From Ozploitation to Ice-T, Squid Game is just the latest splatter of class warfare on screen
South Korean horror drama Squid Game has quickly become Netflix’s most-watched series. For those who haven’t seen it, the premise is simple: a group of contestants on the poverty line are pitted against each other in a series of deadly games, all for the entertainment of the super-rich.
At its core – and partly why it’s so compelling – is the class struggle. We’re living in a time where the gap between extreme wealth and extreme poverty has never been wider, so the concept of the rich exploiting the poor for sport, or simply to alleviate boredom, feels particularly deranged.
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But Squid Game is far from the first time class warfare has been explored on screen, and there are a couple of standouts – including an underrated US action film and a cult Australian horror movie – waiting patiently to be rediscovered.
The Most Dangerous Game – a 1932 thriller about a hunter stalking humans as prey – was loosely remade in the 1990s, with two separate films that established the hunted characters as homeless men. The first was 1993’s Hard Target, directed by John Woo and starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. It was followed just eight months later by the Ernest R Dickerson-directed Surviving the Game, which has lived in Hard Target’s shadow for far too long.
Surviving the Game sees Ice-T in career-best form as Jack Mason, a homeless man hunted through the wilderness of the Pacific north-west by a dream team of 1990s character actors including Rutger Hauer, Gary Busey, Charles S Dutton, John C McGinley and F Murray Abraham.
Hauer, a mysterious businessman, leads the charge for the hunters. Like the organisation in Squid Game, he masks his true intentions behind a facade of helpfulness, offering Mason a job on his team and the opportunity to get back on his feet. Mason agrees to participate, without fully understanding what he’s getting into.
Like all good entries in the genre, the bad guys see the protagonist as an “other” – as someone beneath them. In Surviving The Game, Mason is deemed to be “nothing”; but Ice-T’s character has other plans and sets about levelling the playing field by dispatching his pursuers in ingenious and bloody fashion.
In a similar ballpark is the homegrown 1982 Ozploitation film Turkey Shoot (retitled Blood Camp Thatcher for its UK release and Escape 2000 in the US), in which celebrities and politicians trudge through the Queensland rainforest, hunting inmates from a dystopian prison camp. The elite view the experience as a privilege to which they are entitled, with evil hunter Tito (Michael Petrovitch) stating: “Excess is what makes life worth living – for people like us.”
Turkey Shoot achieved cult status across the globe, including a superfan in Quentin Tarantino.
Hampered by a shrinking budget, director Brian Trenchard-Smith needed a way to make his movie stand out and the answer was simple – more blood! Because, as he states in his excellent memoir Adventures in the B Movie Trade, “blood is cheap”.
Turkey Shoot’s claret-strewn, explosive mayhem won’t be to everyone’s taste, but for those seeking to understand why Australian sleaze horror is a genre unto itself – Ozploitation – this is the perfect place to start.
Related: Turkey Shoot rewatched – video-game carnage in a dystopian future
Other notable variations on the elite-hunt-underclass theme include 1987 dystopian action film The Running Man, where Arnold Schwarzenegger is hunted on reality TV. More recently, 2019’s comedy horror Ready Or Not stars Samara Weaving as a bride who is stalked on her wedding night by maniac in-laws desperate to preserve their wealth and status at her expense.
Rich people gambling on the lives of the poor is another present theme in Squid Game. For a classic example on screen, you can’t go past John Landis’s 1983 comedy Trading Places, in which two geriatric millionaires make a bet to switch the fortunes of commodities broker Dan Aykroyd and street hustler Eddie Murphy for the princely sum of $1. And in 2016 horror The Belko Experiment (by Wolf Creek director and Australian Greg McLean), ordinary office workers are pitted against each other in a death match at the behest of a shadowy gambling syndicate.
If you’re on a dystopian roll, Hard Target 2 starring action dynamo Scott Adkins, and The Hunt starring Glow’s Betty Gilpin, are both arriving on Netflix in November. And The Most Dangerous Game is getting yet another remake later this year under the title Apex, starring Bruce Willis as the prey.
In real life, billionaires are firing themselves into space for fun. But on television and in the movies it looks as if there’s no cure for their affluent ennui … where they will continue to hunt and gamble and toy with lives.
