Game of Death (2017): a head-exploding horror comedy that plays its gimmick straight

A board game with one rule — kill or get your skull blown apart — and seven friends who underestimate it. Sebastien Landry and Laurence Morais-Lagace squeeze a single B-movie premise dry without ever cracking the tone.

Game of Death is a 2017 Canadian horror comedy directed by Sebastien Landry and Laurence Morais-Lagace, with Sam Earle and Victoria Diamond leading a small ensemble. It premiered at Fantasia in Montreal and travelled the festival circuit through SXSW and FrightFest before settling into the cult-cabinet drawer that splatter films tend to end up in. Eighty minutes long, English-language, low-budget by any honest measure, and entirely committed to one premise.

Seven millennials are hanging out in a half-empty town when they pull a vintage board game off a shelf. The rules are printed on the box: kill twenty-four people, or the game starts killing you. They laugh. They roll the dice. Heads count down. Heads explode. The friends then have to decide whether to keep playing — meaning to keep killing — or to watch each other detonate in turn.

Landry and Morais-Lagace treat that premise like a math problem. Most of the kills are staged in handheld single takes, broken up by a hand-drawn animated interlude when the film needs a pulse change, and held together by one synth riff played hard enough to function as a second antagonist. There is no twist about who is responsible for the game. There is no mythology behind the board. The board is the board.

What the film actually does well is keep its tone level. A horror comedy that runs on peer pressure could easily slide into wink-and-gore mode, and Game of Death never quite does. The practical effects are ugly and brief, and the camera does not linger on them for trophy value. The jokes come from how the characters refuse to say out loud what they are doing.

Sam Earle and Victoria Diamond carry most of the dialogue and they let the silences sit. Diamond in particular plays the friend who works out what is happening before the others and decides to stay anyway, which is a small acting choice the film leans on more than it admits.

Eight years on, Game of Death is still what it was at Fantasia 2017: an eighty-minute provocation that does not want a sequel, a moral, or a soundtrack album. A small horror comedy made by two directors who knew exactly which corners to cut and which corner to commit to. Watch it once with the volume up.

Tags: horror comedy, Laurence Morais-Lagace, Sam Earle, Sebastien Landry, Victoria Diamond