Review #300: The Cold/The Game (1984)

October 2024 Horror Origins Review #17- The Cold/The Game (1984)

Watch it here on Amazon Freevee! (You'll need an Amazon account but the movie is free to watch with ads.)

I first watched The Cold about fifteen years ago, after receiving a DVD boxed set of "50 Chilling Classics" - low-budget horror films mostly from the 70s and 80s. The description sounded interesting- a group of people are invited to a secluded mansion by three eccentric billionaires to take part in a mysterious game, and each contestant must face their wildest fears for the chance at winning a million dollars. Sounds cool, right? (It's been done, of course- House on Haunted Hill had the exact same premise almost thirty years earlier- but hey, nothing wrong with reusing a good plot like that.) The problem is that this movie looks bad, sounds bad, and most importantly, doesn't make a lick of sense.

So, nine people are brought to this resort on an island to take part in this game. They're told that if they can survive all of the scares that the three hosts have planned for them, the last remaining survivor will win a million dollars. But the "scares" are... um, stupid. Very stupid. One person gets a tarantula put into their soup bowl, another person has a skeleton puppet pop out of their closet, a guy and a girl get locked in a sauna for a couple minutes, and a whole lot of cold air and dry ice fog gets blown around the building- that's really the extent of the "scares" that people have to endure as contestants. But the real issue is that periodically, the hosts will just abduct someone and then declare that they'd lost the game (usually following that up with some sort of a trick to make them look dead so the other players think they've been murdered). If the hosts of the game can just decide that you've lost, then is this really a game at all?

There's also a ton of stuff going on in this movie, mostly in the second half, that just makes it all completely nonsensical- to the point where I am pretty sure that either this movie is made up of cobbled-together footage from multiple unrelated movies, or it was all one movie but they were literally making it up as they went along, shooting scenes whenever an idea popped into the director's head and then later deciding which scenes (if any) were going to go in the movie without much regard for continuity or story. Examples:

1. One scene shows the hosts sneaking a snake into the pool, presumably to attack the next person who goes swimming. After this we see a contestant sleeping, but then a transparent image of her (like how a movie would portray a ghost or an astral projection or something) gets up out of bed and walks down the hall (still ghost-like). Then in the next shot she's in the pool room, no longer ghost-like, but wearing a bathing suit. She goes swimming, the lights go out, and the snake seems to get her. We then immediately cut back to her asleep in bed. Was it a dream? If so, why show the snake being put into the pool (before she was asleep)? And if it wasn't a dream, what the crap was it?

2. There's multiple scenes involving a weird hunchback guy lurking around the resort (sometimes in the background while other characters are in a scene, but mostly off on his own when no other characters are present) and then at the end of the movie it's revealed that he's an actor hired by the hosts to play a role (nevermind the fact that, before the ending, none of the characters ever interacted with him at all, so he was in character the entire time performing for nobody). So why have him play a role nobody will see?

3. Similarly, there's a point halfway through the film where the hosts do their trick of declaring someone has lost the game and then tying her up and pretending to play Russian Roulette with her; but then after leaving her room the hosts are shocked to find out that she actually did get shot by an unknown murderer, so they theorize amongst themselves that one of the contestants is putting on a deadly game of their own to implicate the hosts. Except then it's revealed that this was all part of the host's plan, so why were the three of them talking about it being a counter-game when they were by themselves? Again, who were they performing for if the only people present all knew that it was a scripted part of their own plan?

4. At the end of the movie it's revealed that nobody has actually been killed, everything was all part of the game and all of the "dead" contestants are sitting pretty in a hotel with a fifty-grand consolation prize. So the survivors leave the resort, and after they've left, the three hosts are sitting around laughing about the game when suddenly white fog starts drifting into the room. The hosts freak out, run away from the fog, keep running away from the fog, eventually reaching a dead end where they see the fog is accompanied by some kind of floating ghost thing that freezes them all to death. We then see the survivors arriving at the hotel, but they are informed that nobody else is there- the "dead" contestants never arrived. So are they actually dead after all? Were the hosts lying, and have now been killed by some kind of supernatural force? I don't know, but we then get a shot of the three frozen dead hosts- who begin moving, apparently NOT dead after all, and laugh once again (remember, there is nobody present to see any of this happen, just us the movie viewer). We then get an ending narration where the narrator admits the story is confusing, cut to credits.

When we watched this the first time I really thought I just hadn't paid enough attention, but this time around I had my eyes glued to the screen and it still didn't make sense. Numerous times characters referenced events that either didn't happen, or were being described so poorly as to not resemble the actual events of the film. Numerous times a character's fate was left completely ambiguous because they just walked offscreen and then were never seen again. The few characters that got enough screentime to do anything noteworthy were interesting enough, I guess, but the movie as a whole just looked and sounded so bad it was hard to follow and even harder to care. This film came out in 1984 but I would have easily believed it came out over a decade earlier, because of how poorly it aged (and likely how bad its budget was even at the time).

I really wanted to like this film, especially the second time around, but unfortunately I just couldn't. Feel free to watch it if you want to try and decipher whatever puzzle the director was making but if you want a fun experience, maybe pass on this one.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Towels in the Sauna

Nostalgic Rating: 3/10 Xenomorph Mattresses

Additional Viewing: Apparently, director Bill Rebane also made a movie called Blood Harvest, featuring the musician Tiny Tim as a murderous clown! My wife owns a piece of the suit Tiny Tim was wearing when he died so I think we will need to revisit Bill Rebane's other works in the future.