Editorials
Skip the Super Bowl: Sports Movies for Genre Fans
This Sunday, February 4th, people everywhere will be gathered around their television sets, likely in large groups, watching hordes of beastly men duke it out on the gridiron. They will, of course, be watching the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots square off for the NFL supremacy in Super Bowl LII. Super Bowl Sunday, as it’s often referred, is a big deal for people all across the world, even those that aren’t football fans. Many even consider it to be a holiday and why wouldn’t they? All the holiday staples are present during Super Sunday — friends, family and food.
What if you want to get in the Super Bowl spirit but don’t really have any desire to watch the game?
You’re in luck because there are a number of genre films that take place in the midst of a major sporting event and I’ve gathered a list of them for you. The sporting events vary, not all are football related, and in some cases, the sporting event is more in the background and not as heavily featured, but at any rate, it’s a good batch of films.
The only thing left to do now is to call over some friends, order some pizza & wings, and sit back and enjoy.
Two-Minute Warning — 1976 — Dir. Larry Peerce
In the 70’s movie-goers were fortunate enough to experience the golden age of disaster movies. Universal Pictures was at the forefront with movies like Airport and Earthquake. Universal took that same basic concept, gave it to director Larry Peerce and had him create a football thriller with Two-Minute Warning. It’s the day of the big game, Championship X (not to be confused with Super Bowl X happening that same year) between LA and Baltimore. 91,000 people pack the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum unaware that a sniper is perched up inside with a SWAT team trying to capture him.
This is a fun little 70’s thriller featuring a great cast. A young Beau Bridges is especially impressive. Ultimately the film makes some mishaps along the way and fails to do something bigger. Two-Minute Warning reaches the end zone but is forced to settle for a field goal.
Black Sunday — 1977 — Dir. John Frankenheimer
Following on the heels of Two-Minute Warning, Paramount decided to get in on the football mayhem with Black Sunday. A terrorist group attempts to blow up a blimp hovering over the Super Bowl where 80,000 Americans, including the President of the United States, are in attendance.
Paramount brought out all the heavy-hitters for this one. The legendary John Frankenheimer directed, creating arguably his greatest thriller, and the all-star cast was carried by Robert Shaw and Bruce Dern. This film drives from end zone to end zone and pounds it in for six.
Absurd — 1981 — Dir. Joe D’Amato
Absurd is my favorite movie on this list and it’s not particularly close. This Joe D’Amato classic is about a priest hunting down a killer in a small town. The problem is the killer is some sort of mutated freak with blood that quickly coagulates making him nearly impossible to destroy — he’s basically Wolverine.
This movie takes place on the day of Super Bowl XIV between the Los Angeles Rams and the Pittsburgh Steelers. We see clips of the game throughout and multiple characters talk about it. Does it actually factor into the plot? Not really, but that doesn’t matter. This is an Italian movie trying to pass as American. What’s more American than football?
Absurd is awesome and you should watch it. Luckily 88 Films put it out on a gorgeous region B Blu-ray.
Graduation Day — 1981 — Dir. Herb Freed
The first non-football film on the list comes in the form of 1981’s Graduation Day. This is about a masked killer that starts murdering members of a high school track team. It stars Christopher George and Christopher George should be enough to sell anyone. However, if you’re some sort of freak that isn’t excited about seeing Christopher George there’s still plenty of sports-related mayhem here to keep you occupied. After all, this movie does feature a dude getting impaled by a spike attached to a football.
Graduation Day was released a while back on Blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome in the US and 88 Films in the UK. Get one of those and enjoy.
Night Game — 1989 — Dir. Peter Masteron
Roy Scheider returns to the beach but this time instead of tracking down a man-eating shark he’s on the lookout for a serial killer that stalks young women to murder every time Houston Astro ace Silvio Baretto wins a game. Scheider’s character is a minor league ballplayer turned Galveston detective, obviously.
This is a plot most sports fans can relate with. Yes, when our favorite teams lose, we get upset, but when our teams win we go crazy and riot. Our killer just chooses to riot by slicing the throats of innocent women. This is a fairly standard thriller, but the addition of Scheider and the quirky plot make it worth a watch.
Pentathlon — 1994 — Dir. Bruce Malmuth
Pentathlon isn’t the best movie on this list but it may be the most awesome. My President, Dolph Lundgren, stars as an East German Olympic gold medalist that escapes to the US only to be tracked down by a former coach that wants him dead. This movie rules because I bet Dolph actually could have been an Olympian back in his prime if he wanted and he would have won all the medals.
Pentathlon actually doesn’t have as much action as you would think, but it does think outside-the-box and allows Lundgren to deliver on something different than what the audience may expect. Five stars.
Sudden Death — 1995 — Dir. Peter Hyams
Director Peter Hyams and action mega-star, and Dolph’s Vice President, Jean-Claude Van Damme teamed up for the second time when they gave us the awesome Sudden Death. This is basically a remake of Black Sunday but football is switched out with hockey and the Vice President is in attendance rather than the President. And that makes sense because hockey is more a VP sport, right?
Sudden Death was a box office disappointment and received mostly negative reviews at the time of its release. That’s mostly because people are idiots. Time has been much kinder to the film and it is now regarded by many as a Van Damme classic, which it is because Van Damme fights the Pittsburgh Penguins mascot.
The Fan — 1996 — Dir. Tony Scott
The Fan tackles the obsession many sports fans have with their favorite team, albeit to an extreme level. Robert De Niro stars as Gil, a huge San Francisco Giants fanatic. When the Giants acquire star Bobby Rayburn (Wesley Snipes) Gil is thrilled. After Rayburn suffers a chest injury that negatively impacts his play on the field, Gil’s excitement for his team turns into dangerous aggression.
The Fan is a pretty standard Tony Scott film. It hits all the right beats and keeps you entertained for two hours. It may never blow you away, but it does the trick. What would be fascinating is a remake of The Fan set in the modern, social media age when the line between fans and star athletes is more blurred than ever before.
Battlefield Baseball — 2003 — Dir. Yudai Yamaguchi
Japanese director Yudai Yamaguchi has developed a repetition over the years as a filmmaker sure to leave an impression. His brand of goofy gore and offbeat humor may not be for everyone but you’re not likely to forget it anytime soon. Yamaguchi got his start behind the director’s chair in 2003 when he adapted the manga, Battlefield Baseball.
Battlefield Baseball is basically a form of baseball in which one team must kill the other in order to win…I guess. The plot is pretty incoherent as the movie bounces all over the place. That’s perfectly fine, however, because the film delivers plenty of wackiness to make up for the lack of logic. If you’re looking for a party film look no further than Battlefield Baseball.
All Cheerleaders Die — 2013 — Dir. Lucky McKee & Chris Sivertson
Is cheerleading a sport? I think so and I believe many others would agree and that’s why I’m rounding out this list with the delightfully entertaining All Cheerleaders Die. Directors Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson teamed up for this story about a group of cheerleaders that attempt to get revenge on the captain of the high school football team but get caught up in an unexpected supernatural battle.
This movie is pretty great and the world would be a better place if more people watched it. It’s funny, charming and suspenseful. Reminds me a lot of the 90’s horror movies I grew up watching. It’s the perfect Super Bowl post-game show.
Twice a month Joe Lipsett will dissect a new Amityville Horror film to explore how the “franchise” has evolved in increasingly ludicrous directions. This is “The Amityville IP.”
A bizarre recurring issue with the Amityville “franchise” is that the films tend to be needlessly complicated. Back in the day, the first sequels moved away from the original film’s religious-themed haunted house storyline in favor of streamlined, easily digestible concepts such as “haunted lamp” or “haunted mirror.”
As the budgets plummeted and indie filmmakers capitalized on the brand’s notoriety, it seems the wrong lessons were learned. Runtimes have ballooned past the 90-minute mark and the narratives are often saggy and unfocused.
Both issues are clearly on display in Amityville Karen (2022), a film that starts off rough, but promising, and ends with a confused whimper.
The promise is embodied by the tinge of self-awareness in Julie Anne Prescott (The Amityville Harvest)’s screenplay, namely the nods to John Waters’ classic 1994 satire, Serial Mom. In that film, Beverly Sutphin (an iconic Kathleen Turner) is a bored, white suburban woman who punished individuals who didn’t adhere to her rigid definition of social norms. What is “Karen” but a contemporary equivalent?
In director/actor Shawn C. Phillips’ film, Karen (Lauren Francesca) is perpetually outraged. In her introductory scenes, she makes derogatory comments about immigrants, calls a female neighbor a whore, and nearly runs over a family blocking her driveway. She’s a broad, albeit familiar persona; in many ways, she’s less of a character than a caricature (the living embodiment of the name/meme).
These early scenes also establish a fairly straightforward plot. Karen is a code enforcement officer with plans to shut down a local winery she has deemed disgusting. They’re preparing for a big wine tasting event, which Karen plans to ruin, but when she steals a bottle of cursed Amityville wine, it activates her murderous rage and goes on a killing spree.
Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, Amityville Karen spins out of control almost immediately. At nearly every opportunity, Prescott’s screenplay eschews narrative cohesion and simplicity in favour of overly complicated developments and extraneous characters.
Take, for example, the wine tasting event. The film spends an entire day at the winery: first during the day as a band plays, then at a beer tasting (???) that night. Neither of these events are the much touted wine-tasting, however; that is actually a private party happening later at server Troy (James Duval)’s house.
Weirdly though, following Troy’s death, the party’s location is inexplicably moved to Karen’s house for the climax of the film, but the whole event plays like an afterthought and features a litany of characters we have never met before.
This is a recurring issue throughout Amityville Karen, which frequently introduces random characters for a scene or two. Karen is typically absent from these scenes, which makes them feel superfluous and unimportant. When the actress is on screen, the film has an anchor and a narrative drive. The scenes without her, on the other hand, feel bloated and directionless (blame editor Will Collazo Jr., who allows these moments to play out interminably).
Compounding the issue is that the majority of the actors are non-professionals and these scenes play like poorly performed improv. The result is long, dull stretches that features bad actors talking over each other, repeating the same dialogue, and generally doing nothing to advance the narrative or develop the characters.
While Karen is one-note and histrionic throughout the film, at least there’s a game willingness to Francesca’s performance. It feels appropriately campy, though as the film progresses, it becomes less and less clear if Amityville Karen is actually in on the joke.
Like Amityville Cop before it, there are legit moments of self-awareness (the Serial Mom references), but it’s never certain how much of this is intentional. Take, for example, Karen’s glaringly obvious wig: it unconvincingly fails to conceal Francesca’s dark hair in the back, but is that on purpose or is it a technical error?
Ultimately there’s very little to recommend about Amityville Karen. Despite the game performance by its lead and the gentle homages to Serial Mom’s prank call and white shoes after Labor Day jokes, the never-ending improv scenes by non-professional actors, the bloated screenplay, and the jittery direction by Phillips doom the production.
Clocking in at an insufferable 100 minutes, Amityville Karen ranks among the worst of the “franchise,” coming in just above Phillips’ other entry, Amityville Hex.
The Amityville IP Awards go to…
- Favorite Subplot: In the afternoon event, there’s a self-proclaimed “hot boy summer” band consisting of burly, bare-chested men who play instruments that don’t make sound (for real, there’s no audio of their music). There’s also a scheming manager who is skimming money off the top, but that’s not as funny.
- Least Favorite Subplot: For reasons that don’t make any sense, the winery is also hosting a beer tasting which means there are multiple scenes of bartender Alex (Phillips) hoping to bring in women, mistakenly conflating a pint of beer with a “flight,” and goading never before seen characters to chug. One of them describes the beer as such: “It looks like a vampire menstruating in a cup” (it’s a gold-colored IPA for the record, so…no).
- Amityville Connection: The rationale for Karen’s killing spree is attributed to Amityville wine, whose crop was planted on cursed land. This is explained by vino groupie Annie (Jennifer Nangle) to band groupie Bianca (Lilith Stabs). It’s a lot of nonsense, but it is kind of fun when Annie claims to “taste the damnation in every sip.”
- Neverending Story: The film ends with an exhaustive FIVE MINUTE montage of Phillips’ friends posing as reporters in front of terrible green screen discussing the “killer Karen” story. My kingdom for Amityville’s regular reporter Peter Sommers (John R. Walker) to return!
- Best Line 1: Winery owner Dallas (Derek K. Long), describing Karen: “She’s like a walking constipation with a hemorrhoid”
- Best Line 2: Karen, when a half-naked, bleeding woman emerges from her closet: “Is this a dream? This dream is offensive! Stop being naked!”
- Best Line 3: Troy, upset that Karen may cancel the wine tasting at his house: “I sanded that deck for days. You don’t just sand a deck for days and then let someone shit on it!”
- Worst Death: Karen kills a Pool Boy (Dustin Clingan) after pushing his head under water for literally 1 second, then screeches “This is for putting leaves on my plants!”
- Least Clear Death(s): The bodies of a phone salesman and a barista are seen in Karen’s closet and bathroom, though how she killed them are completely unclear
- Best Death: Troy is stabbed in the back of the neck with a bottle opener, which Karen proceeds to crank
- Wannabe Lynch: After drinking the wine, Karen is confronted in her home by Barnaby (Carl Solomon) who makes her sign a crude, hand drawn blood contract and informs her that her belly is “pregnant from the juices of his grapes.” Phillips films Barnaby like a cross between the unhoused man in Mulholland Drive and the Mystery Man in Lost Highway. It’s interesting, even if the character makes absolutely no sense.
- Single Image Summary: At one point, a random man emerges from the shower in a towel and excitedly poops himself. This sequence perfectly encapsulates the experience of watching Amityville Karen.
- Pray for Joe: Many of these folks will be back in Amityville Shark House and Amityville Webcam, so we’re not out of the woods yet…
Next time: let’s hope Christmas comes early with 2022’s Amityville Christmas Vacation. It was the winner of Fangoria’s Best Amityville award, after all!
4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home
‘Ready or Not’: Radio Silence Filmmakers Tease the “Absolute Banger” of a Sequel That’s Taking Shape
Looking for New Episodes of “Chucky” on Peacock? Here’s What Changed
‘Terrifier 3’: Filming Has Wrapped on Damien Leone’s Christmas Slasher Sequel!
‘Halloween: Illustrated’ Review: Original Novelization of John Carpenter’s Classic Gets an Upgrade
You must be logged in to post a comment.