Night Games movie review & film summary (1980)

One thing's for sure: Potential like that deserves a better movie than "Night Games," which even Vadirn doesn't think is the greatest movie since "And God Created Woman."

Here he is, talking about the project in an interview with me last January: "There is nothing worse than to be around without working ... and I knew I would have to do something. I can't say it's the greatest script I've ever had. The dialogue is not always as good as it could be. I kept asking Raymond Chow, the producer, to hire writers to work on the dialogue, but he wouldn't."

Not the embodiment of enthusiasm. To be fair to Vadim, who does have talent, "Night Games" looks like it was shot on a bargain basement budget. Pickett stars as the housewife, whose rich publisher husband Jason has given her (I quote here from the synopsis) "money, a beautiful house, clothes, cars, everything except the ability, to experience a full and normal sexual relationship."

Jason surprises her with a birthday party (shot so ineptly and with such bad sound that it almost seems as if the movie's crew was not invited). Then they begin to make love, but she reacts violently, Jason flies off to London, and Cindy is left alone in the vast mansion.

What we get next is a long, ambitious passage of fantasy that we never, alas, quite understand. Pickett mopes around the mansion. She has erotic dreams. She is visited by a phantom lover. In one sustained sequence, she is pursued through the Mansion it night. Why? By whom? Perhaps by Sion (Paul Jenkins), the brawling Welsh poet who might have stayed behind in the house after the party guests left. Or perhaps everything is in her imagination...

The movie's conclusion is dated, awkward, and insultingly sexist. Pickett's demon lover engages her in a series of "night games" - dreams? realities? - and finally rapes her. And during the rape, she flashes back to long-repressed memories of when she was attacked by a man during her girlhood. It goes without saying in trash of this sort that these childhood traumas, when recalled, immediately evaporate - leaving our heroine free to truly love Jason when he returns from London.