1991's most prominent direct-to-video baseball-action-sexploitation-gore-wilderness-survival thriller, BLOOD GAMES demonstrates what befalls a traveling all-girl bikini team, "Babe and the Ballgirls," in a squalid male-dominated backwoods settlement called Lint Ridge.
The women handily defeat the local yokels at the sandlot, rankling the area opinion leader, bloodthirsty mercenary Vietnam vet Mino Collins (Luke Shay). When some good ol' boys assault the girls a shootout results, and Mino's rapist son is killed. "It's them baseball bitches that done it, Mr.
Collins!" testifies one loyal citizen, and the vengeful Mino leads a posse of gun-toting galoots after the fleeing sportswomen. Following a slow-motion massacre of their teammates, the surviving ladies strike back against their tormentors with brilliant guerilla tactics, like traipsing around the
forest with their Louisville sluggers at the ready.
At the very least the filmmakers could have instilled this garbage with a self-parodying--if tasteless--sense of fun, like the zanier Roger Corman or Fred Olen Ray drive-in drivel, but noooooo! BLOOD GAMES is as humorless as Congressional hearings on sexual harassment. The cast slogs gravely
through it all, with rangy B-movie reliable Ross Hagen, playing the Ballgirls' manager and the only friendly male, killed off early. The mountainous scenery is quite striking, though, and is used for maximum impact by director Tanya Rosenberg. While cineastes may try to detect feminist meaning in
this foul no-hitter, all should note that the script is credited to a quintet of men. (Violence, profanity, sexual situations, nudity.) leave a comment
