The 1977 erotic thriller Death Game follows George Manning (Seymour Cassel), a happily married father who finds himself alone in his home on his 40th birthday. And even though opening his front door to two damsels in distress whose car broke down in the pouring rain seemed like a good idea at the time, that simple act of human decency set in motion a series of events that George could have never predicted. Chaos ensues and all hell breaks loose in Peter S. Traynor’s directorial debut that opens with a text alleging that the movie was based on true events. Traynor, a former California real-estate investor became a movie producer during the 70s and bought the script for Death Game from its screenwriter Jo Heims (a frequent collaborator of Clint Eastwood). He then commissioned a re-write of the screenplay, which was done by Michael Ronald Ross and Anthony Overman.
The film was shot in a fortnight in a huge Los Angeles house, but the production process was anything but smooth. Actress Sondra Locke claimed that she and her co-star Colleen Camp basically had to direct themselves and Seymour Cassel often threatened to abandon the project due to constant disputes with the director. Although he ended up staying, the actor declined to record his character’s lines, so the film’s cinematographer David Worth dubbed the dialogue in Cassel’s stead. Manuel Esteba’s 1980 film Viciosas al Desnudo (Vicious and Nude) and Eli Roth’s Knock Knock (2015) are both remakes of Traynor’s polarizing but intriguing exploitation flick.
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