wave your flag with pride. If it’s any good, I’ll even let you eat cake.