Night Game (1989) - Movie Review

What if I told you that there was a baseball-themed serial killer film?

AND

It has a fantastic cast

AND

It’s absolute rubbish.

Let’s discuss.

Night Game is a 1989 Serial Killer / Thriller brought to us by director Peter Masterson and writers Spencer Eastman and Anthony Palmer. Masterson directed about a dozen films in his career, but is much more well-known as an actor, having appeared in some of the all-time great films, such as 1973’s The Exorcist and 1975’s The Stepford Wives. Eastman is less well-known in all respects, with his most notable film being 1988’s Kansas. Similar to Masterson, Palmer is much more prominent as an actor and has a lot of screentime in the movie. The basic gist of this production seems to be a director and writer getting all their buddies to their hometown to shoot a movie and watch the Houston Astros play in the Astrodome.

The film focuses on a small-town detective, Mike Seaver, as he prepares to marry his young fiancée in Galveston, Texas. Unfortunately, a serial killer has decided to leave a brutal trail of bodies between the lovebirds and their wedding day. The killer brutalizes women on the beaches with no discernible rhyme or reason. The only commonality between the victims are small, odd greetings left on torn pieces of baseball programs, stuffed in the women’s panties. With the county sheriff and the State Governor breathing down his neck, and with no leads to track down the killer, Mike is facing the end of his career. When he finds a little black book in a victim’s apartment that seemingly links the killing to prominent members of society. The killer begins to close in. Will Mike solve the crimes before his life falls apart, or will he be the loser in the Night Game?

This is a terrible movie.

Coming up with a summary hurt my brain because this film is a meandering dumpster fire floating down the hurricane-flooded streets of Galveston. God himself tried to prevent the filming of this turd by sending Hurricane Gilbert toward Galveston mid-filming. Therein lies the initial problem.

By all accounts, the script originally was set in San Francisco, California, but the filmmakers decided that San Francisco was boring, having already hosted a variety of crime dramas and thrillers over the decades. Masterson is quoted as stating, “It seemed more interesting to bring it to Houston. A lot of movies are made in San Francisco and not as many in Houston or Galveston.” What our esteemed director failed to realize is that there is a very good reason for that: They’re shitholes, especially in 1989.

When the setting is shit, the poor production designer is shit-out-of-luck.

Houston is one of my least favorite places in the world. It’s hot, sticky, and ugly. It stinks of natural gas and petroleum runoff. It’s a great place to make money, has one of the best international food scenes in North America, and still absolutely sucks. It doesn’t have notable or distinct architecture, outside of the Astrodome, which might be the most boring building exterior of all time.

And don’t get me started on Galveston. Galveston should not be inhabited by anything that doesn’t have gills. It’s one of the ugliest, most hazardous beach scenes you could walk into. Every time a hurricane even thinks of forming, it is vaporized.

Now, I’m describing these places from modern, 1st hand experience. Imagine how it looked in 1989, shot through a VHS camera!

I’m no fan of San Francisco, and have never wanted to visit, but it’s iconic. I love it as a setting for books and movies, because it has so much character. When you see a picture of the impossibly hilly city streets, you can’t help but think of Steve McQueen weaving in and out of traffic in a GT390 Mustang, and a random image of a random quarry conjures memories of the final climactic scene from 1971’s Dirty Harry. But… those are great movies with impeccable production design, costuming, and musical scores.

Guess what this movie doesn’t have?

DING

DING

DONG

There isn’t a single part of this film’s technical categories that I could praise…but the Cast is fantastic!

We’re talking Roy Scheider, Paul “Mess with the Bull, You get the Horns” Gleason, and Richard “ best hair in the bidness” Bradford. Oh, and how could I forget one of the all-time legends, Lane Smith. They all perform admirably, and the script is an odd black comedy revolving around two feuding Carny families who bond over the Houston Astros’ playoff run.

Yeah, it’s boring, but the characters aren’t the normal 1990s stereotypes. They’re all fully developed, with unique eccentricities and personal histories. They were so well performed that I ended up enjoying the movie due to the random hijinks they’d get up to. I wish these characters could get put in a different story, because I’d pay to watch anything but this.

Baseball serves as little more than a backdrop here, with the Astrodome itself—which the directors have gushed about filming in countless interviews—seemingly the real motivation behind the entire production. A half-hearted subplot involving the team's star player as a potential suspect vanishes almost as quickly as it appears, leaving viewers with nothing to invest in emotionally. The film might have recovered had it not centered on the cringe-inducing romance between a 56-year-old man and the grating 28-year-old daughter of his high school flame—a young woman whose character fails to generate even a flicker of audience sympathy.

This is just bad movie.

Even with the great cast and lovable characters, this movie isn’t worth your time.

We watched this one on Prime Video.