Surviving the Game

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This week, the guys sat down to bask in the glory of Ice-T, a man who once played a "gangsta" kangaroo.

But in this week's movie, Surviving the Game, he plays Mason, a homeless man who is having a pretty rough week. First, his dog gets hit by a taxi. Then, while trying to steal what appears to be an entire side of beef to feed himself and his hobo mentor (that's a thing, right?), Hank (Jeff Corey), when they are assaulted by a security guard (Bob Minor).

The next day, Mason wakes up in his spacious, conveniently-located abandoned camper to discover Hank has died in the night from his injuries. So, of course, Mason buries him next to the dead dog.

Finally fed up with all of this nonsense, Mason decides to end it all by stepping out into traffic, only to be "saved" at the last second by Cole (Charles S. Dutton), a guy working at an outdoor soup kitchen.

Cole sends Mason off to see his friend Thomas Burns (Rutger Hauer) about a possible job. After a very brief interview, Burns offers Mason a vague job that involves working as a kind of guide during a hunting trip.  He gives Mason some money and tells him to get some new clothes and be ready to go the next day.

Wackiest roadtrip movie EVER.

After sharing a brief flight in a private plane with Burns, Cole, and a pig, they land near a cabin in the middle of nowhere, where Burns and Cole's friends await their arrival. They all seem to take to Mason, with the exception of Griffin (John C. McGinley), who looks like he wants to hate-fuck Mason to death.

Once everybody is settled in, they sit down to dinner, and Doc Hawkins (Gary Busey) explains how he knows the others; he is Burns' and Cole's psychiatrist, and they are all ex-FBI. He then tells a disturbing story about how his father made him kill his dog with his bare hands when he was thirteen. To say that it was odd dinner conversation would be selling it way short.

Griffin, on the other hand, keeps giving Mason "murder eyes," and when he asks Mason how he ended up homeless, Mason says, "I killed my wife and kid," which causes Griffin to go ballistic. After the others drag him away, burns explains that Griffin's daughter had been murdered by a homeless man. Whoops.

Griffin gets lost in Mason's eyes and dreadlocks.

After dinner, Burns shows Mason to his room, suggesting he get a good night's sleep because the next day's hunt will be pretty busy.

The next morning, Burns and Cole wake Mason by sticking a gun in his face and telling him to get outside. When he goes, they tell him that he is, in fact, the prey they will be hunting, and he has until they finish a nice breakfast to get himself as far away as he possibly can.

As the "hunters" are enjoying their breakfast, Derek (William McNamara), the son of Wolfe, Sr. (F. Murray Abraham), tells them that he is not too keen on actually hunting and killing a human being. The others mock and harass him for being such a whiny little puss, especially Hawkins, who is now clearly aroused by the idea.

Jeepers! I sure do enjoy murdering!

Now happily fed, the crew mount up on ATVs and motorcycles bristling with guns and other implements of destruction, and they start tracking Mason, who, it should be noted, is on foot.

After an initial close call in which Griffin spots Mason and tries to shoot him, Mason circles back to the cabin in search of weapons to defend himself. He breaks the padlock off the door of the room he thinks they are in, but discovers he is exactly wrong. The room, it turns out, is filled with glass jars containing the heads of all the previous hunt victims. there's also an empty one with a brass plate that says "Mason" on it.

I am certain he will never circle back around to the cabin and discover the
room full of heads.

Suitably disgusted, Mason douses the entire cabin in gasoline. The hunters, figuring out that Mason may have gone back to the cabin, get there and send in Hawkins and Wolfe, Sr. to either chase him out or kill him. That's when Mason sets the place on fire, trapping Wolfe, Sr. upstairs behind a wall of flames. Hawkins, however, catches Mason outside and attacks him with a knife, and a struggle ensues, until Mason throws Hawkins through a window, just as the room full of heads explodes, ending the doctor's participation in the hunt.

Derek runs inside and rescues his father and, as he is dragging him out a window, spies Mason running back into the woods, but decides not to tell the others, as he's still not in line with the idea of hunting and killing another human being, despite that human being having almost killed his father. (In Derek's defense, Wolfe, Sr. is kind of a dick, even setting the murderiness aside.) However, Burns figures it out by watching Derek's eyes.

Now deep in the woods, Mason stops for a breather, only to come face to face with a wolf that is not especially happy to see him. This results in the best face acting ever committed to film.

Cinematic gold.

Next, he lures the hunters into a trap using some cigarettes stuck into a tree, and takes Griffin hostage in a cave. While there, Mason explains how, when he was working two jobs--one of which as a maintenance man at the apartment complex where he lived with his wife and child (possibly children)--and how he kept putting off some of the repairs, which resulted in the building catching on fire and killing his family. Since then, he blamed himself for their death. Griffin, in turn, tells Mason about the homeless man who murdered his daughter.

The next morning, the others raid the cave, finding Griffin by himself. When they untie him, he says he's dropping out of the hunt and going home. Burns is not happy about this, and he has Cole shoot Griffin in the forehead, causing Derek to scream like a frightened pre-teen girl. After a stern talking-to from his father, Derek agrees to finish the hunt, but wants everyone to know that he's not cool with it.

What follows is a comedy of errors that allow Mason to dispatch the remaining group, except for Burns, who manages to escape in his plane after blowing up Wolfe, Sr.'s plane as Mason is running toward it.

Did it work? Is Mason dead? Will Burns go into hiding, not sure whether there is someone out there who knows what he and his friends were doing? You'll have to tune in to find out!

Larry liked the movie a lot more than he expected. He does have some logic issues with the way Mason ignores two huge packs of supplies on an ATV in favor of taking a rifle and then using most if its shells to knock over a tree. He is right to question it.

Derek also enjoyed the film. He thinks Ice-T did some solid acting in this film, and his only nitpick is the fact that the abandoned motor home Mason and Hank live in is bigger than his own apartment. And how they can grill without their grill being stolen. He's really angry about that.

Jake picked the movie, and thinks it is still as good as it was when he first saw it. He does have a problem with the whole "shooting-a-tree-with-all-of-your-shells-and-having-to-throw-rocks-at-the-bad-guys" thing, but he is willing to overlook it because the rest is so good.

So put on your camp, trim an unnoticeable bit off your dreadlocks, and check out this week's show!