5 Wacky Sports Horror Movies
Sports horror movies are rare. Most sports film fans want to watch inspirational underdog stories like Rocky, sentimental dramas like Field of Dreams, or comedies about bumbling misfits who get revenge on their tormentors, like Happy Gilmore or The Bad News Bears. These expectations don’t mix well with horror, for obvious reasons.
I recently reacted to the trailer for the upcoming football horror movie HIM. It got me thinking: are there any horror sports movies that are worth watching? Well, let’s take a look!
Here’s five wacky sports horror movies. Honestly, this is a deeply flawed group. But I will say this – if the only unforgiveable cinema sin is boredom, these movies pass the test. They may be bad – downright awful in some cases – but at least they’re flawed in interesting ways!
Night Game (1989)
This one fits better in the thriller genre, but there are so few horror sports movies that it’s worth including. Peter Benchley from Jaws stars as a Texas small town detective who is hunting a serial killer.
The psycho slashes a woman – typically a young, pretty blonde – whenever a Houston Astros pitcher makes a no hitter. Or something like that. I don’t follow baseball and have minimal understanding of the game, so that stuff went over my head.
The grizzled detective has recently become engaged to a much younger woman who happens to be, you guessed, it a pretty blonde. No prize for guessing who the killer targets next!
Night Game would be both simpler and more effective if the villain was simply a crazed Astros fan who killed somebody every time the team lost. Speaking of unnecessary complications, it has a superfluous subplot about corrupt cops running a prostitution ring. This storyline does nothing except pad the movie’s runtime.
The Faculty (1998)
The Faculty is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style flick about extraterrestrials who possess the teachers and coaches at a high school. The students fight back against the evil aliens, but are some of them secretly possessed as well? As accusations fly, the survivors must figure out who they can trust before it’s too late.
The characters are the typical high school archetypes: the popular quarterback, the pretty mean girl, the weird outsider, the nerd, the awkward new girl, the pothead, etc. This movie features several well-known young actors who were early in the careers at the time: Elijah Wood, Josh Hartnett, Jordana Brewster, Famke Janssen, and Salma Hayek.
It also has Robert Patrick playing a gruff football coach. This movie is entertaining and has a solid cast. It’s the best movie in this list in terms of acting and production values.
Unfortunately, The Faculty has elements that have aged poorly. Stokely (Clea Duvall) is the aforementioned weird outsider because she (gasp!) dresses in black and (double gasp!) might be gay. This character’s storyline is messed up on numerous levels, especially how her arc is resolved at the end.
Equally problematic to modern eyes is the dated way the movie portrays the relationship between Hartnett’s drug dealing teen and a hot teacher, Miss Burke (Janssen), who he’s trying to seduce.
Fatal Games (1984)
Holy cow! The previous two movies had their issues, but they’re masterpieces compared to this deservedly obscure slasher about students competing to make the Olympics. This one has a javelin-throwing villain, which is a cool idea, except that he kills everybody in essentially the same way. This movie doesn’t have the budget for creative deaths.
It’s mostly shot during the day (filming at night costs money, after all) and sometimes features scenes with the camera placed far away from the speaking actors (presumably because their dialogue was dubbed in later).
This is an amateur effort with nothing to offer except an astonishing amount of gratuitous nudity. Fatal Games surpasses even the early Friday the 13th movies in this regard.
This movie ends with a poorly executed Sleepaway Camp-style twist. While Sleepaway‘s conclusion is shocking and unforgettable, the Fatal Games version is abrupt, anticlimactic, and utterly laughable. This abomination is currently available on Shudder, but I would only recommend it to the most hardcore vintage slasher fans.
Graduation Day (1981)
The star of a high school girls track team dies at a competition. Soon afterward, a mysterious killer starts knocking off her teammates one by one. He wears a fencing costume, brandishes a sword, and uses a stop watch to time the murders.
The dead girl’s older sister has just arrived back in town. Could she be the killer? And what about the girl’s grieving boyfriend? Or the school’s controversial track coach, who is being blamed for pressuring the dead girl to win?
Graduation Day reaches a threshold of basic competence that Fatal Games fails to hit, but it’s a pretty standard entry in the golden age of slashers. I love the fencing costume, though. That’s a great idea. This movie is one of the first horror roles for b-movie queen Linnea Quigley. It also features a young Vanna White, before she became a celebrity on Wheel of Fortune.
Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl O’ Rama (1988)
First, let’s take a moment to appreciate this movie’s title. It positively *screams* ’80s low budget horror! A group of sorority girls break into a bowling alley to steal a trophy as part of an initiation ritual. They accidentally unleash a demonic imp who looks like Yoda on crack. Chaos ensues.
Linnea Quigley is in this one, too. By ’88 she was an established horror queen, with roles in Return of the Living Dead, Silent Night Deadly Night, and Night of the Demons, among many others. This time, she’s joined by two other actresses who were prolific during this period: Brinke Stevens and Michelle Bauer. This is one of the few movies with all three.
Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl O’ Rama is surprisingly self aware for its era. It’s a funny and knowingly absurd romp that’s the most purely entertaining of the sports horror movies in this list.
It’s Easy to See Why Sports Movies And Horror Films Rarely Mix
None of these movies use sports in the way that conventional films do. The typical sports flick will feature an athlete protagonist who is determined to achieve a championship of some sort. None of the movies discussed here have this, although Fatal Games comes the closest.
An athletic competition or event is the inspiration for the villains in three of these movies (Night Game, Fatal Games, Graduation Day). In the other two, the games are incidental to the main story.
If HIM is successful, perhaps it will lead to more and better sports horror movies. For now, it’s an underdeveloped subgenre that doesn’t have a great standard bearer.
