Ha ha, strike 3, it’s Burl, here to review a curious movie
that’s about a maniac murderer whose crimes are tied in with the fortunes of
the Houston Astros baseball team! Yes, the picture is called Night Game, and it
features none other than Roy “Sorcerer”
Scheider as the leathery Galveston cop / baseball fan who’s on the trail of the
burly, remorseless killer!
The air of oddballness begins with Scheider, who is getting
ready to marry a lady half his age (a pixie-cut Karen Young from Heat), whose mother he used to date in
high school! So that creates a few conflicts, especially one involving a TV set
that doesn’t get Channel 8! Then you’ve got the strange effect these murders have
on the community: they seem to encourage rather than prevent the town’s young
blonde women – the killer’s established and well-publicized preference of
victim – to go out walking at night in desolate areas! Ha ha, one victim in
particular is so silly in her every reaction that when she steps on a nail and
is subsequently hook-slashed to death, one feels mainly a sense of relief that
such a character will be seen no more!
There’s an awful lot of departmental politics on hand, too!
Ha ha, there’s the grumpy chief who perpetually has a headache; he’s played by
Richard Bradford from The Mean Season,
a picture this one somewhat resembles! Then there’s a mean jerk played by a
master of the form, Paul “Die Hard”
Gleason; his filmography being what it is, he wouldn’t have to do a thing to
persuade you of his obnoxiousness, but instead he seems to give double the
effort! Ha ha, you want to see him catch a punching, and he does!
Frankly the picture sports too many subplots and, as a
result, many more characters than any ninety-five minute thriller should have!
The killer, who turns out to be a hook-handed ex-ballplayer driven mad by his
own misfortune – though why he acts out his madness in just this way is left a
mystery – is a bulky sad-sack played by Rex Linn from Drop Zone, and is unmemorable enough that even the other characters
seem to forget about him for great stretches of the picture!
But ha ha, I hear you say, what about the suspense scenes?
Given that the picture’s producer, George Litto, worked several times with
Brian De Palma, producing some of that director’s finest thrillers (Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out),
you might expect some special care was taken there! But nope, they’re pretty
rote: flat and none too seat-clutching! The killer’s murder weapon, his hook-hand,
is pointlessly held back as a late-picture surprise (despite being explicitly
part of the Rolling Thunder-style promotional
artwork), so we are even largely deprived of the eccentricity this might have
offered!
The interesting locale, Galveston, is underused, but not
completely wasted! We get some nice looks at the Gulf beaches and piers, and of
course there are many aerial shots of the not-far-away Astrodome! Ha ha! The
baseball stuff seems a little arbitrary, despite the lead character’s obsession
with the sport, and Pino Donaggio’s saxophone-heavy score must rate as one of
his worst! Altogether, along with such pictures as The First Deadly Sin and The Banker, Night Game is a fairly
desultory attempt at a psycho-thriller featuring an unusual weapon, and I give
it one and a half microwave ovens bigger than a large TV set! Ha ha!
