Grade: F
If you thought that “reality entertainment” had reached its nadir in the raft of crummy shows strewn across the network landscape nowadays, you need only check out “Games People Play: New York” to see how far it’s actually possible to fall. The brainchild of writer-director-editor James Ronald Whitney, who also appears as the “host” of the enterprise, this first of a proposed trilogy of “Games” movies degrades both those who chose to appear in it and those of us unfortunate enough to watch it.
The movie presents itself as a low-budget pilot for a proposed TV show in which a group of guys and gals, chosen in open audition for their physical endowments, personality and, it would appear, troubled pasts, compete in a series of contests for points that will, in the end, determine the winner of a $10,000 prize. The tasks assigned them, sometimes in couples and sometimes individually, are sleazy, low-grade “Candid Camera” stunts involving unsuspecting bystanders. In one, the men must solicit urine samples from passersby on the street. In another, they have to convince aspiring actresses to simulate torrid sex scenes with them on a literal casting couch. Meanwhile, the girls have to persuade women in neighboring bathroom stalls to help them with their dialogue, and convince delivery men to disrobe for a massage as quickly as possible. A combined requirement has the sextet, divided into couples, convincing a stranger on the street to accompany them to a hotel room and sing a musical trio in the nude. Interspersed with this stuff are interviews with the contestants conducted by a press agent named Jim Caruso and a therapist called Gilda Carle. In these each of the six pours out his or her soul about a tortured past. (It has to be said that Carle, who looks like a glaceed younger version of Joan Rivers, comes across as the most ludicrous figure in the picture.) The closing ceremony spotlights an entirely predictable twist that pretty much renders pointless all that’s gone before; but still, this is reported to be the first in a series of three “episodes,” the second set in Hollywood and the third in the South.
If slumming by watching such drek is to your taste, then go for it; but you’d find easily as much entertainment value in any soft porn title you might pull off a rack at your local video store. Certainly “Games People Play” won’t impress anybody with its technical properties. It looks like it was shot on the crummiest video equipment by somebody with an ocular impairment (the camerawork is credited, if that’s the word, to one Neil Stephens), and the resultant graininess and hand held jumpiness are likely to give a migraine to anyone with the forbearance to stay awake through the entire thing. Needless to say, none of the cast members are likely to achieve any sort of fame except the sort that was accorded to the supporting players in Ed Wood’s pictures, although apparently we’re supposed to think of Joshua Coleman, a sort of male blond bombshell with an especially torturous backstory, as a real find.
The upshot is that even with all the sniggering sex gags, gross-out humor and abundant nudity, Whitney’s “Games” proves duller than an evening of checkers with an aging relative. And as embarrassing as it must have been for the participants, as a spectator sport it’s even worse.