3615 Code Père Noël (aka Deadly Games)

12/25/19 • 51 min

2 Guys And A Chainsaw - A Horror Movie Review Podcast

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

This recently rediscovered home invasion thriller from France bore such a striking resemblance to Home Alone that its director threatened to sue John Hughes when the Macauley Caulkin smash debuted two years later. And yes, the similarity is strong: A young boy is forced to use traps to protect his home after a menacing Santa slides down his chimney.

Although it’s much darker than most holiday movies, what we found in this forgotten French flick was a lot of heart and a fun ride. Recently remastered, you can now catch it exclusively on the Shudder network.

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3615 Code Père Noël aka Deadly Games (1989)

Episode 199, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello, and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, we are creeping closer and closer to Christmas. In fact, it is Christmas. Merry Christmas, Craig.

Craig: Merry Christmas.

Todd: I, thought that this year, we actually did a fairly decent job of finding some Christmas horror movies. I was quite shocked. How about you?

Craig: Yeah. Not bad. And the closer we got, I kept seeing more and more lists of, Christmas horror movies. So I think we’re set for a while.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. We keep saying that there are slim pickings, but, actually, the more and more we look into it, the more stuff there is out there. And some of it’s kind of obscure, some of it’s a little more recent, but we we have found some things. Right? Yep. We’re keeping a list for next year, and, also, thanks to our listeners’ suggestions. In fact, especially Todd, today’s movie, I was really looking forward to reviewing, and I had never heard of it before. It was actually recommended to us by one of our listeners. His name is Steve. And, the movie is titled, depending on, I don’t know, where it was released or or whatever, either Deadly Games OR Game Over OR Dial Code Santa Claus. But the actual French title of the film Craig, do you know French? Do you know any French? Nope. You never took a French class? Anything like that? Nope. Well, Craig. Me neither. The original French title is 3615 Code Pere Noel. I have no idea if I’m saying that right. It’s probably not Todd. Right? It’s probably Todd or something like that.

Craig: I don’t know.

Todd: The really interesting idea, this this film is a 1989 movie. And, apparently, when it came out, it did not get a lot of love commercially, although it did get some love critically.

Craig: Yep.

Todd: Came out in France in 1989. And then 2 years later, a small little film called Home Alone premiered in the US, which bears, in many ways, a striking resemblance to this movie, at least the concept of the film. So much so, in fact, that the writer director of this film, Rene Monsor, had actually threatened to sue the makers of Home Alone, for copying his movie. I don’t know whatever came of that. Do you? Did you find anything in your online research?

Craig: That’s all I saw too was that he threatened, but I don’t think that he ever did. I don’t know. You know, there there are a lot of similarities and as we talk about it, I think that our listeners will be able to definite even if you’ve not seen the movie, I think that you’ll definitely be able to see the similarities, between the 2. I don’t know. Ultimately, they’re not so much alike that I would, say that it’s definite copyright infringement. But it makes you wonder, Chris Columbus did Home Alone. Is that right?

Todd: Yeah. Well, he he directed it and but it was written by,

Craig: Oh, the guy who did all the big eighties Yeah. Movies. Right? John Hughes.

Todd: John Hughes. That’s right. Yeah.

Craig: And, I I think that John Hughes said that he had gotten the inspiration for this movie while he had been vacationing in Europe. So No. I don’t know if he and like you said, it this movie came out just a year or a couple years before Home Alone. Who knows, you know, production on movies can take years in predevelopment and it could just be total coincidence that they share these similarities, but it makes you wonder.

Todd: It kinda does. And it’s funny because I just got off of seeing, Netflix series called The Movies That Made Us and

Craig: I watched it too. You told me about it, so I watched it. Yeah.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s one on Home Alone, which is really interesting, and then there’s one also on Die Hard, which I recently watc...

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Expand to read episode transcript Automatic Transcript

3615 Code Père Noël aka Deadly Games (1989)

Episode 199, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello, and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, we are creeping closer and closer to Christmas. In fact, it is Christmas. Merry Christmas, Craig.

Craig: Merry Christmas.

Todd: I, thought that this year, we actually did a fairly decent job of finding some Christmas horror movies. I was quite shocked. How about you?

Craig: Yeah. Not bad. And the closer we got, I kept seeing more and more lists of, Christmas horror movies. So I think we’re set for a while.

Craig: I don’t know.

Todd: The really interesting idea, this this film is a 1989 movie. And, apparently, when it came out, it did not get a lot of love commercially, although it did get some love critically.

Craig: Yep.

Todd: Yeah. Well, he he directed it and but it was written by,

Craig: Oh, the guy who did all the big eighties Yeah. Movies. Right? John Hughes.

Todd: John Hughes. That’s right. Yeah.

Todd: It kinda does. And it’s funny because I just got off of seeing, Netflix series called The Movies That Made Us and

Craig: I watched it too. You told me about it, so I watched it. Yeah.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. So there’s one on Home Alone, which is really interesting, and then there’s one also on Die Hard, which I recently watc...

Previous Episode

To All A Goodnight

This Friday the 13th knockoff may be full of Christmas imagery, but that can’t save it from being hilariously bad. A killer Santa stalks a bunch of super-horny teenage girls and their boyfriends. Sound familiar?

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To All A Goodnight (1980)

Episode 198, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw

Todd: welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw I’m Todd

Craig: and I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, Craig Christmas is creeping up on us with a knife in his hand.

Oh, right. That’s not the end of the corny jokes. I’m sure. Especially when we start talking about this movie, we found another Christmas movie that we hadn’t heard of. Well, I hadn’t heard of it before. Had, you

Craig: know,

Todd: this is, um, another, I believe, Canadian movie, although I’m not 100% sure on that. Called to all a good night, and it came out in 1980 it came out right on the heels of, actually, I think the same year as Friday the 13th and if Friday the 13th hadn’t come out first, you would think that Friday the 13th borrowed a lot from this movie, but I think it’s quite the other way around.

But it’s interesting because the director of this film is David Hess, and I’m David Hess is a rock star. Almost literally David Hass was a as multitalented mostly as a musician. But also did some dabbling and film. Some of our listeners might remember him as one of the bad guys in the last house on the left.

Yeah. You remember that? I mean, he’s got

Craig: like, I didn’t know that was him, but I, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I looked him up, but I was just looking for his deck. Directorial stuff. And this is the only movie, or at least feature film that he directed.

Todd: Yeah. He’s only been in like, I think he only has like 39 acting credits to his name, which is more than I do.

Yeah. But, you know, it’s like a random movies here and there. Nothing really big. He does a few things on TV, but, uh, as a musician, he has written a number of hit songs for people. He wrote all shook up for Elvis Presley wound, uh, some countries, things like, um. For Conway Twitty and Andy Williams and Pat Boone, and a number of people.

I mean, he’s just had a, I think that’s where he’s made most of his money and gotten most of his fame. And according to him, it’s where he’s most comfortable. But he’s done some dabbling in film too, as an actor and then behind the scenes as a producer sometimes, and then directing this, and you’re right, he hasn’t really directed much besides this.

So I guess maybe after this movie, he wasn’t in huge demand as a director. And then the movie was written by a guy,

Craig: Alex rebar.

Todd: Alex rebar. Yeah. What did you find out about Alex rebar? Craig.

He’s also an actor. He’s dabbled in, in television a little bit. He has about eight writing credits to his name. Um, this a movie called demented, which I think we need to throw on our, on our list. Another movie called nowhere to hide. And, and that’s kind of about it. So really this is about the only thing he’s done as well.

And for both of them. More or less their very first gig out there. And so clearly they’re going for the horror genre as we sort of talk before. It’s sort of the way to, to make your Mark in a safe way. It doesn’t require a lot of money. I think this movie had a budget of about $75,000 almost completely takes place in a, in a mansion, uh, and the ground surrounding the mansion.

So it was probably pretty cheap to shoot. And then I saw an interview with a, one of the actresses who mentioned that they had actually just stayed in this mansion and filmed this movie over the course of 10 days. So cheap, quickly shot a slasher movie in the vein of Friday the 13th very, very much so.

And borrows from a couple other movies as well as we’ll probably get to talking about. And aside from those two people, and one of the stars in this movie, who ends up being the final girl, her name is Jennifer Runyon. There’s not many people of note in here with a couple. Well, there are a couple others.

Craig: Harry Reems.

Todd: Yeah, Harry reins. Right. So

Craig: I’m familiar with this word.

Todd: I guess we can both admit that, huh? It wasn’t until the last scene with him in it. I don’t know if it was just too dark or we didn’t see much of him at the beginning of the movie, but at the end of the movie, when he comes in, I did a double take.

I was like, no. No, that is God. Oh my God. That is funny.

Craig: I couldn’t remember having seen him at all. I’m like, I don’t know who that is, but, okay.

Todd...

Next Episode

Scream

It’s our 200th Episode!

As per tradition, we visit an iconic Wes Craven movie to celebrate this milestone, and we could think of none better than 1996’s game-changing “Scream”.

Does it hold up after all these years? Listen and find out. And thanks for YOUR loyal listenership and support after all these years. You guys keep this fun for us, which keeps us going and going. Happy 2020!

Expand to read episode transcript Automatic Transcript

Scream (1996)

Episode 200, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of 2 Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: Well, Craig, we have made it. Not only have we made it to the end of the year and a brand new year 2020, but it just so happens that we’ve made it to our 200th episode.

Craig: It’s insane. I can’t believe we’ve done 200. I didn’t know if we would get past 20.

Todd: I know. Right? I can’t remember. Man, we’ve I this really puts into perspective just how many movies you see over the course of your life, doesn’t it?

Craig: Like Yeah. Yeah.

Todd: If you and I have seen 200 movies once pretty much once a week for the last few years over our lifetimes, how many thousands of movies have we seen?

Craig: I know. I and I like, I told my parents that we were coming up on the 200th episode. My mom’s like, I didn’t even know there were 200 horror movies. Oh, that’s

Todd: so cute. Wow. Well, we probably got at least 200 more horror movies we could review and keep this thing going for I don’t know. Yeah. We’ll see. Don’t ask your mom. She won’t have any good ideas for us. Yeah. When we started out when we started out this podcast, the very first episode we did, was The People Under the Stairs, Wes Craven film. I think we chose it because we were such fans of Wes Craven, but we didn’t wanna do something so obvious and easy right off the bat like Nightmare on Elm Street. Right?

Craig: Right.

Todd: Yeah. So we chose The People Under the Stairs. We had a really good time doing it. We thought, oh, we’ll just kinda keep doing this while it stays fun. That was our pact that we had with each other. Mhmm. And so here we are. We’re still having fun, and it seems like at every little milestone, I think our 100th episode anyway, we’ve kept up this kind of Wes Craven thing for each of our milestones. And so it’s getting harder and harder to do a real quality Wes Craven movie for each of these milestones. Right? Or at least 1 that we really wanna do.

Craig: Right. So this week, we picked music of the heart.

Todd: Yes. The heartwarming tale. We’re going in a different direction. With our 200th episode, we thought, aren’t you guys sick and tired of horror?

Craig: Right. We need, like, an inspirational music kind of thing.

Todd: No. We’re going to romantic comedies. This will become 2 guys and a bouquet of roses. That’s the big announcement we have for you folks. No. What we are gonna say is we’re not gonna promise that for our next milestone, we’re gonna do another Wes Craven movie. So we we decided, at least, at this point, for 200, we would we would just pick 1 of the most iconic ones that we could and the answer is Scream from 1996. You know, we don’t typically do these really popular movies because there’s so much has been said about them already. Everybody kind of already knows so much about them that we we don’t feel like what we can say about the movie really makes much of a dent in the general conversation. Right?

Craig: Yeah. But at the same time, this is 1 of the very few horror franchises that we haven’t touched yet.

Todd: Yeah.

Craig: So we’re gonna have to get around to it eventually, so we may as well start at the beginning.

Todd: Well and you wanted to do, like, scream 3 or scream 2.

Craig: The reason I wanted to do scream 3 is because people usually point to that as being the weakest entry in the franchise, and it’s actually 1 of my favorites. I mean, they lean really heavy into the comedy in scream 3, but I I absolutely love it. So maybe someday we’ll get around to it. But I think that you were right in saying that we should probably, you know, just just go for the original and see where we go from there.

Todd: Well, I also kinda have this thing where, like, I don’t feel right reviewing a sequel until we’ve done the original. Right? So that’s kinda 1 of my weird hang ups about what we choose to do.

Craig: I know...