Imagine, if you will, a man who speaks like Helen Keller right after she learned to pronounce “water.” Then, imagine that man playing arpeggio loops on a Casio and shouting the following at the top of his lungs:
Mortal Challenge!
Face to face!
Fight with style!
Sing with grace!
If you’ve imagined it correctly, you’ve just heard the Mortal Kombat-inspired (AKA “ripped-off”) theme song to the movie Death Game (AKA “Mortal Challenge”).
Shamelessky designed to kash in on 1995 kult klassic Mortal Kombat, it also evokes Escape From New York/L.A., borrows from Blade Runner, and mimics The Running Man.
In the future, L.A. is plagued with gang violence and earthquakes, so the rich move offshore to a man-made island and happily go about their decadent lives.
Kids are disappearing from all over the ruins of Old L.A., but nobody gives a crap until a rich kid goes missing. Because the cops are overloaded, a wealthy family hires a private dick to find her. Timothy Bottoms detective is styled after Blade Runner’s Deckard character, at least for the first 10 minutes of the film; dressing like a ’30s gumshoe and driving around Old L.A. while moody sax music plays.
TB approaches a group of street kids to pump them for info when suddenly a bunch of “Centurions” attack and abduct most of them. TB teams up with a kid who looks like he is from O-Town
The Socias decide the fate of arena combatants with the old thumbs up/thumbs down, pay to get it on with the gladiators, and spend so much time watching street urchins get impaled you wonder when they have time to go to the university back in New L.A. Seeing some paralells to historical time periods? Hmmm?
Oh yeah, and their college professor (god knows of what) is the ringleader of the arena for some reason. He prattles on about how the games distract people from real problems, just in case you need some sort of moral framework to wrap around the film. But at the end of the day, all that really matters is: do asses get kicked and boobs get shown? They sure do.
TB actually has a couple of decent fight scenes and O-Town gets electrocuted in a takes a lickin’ but keeps on tickin’ sequence. But it isn’t all fun and games. There’s pathos, too.
Like when the arena master tells one of his creations something along the lines of “You were a broken shell when I found you… now you’re a shining thing of beauty!”
To which the borg replies, “You… call… this… beauty?!” and he removes his Geordie goggles to reveal a mangled eye socket and nasty scar. I won’t tell you what happens next, but let’s just say it was more of a rheorical question.
Probably the most amazing thing about this Roger Corman-produced film is that is was made in 1996. You’d swear it’s circa 1986 and I expected an impromptu cyborgs-in-spandex dance sequence to break out.
And at no time did anyone “Sing with grace.”