“I love you, George.”

I never understood the dog in Knock Knock (2015). The French bulldog, Monkey, plays a somehow significant role, but you can’t quite figure out what it is; you’re left assuming something will happen to Monkey, or Monkey will cause the plot to twist at a critical moment.

But that never happens in Knock Knock. Evan introduces Monkey to Genesis and Bel and quickly puts him to bed (because that’s what you do with dogs, of course, you just put them down in their spot in the laundry room and they just stay there for the ensuing hours and hours).

The upshot is that Monkey is apparently witness to none of sex the trio engage in, and none of the violence the women unleash on Evan and Louis, his wife’s unsuspecting assistant who drops by unexpectedly. At Knock Knock‘s conclusion, the women stroll out of Evan’s home, having terrified him but spared him his life, with Monkey in tow.

Now that I’ve seen Death Game (1977), I think I get Monkey. The bulldog is meant to pay homage to the ending of that 1977 film which, in my opinion, was entirely unexpected — and served as both a hilarious and satisfying conclusion. (In fact, I’ll say the ending actually elevated the experience of the entire movie for me; I got one good laugh out of it — and a nod from the producers that seemed to say, “don’t worry — we weren’t about to let that go.”)

You can read deeply into the ending of Death Game — that some situations are morally ambiguous, while others are cut and dried — or accept it as just a cute little twist that you didn’t see coming.

In Death Game the apparently devoted husband and father, George, also has a pet; an unnamed white cat we first see in the film’s opening scene when George and his wife are playing croquet. Unnamed white cat (UWC) is hanging with the couple outside, connected to a piece of patio furniture via a long leash.

(I’ll say I didn’t even know people leashed their cats way back in the mid-1970s; but nowadays, that’s considered something you might do to keep your cat safe from outside hazards while also giving them some playing-in-the-grass time).

George’s wife is called away, and his children are also absent. He’s home alone (with the cat) when two women arrive at his home, soaking wet, looking for the home of the Gregorys; the familiar beats that Knock Knock replicates some 25-odd years later.

As Death Game goes on, the women, Donna and Jackson, invade George’s home much as Bel and Genesis do in Knock Knock. They engage in bathroom sex, which is far more explicit than in Knock Knock (but apparently less explicit than in the 1980 remake of Death Game).

Indeed, there’s a shift in how sex is dealt with between the two films; Donna and Jackson don’t spend a lot of time seducing George with conversation. (Evan is taken aback by their blunt discussion of supposed sexual exploits, while George spies the women’s underwear peeking out under their robes).

Even after the tables are turned on the homeowner, the sexual activity between the women is implied to continue. I assume Death Game is what one might call a sexploitation film, but I don’t know enough about my film history to say for sure.

Donna and Jackson reveal themselves to be aged 15 and 17, after they won’t leave and George threatens to call the police. It’s a claim that, unlike Bel and Genesis in Knock Knock — who eventually tell Evan they’re actually just psychotic grown-ups after all — they never reneg on. The movie ends with the women still “jailbait,” — and at least one (Donna) an abuse victim who, like her Knock Knock counterpart (Bel) has superimposed her abusive father onto George.

The theme that I eventually came to after watching Knock Knock — that it’s about the enduring trauma of child sexual abuse — is harder to see in Death Game. This makes me wonder if it was really there in the original film, or if the theme was played up just enough in Knock Knock to make it more obvious.

Indeed, there’s one major sexual change between the two films closely related to this idea. In Death Game, George catches Bel dressed up in his wife’s nightgown. He protests, of course, but that’s pretty much where it stops.

In Knock Knock, the parallel scenes are significantly more disturbing. Bel, like Donna, talks to Evan while he’s tied up in the bed as if he were her abusive father. While Donna simply details her abuse, Bel takes a shift and screams at Evan/her father, asking him how he could have done that to her. It’s been awhile since I actually watched this scene — I have no desire to rewatch it — so I can’t remember if it’s just prior to this conversation or after that Bel dresses up, not in Evan’s wife’s nightgown, but in Evan’s daughter’s underwear. She threatens/scares him enough to allow her to rape him, while Genesis films with a cell phone.

It’s the next day that, in Knock Knock, the women put Evan on trial for being a pedophile. This is when the theme of the movie becomes pretty obvious. But in Death Game, even though George is on “trial” for the same reason, it’s still hard to view the women as severely traumatized abuse victims instead of plain old psychopaths. In Knock Knock, they are also psychopaths — but you also have a vague sense the movie is still trying to tell you something.

I go back to what I wrote on my post about Knock Knock — compared to movies like Dangeous Liaisons that romanticize child rape, I have to give kudos to Knock Knock for saying, in starkly dramatic terms, there is nothing romantic, or even permissible, about this.

But let’s get back to the cat.

Donna and Jackson question each other, and George, in the process of his “trial.” As they do so, they’re stroking the cat, who, unlike Monkey, has not been shielded from the events by being stuck in the laundry room for (at least) the evening. They hold the cat, pass him around.

Then, in one apparently swift and spontaneous move, Donna does something bad to the cat. It is violent and I won’t describe it here. But if you’ve ever loved a pet, you’ll hate it — and you’ll lose all sympathy for these women, if the psychological and physical violence against George hadn’t already done that.

Donna and Jackson, like Bel and Genesis, leave Evan alive after making him believe he’s about to lose his life. They saunter out of his home, which like in Knock Knock is absolutely destroyed, but lacking in the graffiti that continues the abuse theme.

In Knock Knock Bel and Genesis simply walk away, carrying Monkey with them. In Death Game, Donna and Jackson also walk casually down the street, cheerful and oblivious, when out of nowhere, a large truck with the label “SPCA” strikes them down. Roll credits.

In the muddle of messages about sexual infidelity and abuse and hypocrisy and violence and who has the moral high ground, the makers of Death Game ultimately said, “if you hurt an animal, karma will get you, in the form of a speeding SPCA truck.”

Of course, that’s my interpretation — and I’m sticking to it. According to Wikipedia there were several other possible endings for Death Game, but I think they chose the best one.

[*]

Other notes on Death Game:

I am still left with one big question after watching both films: what’s up with the food? According to Wiki some of the food elements are remnants of lost footage of the delivery guy that wasn’t ultimately used in Death Game. But that still doesn’t explain the rabid, almost feral eating behavior, which was replicated with prescision in Knock Knock. In the later film, the disasterous kitchen and erratic behavior in the breakfast scene — somewhere between food fight and serious lack of table manners — is the first overt evidence the women aren’t what they seem, and might be dangerous. In the earlier movie, it’s strange, and barely seems to have even a sexual implication. You can overthink this one too, by saying it’s supposed to flip the narrative on the usual way food is used as a sensual device in film. There’s some support for that idea; at one point Jackson uses a banana to hint at sexual desire.

Death Game has a long and interesting production history, which kind of makes you wonder what was going on in the movie business in 1977. Clint Eastwood was once attached to direct and one of his collaborators, Jo Helms, worked on a version of the script. Sondra Locke, once romantically involved with Eastwood, took part in this film a few years after securing an Oscar nomination for her film debut. Colleen Camp, who is hilarious in Knock Knock — in my opinion, the only real comedy in that film is Camp’s cameo as Evan’s massage therapist who drops by for a prescheduled appointment (ok, there’s also Evan talking about his chance to tour as a DJ in the tri-state area, and Louis yelling at Bel and Genesis that he’s from Oakland) — made Death Game as one of her first roles. Sissy Spacek and Bill Paxton also had production roles on this very strange little film.

Which makes one think that it isn’t really a “little” film; it’s one of those oddities that somehow meandered around figures in the industry and eventually made it to production and release. A classic, maybe, maybe not. But fun to think about, if you have an interest in how tough issues like putting a bulldog to bed in a laundry room, drinking buttermilk straight from the container, and just-how-many-people-can-reasonably-fit-into-one-home-jacuzzi play on screen.

May 2024