Boy, have I been seeing some real action turkeys lately! Last week, I saw KICK OR DIE. A few days later, I saw LIGHTBLAST. And now, nothing could've prepared me for SURVIVAL GAME after pressing "PLAY" on my VCR. That was when I started to choke on my sandwich real bad. It's probable that Media, distributor of this film, wanted to cash in on the Chuck Norris movies with heavy publicity. The same goes for this one, with Mike taking over his father's place. I guess the Norris family tree wouldn't have been the same without him. He may seem painful with only a single blow to the abdomen, but I say "Nice try, kid!". High-impact action thrills are not what's in store, sorry to say. It's another duplicated rip-off of tough and buff "strong dude" flicks from the 80s, and does worse by the minute. An embarrassing moment comes to mind the scene with Mike and his girlfriend getting chased by criminals in a department store while the song "Louie, Louie" is playing! What's with the father getting drugged up by memories of LSD? It's best that you forget this one entirely, even if you're a Norris fan. Quite awful! Another way to drain out some precious time!
6 Reviews
Bland quasi-entertainment.
tarbosh2200020 September 2013
Warning: Spoilers
Mike Hawkins (Mike Norris, in what is perhaps a Tony Danza-like situation where he can only play guys named Mike to avoid being confused) is a young adult who loves nothing more than to hang out at "War In Peace Survival Camp" and stage mock battles, wars and "survival games". Even the founder of WIPSC, a man inexplicably named Sugar Bear, who was in "Nam with Mike's dad (Bernard), keeps telling Mike to make more of himself and go to college. That's also what his parents tell him. But Mike just wants to keep on Survival Gamin'.
Meanwhile, Dave Forrest (Cassel) gets out of prison after 17 years. Forrest is a man after the fashion of Timothy Leary - a 60's-era guru who invented an LSD-like drug called "Forrest Fire". All he wants to do is talk to his poster of Jimi Hendrix and just chill with some good vibes, man. But his daughter C.J. (Goodrich) gets into a car accident with Mike, and the two of them end up going on the run because some evil gangsters are convinced the Forrest family has a multi-million dollar stash of drug money. So they kidnap Dave and C.J., and only one man with the proper survival skills can save them from the gangsters...MIKE HAWKINS! Survival Game is very dumb, and has frighteningly little action. What action there is happens to be pretty goofy indeed. It seems this whole venture was cooked up as a cash-in to the Norris name in the go-go 80's. We actually like Mike Norris, this isn't a slam on him, but this movie is pretty half-baked. It becomes an uninspiring hostage drama at a certain point and the pace slacks big time. What this movie needed was to ramp up the action, violence and intensity. It seems director Herb Freed was unfamiliar with the techniques of action cinema at the time. Though this movie was released in '87, his next movie after this one was Subterfuge (1996), the Matt McColm non-classic. Subterfuge is more entertaining than this, but that should still tell you something.
Perhaps in keeping with the 60's-era characters like Dave Forrest, there are plenty of songs on the soundtrack from that time. The Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" makes an appearance, but you truly haven't heard "Louie Louie" until you've heard it as the background music while Mike Norris runs through a department store in true "Scooby Doo" style. The song plays in its entirety, no less. Getting every penny out of it, apparently. As for the original music, there's a theme that sounds EXACTLY like "Axel F". Harold Faltermeyer should sue. But hey, it was the 80's. It was a different time. A time when carbon-copy action movies with carbon-copy music hit video store shelves and no one complained and life was good. If the theme of this movie is nostalgia, it truly has come full circle.
Released by Media, it's hard to truly throw our weight behind Survival Game, but its inoffensive, bland quasi-entertainment might appeal to someone.
Meanwhile, Dave Forrest (Cassel) gets out of prison after 17 years. Forrest is a man after the fashion of Timothy Leary - a 60's-era guru who invented an LSD-like drug called "Forrest Fire". All he wants to do is talk to his poster of Jimi Hendrix and just chill with some good vibes, man. But his daughter C.J. (Goodrich) gets into a car accident with Mike, and the two of them end up going on the run because some evil gangsters are convinced the Forrest family has a multi-million dollar stash of drug money. So they kidnap Dave and C.J., and only one man with the proper survival skills can save them from the gangsters...MIKE HAWKINS! Survival Game is very dumb, and has frighteningly little action. What action there is happens to be pretty goofy indeed. It seems this whole venture was cooked up as a cash-in to the Norris name in the go-go 80's. We actually like Mike Norris, this isn't a slam on him, but this movie is pretty half-baked. It becomes an uninspiring hostage drama at a certain point and the pace slacks big time. What this movie needed was to ramp up the action, violence and intensity. It seems director Herb Freed was unfamiliar with the techniques of action cinema at the time. Though this movie was released in '87, his next movie after this one was Subterfuge (1996), the Matt McColm non-classic. Subterfuge is more entertaining than this, but that should still tell you something.
Perhaps in keeping with the 60's-era characters like Dave Forrest, there are plenty of songs on the soundtrack from that time. The Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction" makes an appearance, but you truly haven't heard "Louie Louie" until you've heard it as the background music while Mike Norris runs through a department store in true "Scooby Doo" style. The song plays in its entirety, no less. Getting every penny out of it, apparently. As for the original music, there's a theme that sounds EXACTLY like "Axel F". Harold Faltermeyer should sue. But hey, it was the 80's. It was a different time. A time when carbon-copy action movies with carbon-copy music hit video store shelves and no one complained and life was good. If the theme of this movie is nostalgia, it truly has come full circle.
Released by Media, it's hard to truly throw our weight behind Survival Game, but its inoffensive, bland quasi-entertainment might appeal to someone.
If you can survive this, you're a braver man tham I am!
mark.waltz1 September 2021
Warning: Spoilers
Generic style acting by Mike Norris (Chuck's son) and Deborah Goodrich (Erica Kane's phony sister) is laughable as are the dumb thugs chasing them in this ridiculously idiotic action romantic comedy. They certainly aren't Clark Gable and Carole Lombard or William Powell, given an amateurish script dealing with the kidnapping of Goodrich's criminal father, Seymour Cassel, and the teaming of the two non-thespians to find him. Having met ironically early in the day (when Goodrich as a stereotypically poor "woman's driver" ran Norris off the road), they have gone from squabbling to smooching, and that's even after Goodrich poo poo'd daddy's suggesting that something was going on.
The action is satisfactory but the characters so ridiculously drawn and the story silly, and you can't really root for characters whom you are laughing gas and actors whom you are rolling your eyes at. Norris has a stereotypically ditzy mother (Arlene Golonka) who claims to be in love with her car (which Norris borrowed), and I haven't seen gangsters so dumb since the "deese, dems and doe's" of the days of poverty row crime dramas. Norris has such a generic way of reciting his lines that you are surprised that he was actually able to read the script, and Goodrich is one of the earliest examples of vocal fry that I recall seeing on screen. Norris makes his more well known action star father appear to be a Shakespeare star in comparison. Truly awful, and another example of a DVD that I wouldn't use as a cocktail coaster. Cassel completely hams it up which is an automatic raspberry for his performance.
The action is satisfactory but the characters so ridiculously drawn and the story silly, and you can't really root for characters whom you are laughing gas and actors whom you are rolling your eyes at. Norris has a stereotypically ditzy mother (Arlene Golonka) who claims to be in love with her car (which Norris borrowed), and I haven't seen gangsters so dumb since the "deese, dems and doe's" of the days of poverty row crime dramas. Norris has such a generic way of reciting his lines that you are surprised that he was actually able to read the script, and Goodrich is one of the earliest examples of vocal fry that I recall seeing on screen. Norris makes his more well known action star father appear to be a Shakespeare star in comparison. Truly awful, and another example of a DVD that I wouldn't use as a cocktail coaster. Cassel completely hams it up which is an automatic raspberry for his performance.
Fun little 80s adventure
amadeuseisenberg18 October 2022
When you have a man and a woman running together from one or more different groups of people or doing something else together in a movie with comedic elements, it always makes for a fun movie for some reason, especially if it's from the 80s or 90s. It's a very likeable movie to watch. This is another one of these movies that doesn't deserve a 3/10 on IMDb because there are some really awful and low quality movies with a rating of 3/10 and this is far ahead of those, so it should obviously have a higher rating. It's a proper movie that's competently produced and is highly watchable, unlike many other movies wth the same rating.
Not as bad as would seem
sbryant-1018 April 2006
Warning: Spoilers
Look, sure the acting is horrible. Well, let me clarify. Mike Norris has the acting range of a broken sling shot, but the rest of the crew isn't so bad. That is if you can get over the fact that the one of the characters is affectionately named, "SugarBear." Quite honestly I watched this movie with one main purpose.....Deborah Goodrich. She certainly makes it worth while....even giving the audience a brief glimpse of her lace underwear!!! I have been infatuated with her since, "Just one of the Guys." In my quest to breathe in every moment of sweet Deborah, I actually found the movie to be remarkably watchable. Unlike Remote Control, another Deborah Goodrich gem, Survival Game has a semi-real plot. On Mike Norris....His acting is so bad that it is pretty funny, and actually adds to it oddly enough. No one can tell me that Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Segal has any better range. Sure they are better at squinting through emotional moments, but come on.....it's an action movie. Plus Deborah makes it all worth it in the end.
Actioner sunk by too many '60s in-jokes
lor_21 March 2023
My review was written in October 1987 after a screening in Parkchester in the Bronx.
Its title quite misleading, "Survival Game" is a would-be action pic that ends up as a silly exercise in '60s nostalgia. Chalk it up as yet another video title receiving a token theatrical release.
Mike Norris, Chuck's similarly action-prone son, toplines as a kid who enjoys attending the War in Peace Survival Camp on weekends, where folks participate in gung-ho war games. Via a car accident, he becomes involved with Valley Girl-esque Deborah Goodrich, whose dad, Dave Forrest (played by Seymour Cassel), is just getting out of stir after serving a 17-year stretch related in his druggie activities in the 1960s, in which he foisted the hallucinogenic Forrest Fire on the public.
The FBI and Forrest's ex-partners are all hounding him as to the whereabouts of $2,000,000 in drug money, which he claims never existed. Both he and daughter Goodrich are kidnapped, but Norris and his military mentor Sugar Bear (Ed Benard) come to the rescue.
With lame action scenes and very low-speed chases, flat pic is constantly pushed towards campiness by script's references to '60s jargon and a soundtrack filled with oldies by such groups as Bubble Puppy and the Kingsmen. Herb Freed's listless direction reaches its nadir in a prolonged foot chase through city streets and a department store that is presented silently except for "Louie Louie" blasting pointlessly on the soundtrack.
Norris and Goodrich make an attractive couple, while Seymour Cassel obviously enjoys himself, but it's a long way downhill from t=his hippie-esque starring role in "Minnie and Moskowtitz". Film might have had a chance to work if scripted as a romantic or screwball comedy, but the need to sell it internationally as an actioner has resulted in an unpalatable mishmash.
Its title quite misleading, "Survival Game" is a would-be action pic that ends up as a silly exercise in '60s nostalgia. Chalk it up as yet another video title receiving a token theatrical release.
Mike Norris, Chuck's similarly action-prone son, toplines as a kid who enjoys attending the War in Peace Survival Camp on weekends, where folks participate in gung-ho war games. Via a car accident, he becomes involved with Valley Girl-esque Deborah Goodrich, whose dad, Dave Forrest (played by Seymour Cassel), is just getting out of stir after serving a 17-year stretch related in his druggie activities in the 1960s, in which he foisted the hallucinogenic Forrest Fire on the public.
The FBI and Forrest's ex-partners are all hounding him as to the whereabouts of $2,000,000 in drug money, which he claims never existed. Both he and daughter Goodrich are kidnapped, but Norris and his military mentor Sugar Bear (Ed Benard) come to the rescue.
With lame action scenes and very low-speed chases, flat pic is constantly pushed towards campiness by script's references to '60s jargon and a soundtrack filled with oldies by such groups as Bubble Puppy and the Kingsmen. Herb Freed's listless direction reaches its nadir in a prolonged foot chase through city streets and a department store that is presented silently except for "Louie Louie" blasting pointlessly on the soundtrack.
Norris and Goodrich make an attractive couple, while Seymour Cassel obviously enjoys himself, but it's a long way downhill from t=his hippie-esque starring role in "Minnie and Moskowtitz". Film might have had a chance to work if scripted as a romantic or screwball comedy, but the need to sell it internationally as an actioner has resulted in an unpalatable mishmash.
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