I recently watched about a third of a horror movie, Game of Death, currently streaming on Shudder and it is a perfect example of how not to construct a story.

This movie has the very brief running time of a meager 73 minutes. Given such a short length this is the sort of movie that needs to hit the ground already sprinting at full speed perhaps in mid-action with flashback to fill in the audience on how the set-up was established.

But that is not how Game of Death (2017) starts. No, the movie wastes 8 full minutes more than 10 percent of the entire film watching the seven ‘characters’ party at rural home. This extended sequence does very little to reveal character, I honestly couldn’t tell you any of the defining elements of any of their personalities, present no dramatic tension or conflict, and carries no foreshadowing of doom. It is fully wasted time.

Eventually the characters take a break from drugs, swimming, the least erotic sexual scenes I have witnessed in a long time to play the titular board game and get the plot moving. Naturally they do not understand the ‘rules’ of the game and when they fail to make their first kill before the timer expires, a timer I might add that display no countdown so neither the characters nor the audience can judge how dire the situation is, the first of the seven has his head explode. The cast misinterpret this as someone shooting at time and when a neighbor appears concerning about the vast amount of screaming coming from the home. They take him hostage assuming that he was the shooter. To do this one of the guys produces a pistol and I asked the same question the rest of the cast voiced, ‘where did you get that?’ Yup, a gun that proves to be vital as that character, and his terrible trigger discipline, force the others to kill random people to sate the game’s appetite, appears wholly unestablished not even in those wasted 8 minutes from the start.

People do not do this in your films, short stories, or novels. Vital and critical elements of your story must be established before they are employed.

I switched off the movie and removed it from my Shudder queue. There are far too many decent and great films to waste my time watching something this spectacularly bad.