There are bad slashers, there are unwatchable slashers, and then there’s Fatal Games—a cinematic deadlift of clichés, dropped unceremoniously onto the skull of anyone unlucky enough to stumble across it. Directed by Michael Elliott (a man whose résumé makes Ed Wood look like Scorsese), this is the kind of movie that thinks the height of menace is a guy in a black tracksuit throwing javelins like he’s late for gym class.
And in the middle of it all, shrieking like a foghorn and overacting like she’s trying to win an Oscar at a dinner theater, is Sally Kirkland.
The Setup: Discount “Chariots of Fire” with Blood
The film drops us into the Falcon Academy of Athletics, which sounds prestigious but looks like a high school gym rented by the hour. The premise? A group of young athletes, juiced up on performance-enhancing drugs courtesy of Dr. Jordine (who sounds less like a physician and more like a discount Bond villain), are being killed one by one by a masked figure.
The killer’s weapon of choice? Not a machete, not an axe—no, that would be too logical. Instead, we get javelins. Nothing says terror like an Olympic event your gym teacher made you try once before deciding it was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Sally Kirkland, Patron Saint of Ham
And then there’s Sally Kirkland as Diane Paine, the assistant turned steroid skeptic, turned deranged murderer with a vendetta. She doesn’t just chew the scenery—she gnaws it, regurgitates it, and chews it again like a cow working through a field of particularly sour grass.
Kirkland delivers her lines with the kind of gusto usually reserved for Shakespearean soliloquies or drunken wedding toasts. Every glare, every shout, every sudden change of pitch is an acting choice that screams, look at me, I’m acting.Subtlety? Never met her. The role calls for menace, but what we get is a camp performance that could have been cross-promoted with Weight Watchers because it’s 100% ham.
A Plot Written in Crayon
The “mystery” of the killer’s identity is so obvious that even the corpses lying in the lockers could figure it out. A masked figure in a tracksuit stabbing gymnasts with javelins? Oh, who could it possibly be? Maybe the bitter ex-athlete assistant coach with a tragic backstory and a voice that dips lower every time the script needs to remind us of her trauma?
The reveal is supposed to be shocking: Diane once dreamed of Olympic glory but lost it all thanks to botched surgery and hormone scandal, so now she’s out to murder young hopefuls. But the movie telegraphs this from mile one, leaving you less shocked and more relieved that someone finally admitted what we already knew.
Athletes in Name Only
The supposed cream of America’s athletic youth—gymnasts, swimmers, track stars—spend most of their time wandering around locker rooms, stretching in leotards, and delivering dialogue with the charisma of mannequins left too close to a heat lamp.
Characters exist solely to be skewered, and not in a clever way. There’s Annie, the “final girl” whose defining trait is that she occasionally looks worried. Phil, her boyfriend, exists purely to provide exposition and hold her hand when the javelins start flying. The rest of the team are meat puppets on a timer, biding their time until they’re impaled and stuffed into lockers like forgotten gym bags.
Kill Sequences: Less Friday the 13th, More School Sports Day
You’d hope that if you’re going to build a slasher around something as bizarre as javelin murder, you’d at least make it stylish. Instead, the kills look like outtakes from an instructional safety video titled Why You Shouldn’t Run with Sharp Objects. Victims gasp, stumble, and collapse as if they were told at the last second, “Oh, by the way, you’re dead now.”
The blood budget was apparently about five bucks, and it shows. Every stabbing produces a polite dribble, like a ketchup packet reluctantly squeezed. For a film trying to compete with the gore-fests of the early ’80s, Fatal Games arrives with the impact of a foam pool noodle.
Direction That Deserves a Red Card
Michael Elliott directs the film with all the flair of a PE teacher half-heartedly supervising dodgeball. The pacing is uneven, the lighting makes everything look like a daytime soap, and the scares land with the impact of a beanbag toss. Scenes drag on like they’re waiting for someone, anyone, to shout “cut.”
And the editing? Imagine a child with safety scissors trying to piece together a puzzle while blindfolded. Cuts don’t so much flow as they crash into each other, leaving you dazed and vaguely nauseous.
Themes? Don’t Get Your Hopes Up
The film gestures at “serious issues”: steroids, ethics in sports medicine, gender identity. Then it trips over itself, drools on the carpet, and forgets what it was trying to say. Instead of exploring these themes, it opts for cartoon villainy and cheap sensationalism.
Diane’s motive is treated less like a tragedy and more like a punchline. It’s exploitative without being thought-provoking, offensive without being bold, the kind of “commentary” you expect from a drunk guy yelling at the TV during the Olympics.
So Bad It’s… Just Bad
Some slashers find salvation in camp value—watching them becomes fun because of how shamelessly dumb they are. Fatal Games can’t even manage that. It’s not outrageous enough to be entertaining, not competent enough to be respectable, and not self-aware enough to be funny. It just squats there on the screen, sucking 90 minutes out of your life and leaving you wishing a javelin would put you out of your misery.
The Final Throw
In the pantheon of ’80s slashers, Fatal Games doesn’t deserve a footnote—it deserves detention. It’s a film that took the Olympic torch of slasher cinema and used it to set its own shoelaces on fire.
Sally Kirkland, bless her lungs, gives a performance that could wake the dead but only serves to remind us how thin the material is. If overacting were an Olympic event, she’d take the gold, the silver, and the bronze simultaneously, then hurl the medals at the audience for not clapping hard enough.
But as it stands, Fatal Games is less an Olympic nightmare than a cinematic participation trophy: technically, yes, it exists, but no one’s putting it on display.
Final Word: If you ever find yourself cornered with a copy of this film, do what the athletes didn’t—run like hell.
