Game Of Death: The Six Doors To Hell is now available on Digital and VOD from International Media Network.
Trigger Warning: This review includes a brief mention of sexual violence.
Director Timo Rose is only the latest director to hone in on Germany’s martial arts screenfighting talent pool of late with Game Of Death: The Six Doors To Hell. Make no mistake though, as with any horror film Rose’s new work here is targeted to a specific niche, and so the tropes applied here will hit you only depending on your tastes. If you love horror and action, Rose’s film will be right up your alley.
Will it be perfect or satisfactory? That also depends on which way the pendulum swings for you on how you gauge these films. Game Of Death: The Six Doors To Hell is a film that plays it up bigly on the genre fanservice through a dark, gothic lens; Bruce Lee fans and those fond of IPs like Road House and Buronson’s “Fist Of The North Star” and Masahiko Takajo’s “Riki-Oh” are the clear target audience, with a story filtered through producer Nando Rohner’s concept and Rose’s horror-directing chops.
The production framework is inherently indie, with Rose galvanizing a talent roster of anyone from friends and actors to genre staples like Robert Samuels, Kurando Mitsutake and the late Richard Norton to name a few, as well as Li Yanlong. You’ll spot these faces within the backdrop of the film’s narrative as the film is situated in a future dystopia where a powerful regime has taken control of the country and its media, while beneath the city’s obedient allure lies a slow-brewing rebellion.
At the forefront, however, is a story that embarks onto more supernatural territory as we follow Ken Shiro (David Ruessel), a professional fighter fixated on being the best at what he does. When we meet him, he’s already on a journey away from the arena as he sets course to search for his daughter. Meeting the mysterious V (Deena Unverzagt) on the way, the two become reluctant travel companions who both fight together for their survival while trekking the path set on an elusive map to the gates of hell where Ken plans on finding her. Alas, there are some hitches. Six, to be exact – that’s the number of doors Ken must pass through, with V’s help and a few spells of not-so-cryptic introspection, of course.
Game Of Death: The Six Doors To Hell thrives heavily on strong color contours and a variety of edits to capture as much of Rose’s intended graphic novel-style allure as possible. Violence and gore start to surface well into the second half while the action deals in a few sequences that are fun to watch over others. Score choice becomes a factor for much of the duration of the action, resulting in fight scenes that tend to feel more numbing than preferred, even when Rose turns the notch up on all the gory goods, and VFX shots of hell, hearts ripped out of chests and exploding guts, etc. There may have been some AI use here, in which case, I have to give it to Rose for the show he puts on with a number of these FX shots, my own biases be damned.
The remainder of Rose’s dark fantasy is a what I can only describe as an often visually loud, albet shallow tread into psychological territory that forces Ken to look into his past transgressions in order to conquer the hellbound gauntlet. Ken’s journey in the film is woven with flashbacks, many of which occur in the second half of the film and highlight the pivotal evening with Ken, having devolved into a drunken and morose shadow of himself. Specifically, there’s a beating, and the rape of a woman in a bar in which he’s firmly too intoxicated to stop, serving as a preamble to the rest of the story and Ken’s quest.
It’s not until well into the second half that, upon factoring these and other things, we finally see an evolution of our protagonist to a degree. Some of that growth isn’t given a really graceful transition and is more served as a suggestive and often momentous tangent as the story progresses. It helps that V’s role proffers some much needed depth to Ken’s development where and when possible, even if we don’t immediately know what her origins are, or if it even matters by the end.
A lot of the film’s psychedelic visuals and audio decour tend to get in the way of the film’s potential as something preferably easier on the eyes. I guess this is to be expected with an independent venture aimed at cranking up its strongest features as a means of success. In this case, that would be the horror and action fanfare with modest adherence to drama and substantive messaging.
Fans of Sam Raimi, Russell Mulcahy and Lam Ngai Choi, and even John Carpenter ought to take a liking to what Rose delivers with Game Of Death: The Six Doors To Hell (and possibly its sequel which has already been completed and remains on my watchlist as of this review drafting), to which I iterate, again, only matters if the bar isn’t too high for you – provided of course the bar isn’t in hell either. Beyond that, it’s a crowdpleaser of a very specific kind.
3
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