****SPOILERS*** Well to do yuppie, before that word became part of the English language, couple Paul & Jennifer Montgomery,James Caan & Katharine Ross, enjoy playing games on their friends and neighbors in their upper East Side Manhattan townhouse that has given the pair a reputation as neighborhood jesters. It's when Lisa Schindler, Simone Signoret, shows up at the townhouse unexpectedly selling cosmetics that the games that both Paul and Jenny have been playing go to a much higher level.
Lisa somehow gets Paul & Jenny to let her stay at their place until she, in being evicted from her apartment for being behind on her rent, finds a place to stay. Having dabbled in the occult in the past Lisa soon shows the pair what games of faith and chance really are. It's non other then the neighborhood deliver boy Norman Fields, Don Strod, who gets involved in Paul and Jenny's game of misdirection, That's when Norman is set up by the two as the "other man" in Jenny's life and ends up getting his brains blown out by an outraged Paul who caught the two in the act!
Thinking that his gun was loaded with blanks Paul in just trying to show the terrified Norman, after he got two harmless shots off at him, that it's all a joke lets go with the third shot that turned out to be the real deal! A .38 slug that bores into his brain through his right eye killing him instantly! Now with a murder or at the least homicide staring them in the face both Paul& Jenny are desperate to hide Norman's body and keep the police from finding it. While all this is happening Lisa who's totally in the dark to what happened to Norman starts to get suspicious of the couple in the very strange actions they do in preventing her from going in the house in her by chance finding evidence of Norman's death!
***SPOILERS*** It's later when everything seemed to be cleared up in what happened to Norman that he somehow comes back to life terrorizing Jenny while she's awake and Paul in his sleep. It's Jenny who really starts to get spooked in Norman's return from the dead that leads her to suffer from a number of paranoid episodes. They get more and more severe as Norman finally comes out of the shadows and is about to strangle Jenny. By then the poor and confused young woman loses it and in the process ends up losing her mind as well!
A lot like Simone Signoret's 1955 horror flick "Diabolique" the movie "Games" has the audience guessing if what their seeing is real or imagined just like both Paul & Jenny in the movie. The shocking ending is nowhere as good as that in "Diabolique" but still packs quite a punch in how we in the audience were manipulated into not seeing it coming a lot earlier in the film.
Lisa somehow gets Paul & Jenny to let her stay at their place until she, in being evicted from her apartment for being behind on her rent, finds a place to stay. Having dabbled in the occult in the past Lisa soon shows the pair what games of faith and chance really are. It's non other then the neighborhood deliver boy Norman Fields, Don Strod, who gets involved in Paul and Jenny's game of misdirection, That's when Norman is set up by the two as the "other man" in Jenny's life and ends up getting his brains blown out by an outraged Paul who caught the two in the act!
Thinking that his gun was loaded with blanks Paul in just trying to show the terrified Norman, after he got two harmless shots off at him, that it's all a joke lets go with the third shot that turned out to be the real deal! A .38 slug that bores into his brain through his right eye killing him instantly! Now with a murder or at the least homicide staring them in the face both Paul& Jenny are desperate to hide Norman's body and keep the police from finding it. While all this is happening Lisa who's totally in the dark to what happened to Norman starts to get suspicious of the couple in the very strange actions they do in preventing her from going in the house in her by chance finding evidence of Norman's death!
***SPOILERS*** It's later when everything seemed to be cleared up in what happened to Norman that he somehow comes back to life terrorizing Jenny while she's awake and Paul in his sleep. It's Jenny who really starts to get spooked in Norman's return from the dead that leads her to suffer from a number of paranoid episodes. They get more and more severe as Norman finally comes out of the shadows and is about to strangle Jenny. By then the poor and confused young woman loses it and in the process ends up losing her mind as well!
A lot like Simone Signoret's 1955 horror flick "Diabolique" the movie "Games" has the audience guessing if what their seeing is real or imagined just like both Paul & Jenny in the movie. The shocking ending is nowhere as good as that in "Diabolique" but still packs quite a punch in how we in the audience were manipulated into not seeing it coming a lot earlier in the film.