This movie is wild.
It is claimed the film was ripped off by Home Alone, released the following year, but I am sceptical.
It is so excessive in its approach, it feels like one of those Italian ripoffs of popular American films, where they follow a similar premise but with exaggerated or other unique elements.
It is also an early tech thriller - the film is based around the technology of Minitel, an early online system that used telephone lines so that people could communicate, make purchases and other services roughly similar to the internet.
Thomas stumbles upon the killer in the Minitel equivalent of a chat room while searching for the real Santa Claus.
It is worth bringing up at this point the weird dichotomy in tone between the hyper-stylised castle where Thomas resides, and the seamier, downbeat world outside where Patrick Floersheim’s intruder prowls the streets, looking for kids.
Patrick Floersheim’s character is a weird combination of a cartoon buffoon and a child molester.
He is introduced on the street, shadowing a group of kids having a snowball fight.
When he is hunting for Thomas, he winds up getting hired as a Santa at the department store where Thomas’s mother works as a high-level executive.
There follows an incredibly creepy scene where he becomes entranced by the children.
In these early scenes, Floersheim plays these interactions with barely restrained desire. By contrast, when he is in the castle, he is a bug-eyed foil to all of Thomas’s various traps.
While there are a few moments where the tones collide - when Thomas first sees the intruder, he is killing the child’s dog in a brief but shocking burst of violence - but once the movie is a cat-and-mouse chase, the film is closer in spirit to a Spielberg movie.
That real-world seediness of the early scenes is almost completely lost.
It makes the movie more palatable - although that context bubbles to the surface every time the intruder and Thomas catch sight of each other. He is the Childcatcher’s (Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) scuzzier brother.
That tonal disunity is somewhat tempered by the film’s grab-bag of influences.
Like the mise-en-scene, the film is a blend of genres: Christmas, fairy tales, tech thriller and Rambo-style action film (our hero has a mullet and a bandana).
By the third act, the film becomes a parody of Rambo II - our hero performs surgery on himself, buries a deceased loved one, and prepares for war.
I forgot to mention these sequences are arranged in a montage to a song that mashes up Christmas-style melodies with a late eighties power ballad.
As our hero takes the battle to the villain, the film lets go of linear time, transforming into a series of violent, dreamlike setpieces.
Visually, the movie is made up of lush colours and a lot of backlighting - it is as if the movie was co-directed by Russell Mulcahy and Tim Burton.
While it is based around a child, and has a childlike sense of imagination in its production design and setpieces, there are darker implications to the killer’s relentless pursuit of Thomas that is more disquieting than anything Macauly Culkin had to contend with in the Home Alone movies.
Unlike those movies, Deadly Games ends on a note that weirdly reminded me of Silent Night, Deadly Night - Thomas sits traumatised over the corpse of a person he still believes to be Santa Claus.
What is the message here? Thomas learning about his own hubris? Learning that Santa is not real? Don’t talk to strangers or they will dress up like Santa Claus and sneak into your house via the chimney?
It feels like a bizarre moral to punish a child with this experience, but it is a little hard to boil down what that moral is.
Deadly Games is a bizarre oddity, and is worth watching just for how much it tries to accomplish in its surprisingly compact runtime of 92 minutes.
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