User Reviews

Decent psycho thriller doesn't offer much that fans of this kind of thing haven't seen before, but it manages to be enough of a curiosity to deserve rescuing from obscurity.

'Hawaii Five-O' star Jack Lord is front and centre as Symcha Lipa, an amiable Hungarian refugee turned hitchhiker. He's given a lift by young Mickey Terry (lovely Susan Strasberg), and he agrees to stay with her and her family for a while. He and Mickey seem to be falling in love, but first they must deal with this disturbed family of hers: two sisters, Diz (Collin Wilcox Paxton) and Nan (Tisha Sterling), and their matriarch (T.C. Jones).

Very moodily photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, on an obviously very low budget, "The Name of the Game is Kill!" isn't without its pleasures, mainly the go-for-broke performances of the attractive female cast. Lord is reasonably convincing as a foreigner and makes his character likable enough that you wish that he would have just moved on. Sexy young Sterling has a moderately fun little dance number to "Shadows" by The Electric Prunes. (It's worth nothing the fact that there are two second generation talents here, with Strasberg being the daughter of Lee Strasberg and Sterling the daughter of Ann Sothern.) Led by Swedish director Gunnar Hellstrom, who mostly worked in TV ('Gunsmoke', 'Dallas'), the filmmakers do capture an appropriate sense of isolation. Rounding out this minimal group of actors is Mort Mills, the highway patrolman of "Psycho", as a police chief.

Unfortunately, Gary Crutchers' screenplay is too predictable to completely work. The supposed "big twist" in this tale is too obvious right from the start.

Six out of 10.

Wayward Hungarian drifter and refugee Symcha Lipa (an excellent performance by Jack Lord) finds himself stranded on a deserted highway in rural Arizona. Lipa accepts a lift from the lovely and helpful Mickey Terry (a winningly perky and bewitching portrayal by the gorgeous Susan Strasberg), who takes him to an old gas station run by Mickey, her brusque sister Diz (Collin Wilcox Paxton, nicely abrasive), more flirty and flighty younger sibling Nan (Tisha Sterling, deliciously naughty), and their flaky mother Mrs. Terry (well played to the loopy hilt by T.C. Jones). Lipa soon finds himself under the dangerously seductive spell of these four odd and unbalanced women.

Director Gunnar Hellstrom, working from an unusual and involving script by Gary Crutcher, relates the absorbing idiosyncratic narrative at a steady pace, expertly crafts a supremely spooky and sinister atmosphere, and adroitly conveys a strong sense of isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability from the desolate desert locations (the evocative and occasionally quite striking cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond works wonders with the modest budget). Moreover, Hellstrom delivers oodles of simmering sexual tension from the gripping scenario, with Sterling's sultry and unabashed dance to the groovy tune "Shadows" by The Electric Prunes providing a definite sizzling highlight. The shuddery score by Stu Phillips further enhances the overall eerie and unsettling mood. The surprise-ridden twist ending packs a startling wallop. Quirky and compelling, it's worthy of rediscovery.

I saw this as a teenager in 1968 at the theater when it was first released, and had fond memories of it being a fairly eerie thriller. A recent viewing of a 16mm print left me with less fond memories. It is basically an extended Alfred Hitchcock Hour TV show program padded an extra 30 minutes, and in color. Not that this is bad in itself because the Hitchcock Hour was often very good, and at worst, just plain good. But this film could have stood trimming to an hour and the tightening up would have helped. It doesn't help the film that Jack Lord carried an obviously phony foreign accent, and had not yet found his acting stature that he would eventually find in Hawaii Five-0. It would have improved this film by 100% had he just not used the bad accent, and been a plain hitch-hiking American ranch-hand. It also didn't help that TC Jones as the Mom absolutely telegraphed the fact that Mom was really Dad, especially since he had become famous for his portrayal of the female nurse who was really a male psycho-killer in the Hitchcock Hour episode "An Unlocked Window" just a few years earlier. If you recall that episode, you'll remember it was a big surprise to viewers when first aired, and consequently a much lesser surprise here. What this film has going for it is good performances by the three wacky daughters, nice desolate scenery, and a secret mystery that has several possible solutions. Plus the fact that it has been nearly impossible to see.

The make -up is not very effective (close-ups) and the average viewer will have guessed the final unexpected twist long before the end .

The screenplay which sometimes sounds like a poor man's Tennesse Williams is a jumble , like the three different stories the sisters tell which leaves their guest Jack Lord nonplussed ; nevertheless ,due to the low budget , the atmosphere of the place is the strong point of this B-movie ;the unusual pets (snakes and spiders galore) , the disturbing house and a mysterious past give the tale substance ; the strange beauty of Susan Strasberg is also an asset :hadn't it been for her ,why would J.Lord have stayed in this inhospitable area ,where you get run over as soon as you 're out of the one horse town?

I had heard that "The Name of the Game Is Kill!" had a big twist at its end when I first learned about the movie, so I made an extra effort not to learn any more about the movie before watching it so that the big twist would not be spoiled for me. Just a few minutes ago, I finished watching the movie. Was the so-called big twist worth the wait? Eh, not really. While I admit that I was not expecting it, at the same time it was a twist that has been done in many other movies before and since. Maybe in 1968 the twist was more fresh, but today it doesn't seem all that special. So that leaves the rest of the movie to make up for things. I will admit the low budget and crude look give the movie a kind of raw spirit at times, making the story more convincing than had it been done with a lot of polish. And there are a few mildly creepy moments here and there. But for the most part, the story plays out in a humdrum fashion. It doesn't help that there are a few plot details that are not made clear by the freeze-frame end, leaving me mystified with what exactly happened in the tragic (I think) past of the characters. I've seen many thrillers that are a lot worse, I admit, but all the same there isn't enough here to make this a real grabber.

Younger film buffs (i.e., too young to have seen the movies they adore in theaters) and so-called film historians have coalesced around the love of the outre, or "Something Weird" to use the late Mike Vraney's video title per H.G. Lewis. The problem is that the exalting of the unusual over the good, great or merely well-made has distorted their viewing habits.

So when I approached this drive-in movie from the '60s recently I had to somehow dismiss the hype about its quality, which the film could never be expected to live up to. This is a modern paradox: obscure films of the past have to be over-praised in order to get revived at all (in some DVD or maybe streaming capacity), and then the reality sets in.

Failed screenwriter Gary Crutcher (check his credits) seems to have become obsessive about this juvenile screenplay, which has as many misses and mistakes as it has points of interest along the way to its series of anticlimaxes posing as endings and false endings. I have always hated the final phony twist (DePalma's "Carrie" had me booing at a pre-release screening 40 years ago) so director Gunnar Hellstrom and writer Crutcher's final reel was torture and groanorama for me.

I come to this having seen most of its brethren: the feature-length compilation of Joe Solomon trailers from 1963 to 1976 included on the DVD had about 80% of the titles for films I had actually seen. I missed "Kill!", probably because it did not achieve the number of bookings of some of Solomon's better-known biker and horror films like "Simon King of the Witches" or "Werewolves on Wheels". Had I watched it at my local Cleveland, Akron or Canton drive-in circa 1970, I would have enjoyed it at the level of say J.R. Larraz's X-rated "Whirlpool" or even the Jill Haworth film among the trailers "Horror on Snape Island".

On to the film: though written when Crutcher was a teenager, the film fits into the once-very-popular '60s genre of aging women in sinister situations, kicked off by Aldrich's "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" and generating interesting if quirky vehicles for veteran stars. Noting that Gloria Swanson was once proposed as the mother character, instead of the transvestite actor actually chosen, supports this. Such films are tricky because they often became mere Camp, and to subsequent generations "Baby Jane" is pure camp, still shown at my local Chelsea cinema, introduced by drag queen Hedda Lettuce for a predominantly gay audience to hoot & holler at.

A more interesting variation is a favorite of mine, Clint Eastwood & Don Siegel's biggest flop "The Beloved" in which poor Clint during the Civil War falls victim to a house full of horny ladies headed by Geraldine Page (!), with fatal results. In this case an equally macho contemporary of Clint's, Jack Lord, is at the mercy of four strange ladies that writer Crutcher uses as nearly equally weighted suspects and red herrings in the mystery that unfolds. Ultimately he resolves his plot with a nearly Agatha Christie gimmick -they all turn out to be guilty one way or the other (or presumed to be, as not all gimmicks were resolved).

The atmosphere of a remote location, which works wonders for a B movie's success, perhaps the best example being Herk Harvey's one-shot classic "Carnival of Souls", only goes so far this time. The quirky relationship of Lord and heroine Susan Strasberg creates many longueurs where the patient viewer is waiting for something more tangible to chew on. The authentic '30s and '40s B movies ran as brief as an hour long, what was needed here.

As the audience's surrogate in the story, Lord's character is very poorly written -from his much-criticized foreign accent to his more objectionable sexist pig behavior when he ultimately demands sex (even to the point of unstated rape) from Susan for leading him on, while I, for one, could sympathize with her stated need for just companionship.

Once again, the gimmickry endemic to drive-in and exploitation movies (so beloved by the backers of this film's reissue, even naming their company Ballyhoo) means that sex must be the driving force behind the action, even while distributor Solomon rarely actually delivered the soft-core porn we drive-in aficionados craved and were promised in his ballyhoo.

I spotted the chief gimmick of the transvestite mother figure immediately, not only recognizing the actor T.C. Jones whose career was based on such roles but also the fact that the mother was obviously "off" visually. Casting a beautiful transvestite of a certain age would have worked, rather than a character actor.

To contrast, the all-time king of gimmickry, William Castle, cast a beauty Jean Arless as the he/she protagonist in his classic "Homicidal", which still keeps us guessing 55 years after. It should be noted that Hellstrom's film rips off Castle (and others) with its "sign the pledge not to reveal the ending" gimmick.

Unfortunately, once the big "reveal" occurs, the film falls apart completely with that dreaded final reel complete balderdash that even five dozen rewrites wouldn't save. Though I was rooting for Hellstrom & company for over an hour, by the time his concoction unraveled I was as disappointed as I feel when sitting through one of many "it was only a dream" cop-out crap movies.

Stu Phillips and his guest stars The Electric Prunes emerge on the soundtrack as the film's best element. (Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is not as effective as his best early effort, the classic Arch Hall Jr. chamber thriller "The Sadist".) The short subject plugging the Prunes was fun to watch but I was shocked at no mention of their LP "Mass in F Minor", a major achievement in rock fusion and a testament to the musician/producer David Axelrod's artistry. That is an achievement that needs no gimmicks or cults to support and revive for a new generation.