To said audience, the top players of the movie will not connote “grindhouse” at all. They are Seymour Cassel, stalwart character actor and John Cassavetes rep player; Sondra Locke, on the cusp of becoming a long screen (and real life) partner to Clint Eastwood; and Colleen Camp, an actor and producer who memorably portrayed an ill-fated Playboy Playmate in “Apocalypse Now.” But the scenario they act out is pure exploitation. Cassel plays George Manning, a complacent Bay Area bourgeois man, not out to get into any mischief on a weekend his wife and kids are out of the house. But on a dark and stormy night, Jackson (Locke) and Donna (Camp) show up at his suburban doorstep, drenched and claiming to be lost. Like any mensch, he wants to help, so he lets them in, gives them use of the phone and tries to help the rather giddy girls dry out. Remaining giddy, they hit George’s hot tub, and invite him in. A threesome depicted in what seem to be a deliberately annoying series of double and triple exposures plays out. And soon things take a turn, and Donna and Jackson are holding George hostage in his own home.
If the scenario sounds familiar, it’s because Eli Roth adopted it to make “Knock Knock,” a broader and more comedic treatment of the material, in 2015. He even enlisted Camp and Locke as its executive producers. Starring Keanu Reeves, Ana De Armas, and Lorenza Izzo, it winks at the audience a bit more than Traynor’s picture. The original has that vaguely hypocritical aura that distinguished the era’s grindhouse fare—simultaneously lurid but also affecting to be indignant about the conditions yielding the lurid material. And it’s quite relentless, especially as Donna and Jackson abuse George more and more. Not to mention the poor pizza guy.
David Szulkin of Grindhouse Releasing told me he’d been championing the movie “since the mid-80s, when Eli and I went to high school together in Newton, Massachusetts”—which is also, as it happens, where “Death Game” director Traynor hails from. Szulkin kindly answered some questions for me about the movie’s origins, starting by telling me that “the film was a product of the early ’70s tax-shelter laws and was accordingly shelved for years; the original theatrical run consisted of two upstate NY drive-ins and a theater in Fresno.” I asked him to elaborate a bit on that.