Director – Jenn Wexler, Screenplay – Sean Redlitz & Jenn Wexler, Producers – Heather Buckley, Philip Kalin-Hajdu, Albert I. Melamed, Todd Slater & Jenn Wexler, Photography – Alexandre Bussiere, Music – Mario Sevigny, Visual Effects Supervisor – Francois Bordez, Visual Effects – Real by Fake, Special Effects – Blood Brothers FX, Special Effects Supervisor – Carlo Harrietha, Makeup Effects – Morot FX Studio Inc. (Designer – Adrien Morot), Production Design – Ted Samuels. Production Company – Blackvale Films Inc.
Just on Christmas of 1971, Samantha Kramer, a student at the Blackvale School for Girls, receives news from her stepfather that she will have to stay behind at the school for the holidays. Samantha prepares to settle in, along with the teacher Miss Tanner and one other pupil Clara. At the same time, a quartet of people who have been nicknamed the Christmas Killers conduct a trail of murders across the countryside. With one of the group Doug is wounded by a state trooper’s bullet, they stop at the school and demand that Miss Tanner patch him up. They then turn aggressive, taking everybody prisoner. It is revealed that Maisie has led the group back to Blackvale in order to conduct a ritual she found when she was a pupil there that will raise a demon and grant them unlimited power.
The Sacrifice Game was the second directorial outing of Jenn Wexler. Jenn (sometimes credited as Jennifer) Wexler rose up through the ranks at Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix and was producer on Fessenden’s directorial outings Beneath (2013), the N is for Nexus segment of ABCs of Death 2 (2014) and Depraved (2019), as well as other Glass Eye Pix films like Darling (2015), Like Me (2017), Most Beautiful Island (2017) and Psychopaths (2017). She made her debut as director and writer with The Ranger (2018), a darkly funny slasher film about a psycho park ranger.
As it starts, The Sacrifice Game has suggestions of all manner of other films to it. The girls left alone in a boarding school as the Christmas holidays set in and danger lurks suggests something of the quintessential Christmas horror Black Christmas (1974). The quartet of sadistic criminals prowling the countryside on a rampage of sadism and casual murder, as well as the 1971 setting, reminds a good deal of The Last House on the Left (1972).
However, having raised these, Jenn Wexler then proceeds to subvert expectations. The film creates the anticipation that it is heading along the lines of a Home Invasion story but it never does much to follow up on this – there is an unnerving Christmas dinner sequence with the foursome torturing the imprisoned girls, which has a shocking end to it when a proposal abruptly ends with a slit throat. But there is little in the way of the standard stuff of the Home Invasion film with people trying to escape, being pursued through the school and so on. Nor does the film quite end up being the Christmas horror it gives the impression it is – it is a horror film and it is set on Christmas but that is it.
The Christmas Killers – (l to r) Laurent Pitre, Mena Massoud and Olivia Scott WelchThe imprisoned girls – (l to r) Georgia Acken, Madison Baines and Chloe Levine
About halfway through, The Sacrifice Game takes a left field turn from anything you expect it is going to be and becomes a film about Occult rites and raising a demon. Here things are not what you expect them to be at the outset either and the film takes some twists (although some of these are fairly easy to predict) and the entire Home Invasion in a school that we expect the film to be at the outset is turned inside out. [PLOT SPOILERS] It ends up being the invaders who have the tables turned on them in quite a sting ending that inverts the earlier Christmas dinner.
Jenn Wexler has a solid cast. I am more and more impressed with Chloe Levine with everything I see her in – she was previously the lead in Jenn Wexler’s The Ranger. She has a filler role here, the adult among the children at the school that could have been played by anybody, but gives these scenes an emotional core – is a jolt and a loss to the film when she leaves the scene in the middle of the film.
On the other hand, I failed to quite buy Mena Massoud – unrecognisable from his turn as the live-action Disney Aladdin (2019) – as the equivalent of David Hess from The Last House on the Left – he is more like an off-duty backup dancer taking the opportunity to play to the gallery but lacking any character believability beneath the surface of that. Georgia Acken shines during the latter third of the film but to say more would be to spoil surprises.
