Blood Games

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“America’s Favorite Pastime Just Turned Deadly!”

A traveling women’s baseball team is stranded in a small backwoods town filled with rabid rednecks who exhibit some very un-sportsmanlike behavior, leading to an all-out battle between the home run honeys and the hairy hillbillies, in this ultra-cheapo sports/horror/T&A shocker that’s a grand slam of badness. An unreal, unnecessary and enjoyably unbelievable mixture of Deliverance, H.O.T.S. and a crappy ‘80s “How to Survive in the Wilderness” instructional video, Blood Games (which could easily have been titled Baseball Bimbos in Hillbilly Hell) attempts to exploit just about anything and everything under the sun (baseball, breasts, rednecks, hunting, bad teeth, etc.), and pretty much nails it, if one defines “nailing it” as hilariously screwing it all up. Blood Games tells a ripped-from-the-headlines tale involving a team of nubile, daisy dukes-wearing women baseball players (sporting the catchy team name, “Babe and the Ballgirls”), who make money by traveling though the South on their snazzy tour bus and betting locals in winner-take-all baseball games. All goes smoothly until they stop in one particularly scuzzy small town, beat the local boys fairly and squarely on the baseball field, and try to get paid for their efforts. Naturally, the town’s sexist pig mayor refuses to pay the ladies after they win, leading to harassment, gratuitous showering and an accidental murder, at which point the bodacious Babe and her Ballgirls escape into the surrounding wilderness, pursued by the town’s entire male population of dim-witted rednecks who have strict orders from the City Council to not let the ladies leave alive. Can our heroines get out of town before they’re caught? And what happens when they decide to fight back, turning the tables on their inbred enemies by transforming every baseball bat, hair scrunchie and sexy pair of thong underwear into a deadly weapon? Powered by truly atrocious acting, a wildly implausible premise and numerous “why the hell are they doing that???” moments, this one really knocks it out of the crud cinema park. Batter up, it’s time for the Blood Games! (Dir. by Tanya Rosenberg, 1990, USA, 90 mins., Rated R) Digital