Surviving the Game (1994)

Jack Mason (Ice-T) has hit rock bottom. He is homeless, and making his life even more difficult by torturing himself for something pretty damn traumatic that happened in his past. When his only friend, an elderly white guy, dies, Jack gives up completely and tries to kill himself by walking into traffic. He’s rescued – or at least dissuaded – by Walter Cole (Charles S. Dutton) who works at the local food bank and thinks Jack is just the right man to work for him and his partner as a wilderness guide, even though the only external wilderness Jack knows is on the streets (or probably the Streets).

Alas, once Jack has gone through a curious encounter/job interview with Walter’s partner Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer in his best creep mode), and he ends up with Thomas, Walter and a group of clients in the wilderness, things turn out to be less empowering for our hero than he thought. In fact, Jack isn’t there to help some rich idiots hunt, but rather to be the human prey of former CIA men and assorted perverts – the most dangerous game, you know the drill. Co-hunting Jack are psychiatrist Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey in a short, surprisingly nuanced and creepy performance), cowboy John Griffin (John C. McGinley), and rich people supremacist Wolfe (F. Murray Abraham) who has brought his son Derek (William McNamara) to make him a real man by making him complicit in sadistic murder. Turns out this amount of injustice and cruelty is just the therapy Jack needed, and soon, he’s rather effectively striking back at his tormentors.

Among the group of rappers gone genre actors, for my taste Ice-T has always been the best one, probably because he usually makes efforts to act his characters instead of exclusively performing his standard persona. So it is no surprise that Ice-T in a film directed by undervalued (most probably because he’s black, if we’re being honest) Ernest R. Dickerson makes a rather fine action hero; and he is the more interesting kind of US action hero to boot – the one with troubles, who isn’t a perfect killing machine. In fact, the film makes rather a point out of our hero not being a killer by nature or inclination but a guy who defends himself with as much force as necessary and who is even willing to give the worst people imaginable a choice and a chance to walk away. Which is certainly more than they did for him.

Another obvious point in Surviving the Game’s favour is its cast of a host of great character actors, all with copious experience at being entertaining Bad People. They all can chew as much scenery as is needed but also don’t chew more than they should this time around. Not that the characters are exactly subtle, mind you: each and every one of them does after all represent something that is very wrong with (white, powerful) America and its structures turned up to eleven. Still, Dickerson treats these crazy freaks at times much more seriously than you’d expect, giving even the worst of them some depth beyond their inherent horribleness. Which doesn’t make them better people or people we as an audience don’t want to see killed or maimed (preferably both) by Ice-T, but sure turns them into much more interesting action movie villains. Obviously this also gives the film’s political arguments about the intersections of race and class in the USA further heft.

Mind you, this is not first and foremost a deep analysis of US society but a great (perhaps the greatest, depending on the day you ask me) action movie version of The Most Dangerous Game that just doesn’t see why it shouldn’t also consciously comment on the world around it; its makers are after all living in it and had to live through part of it.


As US style action director, Dickerson here is as fine as they come, delivering many a tense scene, a handful of pleasantly absurd ones, and nary a moment after the very effective set-up that isn’t exciting. He also really knows how to get the best out of his actors – which isn’t always typical of directors good at action – by leaving them space to work. There’s an incredible monologue by Busey’s character about his fucked up childhood in the film’s big dinner scene that alone would be worth the price of admission but in this film it’s just one of many great scenes, some of them delightfully and cleverly cheesy, some just clever.

Bones (2001)

A group of friends and relations more or less led by one Patrick (Khalil Kain) – and counting a character played by Katherine Isabelle among their numbers - has bought up a rather frightening looking old house deep in the worst part of their city to turn it into a club that is supposed to get their DJ careers rolling. From Patrick’s side, there also seems to be a tiny hope that this operation just might revive the neighbourhood a little.

Well, a revival is going to take place, but it’s not the neighbourhood that’s rising from the grave. In the 70s, the building where the kids are planning to start their club in was the home of Jimmy Bones (Snoop Dogg) the sort of socially responsible black gangster the neighbourhood is clearly missing now. As we will learn in a series of flashbacks, Jimmy Bones was killed right in the building too when he didn’t go along with plans to supply his turf with hard drugs. Yes, Snoop Dogg’s against drugs in this one. To make matters worse, the kids are the children of one of the people responsible for Bones’s death.

There are various attempts by locals – among them Jimmy Bones’s former girlfriend turned professional clairvoyant Pearl (the great Pam Grier) – to warn the kids off, but it is of course only a question of time and deaths until Jimmy Bones returns to take his vengeance. At least Patrick has time to romance Pearl’s daughter Cynthia (Bianca Lawson) in the meantime.

This is the somewhat infamous attempt by New Line Cinema and Snoop Dogg to turn the rapper into a new Freddy Krueger – one assumes with one eye on the underserved market of black horror viewers and the other on fans of Snoop. The film has a pretty horrible reputation among a lot of horror fans, and I certainly didn’t remember it with fondness going in. However, this is by far not as bad a film as I thought it was. As a matter of fact, the first hour of it or so is definitely one of the better examples of late 90s/early 00s effects-based horror. It is certainly better than most Nightmare on Elm Street films, as dubious as that particular compliment is once you’ve started in on film number four and what follows there.

The film’s not so secret main weapon is director Ernest Dickerson, a man who really deserves better than Hollywood does him. In the film’s earlier stages, he manages to achieve something this kind of horror film very seldom even shows interest in: turn the disposable meat characters it laughingly calls its protagonists likeable enough you don’t exactly want to see them die. Sure, these guys and girls are not portrayed with much psychological depth, but they are more than just walking, talking slasher tropes – and not just because your generic slasher hardly ever contains more than one black character. Which makes them much more interesting to watch than usual in this sort of film, but also becomes a bit of a problem once Bones is actually revived, because then they turn into disposable victims of the usual quipping supernatural slasher of this era, something the film can’t milk for emotional resonance as it is meant as a franchise starter for its killer more than as an actual story.

For the first hour or so, Bones actually tries to be a more interesting horror film than it turns out to be, using elements of urban myth that feel like actual folklore (the black dog that needs to eat to feed Bones’s revival is a particularly fine choice), featuring some visually very imaginative scenes that build up the supernatural threat and tell the backstory. The flashbacks are well realized too, Dickerson using audience knowledge of blaxploitation films and how they looked and feel to position them not in the real 70s but an idealized version that contrasts the grim now. On paper, they’ll also give Jimmy Bones an excellent motivation to take vengeance on the people who caused this destruction but once he’s starting to let maggots rain on people who have fuck all to do with any of this, motivation is going right out of the window.

That hints at the true problem of the film’s final thirty minutes or so. While they do contain a handful of decent kills and a visually very nice stint in the spirit world, they also see Jimmy Bones the spirit of vengeance turn into Jimmy Bones the franchiseable killer of whomever, complete with the random un-thematic supernatural powers that didn’t work for the later Nightmare on Elm Street films either. The finale just seems random, containing scenes that could have come from every other horror film of its style and time; a particular shame in a film that up to that point really did make the most out of specificity. That part of the film also suffers from Snoop’s limited range, to be frank. While he’s certainly effective as the soft-spoken and kind-hearted gangster of the flashbacks, he never convinces as an evil (or even just angry) supernatural force. He’s just to damn chill for an exciting villain.


All that is a bit of a shame, too, for the film’s first hour would have deserved a much more interesting finale as well as a much more interesting supernatural killer.