An all-female softball team, Babe and the Ballgirls, travels to a backwoods town, where they thoroughly defeat a rival team of beer-guzzling males, despite the fact that they are repeatedly objectified and even groped by the men during the game. Unsurprisingly, the men are sore losers, are unhappy about being upstaged by their female counterparts, and are eager to exact revenge by violently terrorizing and assaulting the women. After a series of harrowing events in the small town, our resilient heroines find themselves stranded in the wilderness, where they are pursued by the armed male villains across unforgiving terrain.
The fast-paced 1990 feature,
Blood Games, which was helmed by female director Tanya Rosenberg and earned a cult following in VHS rental stores after a small-scale theatrical release, combines the slasher exploitation aesthetic of films like
Slumber Party Massacre, the wilderness survival aspects of
Deliverance and
First Blood, and the rape revenge intensity of screen stories like
I Spit on Your Grave. Ken Carpenter (
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth,
Tammy and the T-Rex) is the most recognizable face here to B movie fans, but Laura Albert, a stunt performer who has worked on popular films like
Mr. and Mrs. Smith and
The Town, commands the most attention as the team leader who ends up leading her fellow players through the woods during “the most dangerous game.”
Blood Games, with its scenes of women hunted by Carpenter's antagonist, who roams the forest with a crossbow, and his cohorts, its depictions of self-defense by way of baseball bats, and a nifty final death scene that reminds this reviewer of the demise of the Emperor in
Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, will never be mistaken for family friendly fare. At its core, however, it emerges quite successfully as a heartwarming reminder that true friends who stand up for one another and stick together during tough times can accomplish anything.
On an amusing note, the sheer level of hillbilly incompetence displayed by the male tormenters in this movie boggles the mind. The men cannot play softball, they cannot hunt, they cannot fight, and they cannot survive forest terrain. I am in awe of how these characters survived to middle age in a rural environment, but, if drinking beer, chewing tobacco, and leering at the opposite sex are essential to thriving in this fictional world, then I suppose that they have their bases covered. At any rate, I wanted to cheer out loud whenever one of them met the receiving end of a swift kick or a baseball bat to the head courtesy of the female heroes.
This Vinegar Syndrome hits multiple home runs in all departments without injury or defeat. The video and audio both hit high marks, as do the interviews with Albert and Carpenter. I encourage everyone to order this one from VS at their earliest convenience, but be sure to pay full price without short-changing like Carpenter's nefarious sore loser does in the film.
All countries
Argentina
Austria
Belgium
Brazil
Bulgaria
Chile
China
Colombia
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Estonia
Denmark
Finland
Greece
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Ireland
Israel
India
Latvia
Lithuania
Malaysia
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
Russia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Thailand
Turkey
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
Blood Games (1990) coming from Vinegar Syndrome
Linear Mode
