{Movie Review} Granny Needs Help: Flesh Games (2023)

“I wish I could have shit better.”

How to describe a movie like Flesh Games to the uninitiated? This is yet another truly DIY, semi-local flick, shot on video and made for a budget so miniscule that most modern “indie” productions would spend it by accident in an afternoon. It premiered at the Kansas City Underground Film Festival in 2023 and was filmed mostly over a three-day weekend by director David Dawson and the rest of the team of dedicated weirdos who make up Other Trash.

The premise of the movie is simple enough. A bunch of friends (who all happen to share the same names as the folks who’re making the movie) are making a movie called Flesh Games that is basically a low-rent version of CKY or Jackass. Each member of the cast has his own reasons for participating but slowly and very gradually things take an increasingly dark turn.

Let me be clear, though, for 80% of its brief 70-minute running time, Flesh Games is just a DIY take on Jackass. Mike Miller (who plays Mike in the movie) was in the audience at Analog Sunday, where Flesh Games was screened, and he did a Q&A afterward, confirming that most of the stunts pulled in the movie were genuine. (And it is an experience, I will tell you, to do a Q&A with someone whose balls you have just seen multiple times – he joked after the movie that they should have an IMDb credit – and who you just watched take an actual shit on camera.)

When a movie has a gimmick like this – “what if Jackass became a horror movie” – it is generally the case that one side of the equation suffers. Either it is fun to watch while it’s being what it is, and then the horror turn is lacking, or the first part is excruciating and you’re just waiting impatiently for the horror to start. Perhaps the nicest thing I can say about Flesh Games is that I wouldn’t have minded if the turn never came – but when it did, it was genuinely haunting.

What makes the first 60% of Flesh Games work is a combination of its DIY approach and the affability of its cast. Even then, Dawson knows how to eke the tension out of his set-ups, how to convey the potential for harm with a simple shot.

One gag in particular, the “Homerun Derby,” is a perfect example of this. In a setup so obvious and so stupid that one wonders why no one has thought of it before, the guys all hang a baseball bat from a running ceiling fan, then put on blindfolds and try to cross the room. (It’s also one of the few stunts in the movie that thankfully isn’t real – the bat is foam rather than wood.)

There was a clip of the “Homerun Derby” set piece in the trailer that screened at an earlier Analog Sunday, and the second the audience saw it, even then, without any context, the room was a sea of gasps and “oh no”s. It’s that ability to instantly convey an understanding of the repercussions of what we’re seeing that is one of the primary engines driving Flesh Games to be something more than the sum of its parts.

Another is the gradual blurring of the lines between reality and fantasy and back again. Mike and the rest of the cast do a fantastic job, but they’re also playing thinly fictionalized versions of themselves. Everyone is playing someone who looks like them, has their same name, and is making the same movie that they’re making. These guys are actual friends in real life, hanging out and making a movie about hanging out and making a movie, and that erasure of the distinction between the fictionalized Flesh Games and the real one lends the film’s darker moments much of their punch.

When that punch comes, it is not exactly devastating or surprising, but it has a haunting quality that sticks in the memory, in part because it asks a question that doesn’t have an answer – what makes someone engage in these kinds of shenanigans, and what makes us want to watch them? What is the line that makes something “too far,” and why can that line not be pushed further?

One of the aspects that helped “godfather of gore” Herschell Gordon Lewis’s films stand the test of time was their tendency to turn to their audiences and demand of them, “Why do you want to watch this stuff?”

The ending of Flesh Games may leave you asking the same question – but the rest of the movie will also leave you with no doubt that you certainly do.