“You’re going to have to be quicker than that if you want to play T.A.G.”

Justin’s rating: Pew and pew

Justin’s review: When I first started attending college, older students told me how there used to be this highly popular assassination game — creatively called The Game — that used to rage across campus over the year. Allegedly, the administration cracked down on it just prior to me getting there, which is too bad, because it sounded like a lot of fun. Y’know, as long as it didn’t get out of hand.

Perhaps this wasn’t as original a concept as I once thought, because Hollywood made a movie about a very similar idea all the way back in 1982. TAG: The Assassination Game focuses on a bunch of college kids engrossed in an ongoing game of tag, where players have targets to hunt down with these little suction-cup pistols while trying to avoid getting “killed” themselves. Participants are super-super into this, with booby traps, secret weapons, a scoreboard, and a whole rulebook. There’s even a headquarters run by a guy who wears a vest and sunglasses.

Susan (Linda Hamilton, The Terminator) is in the midst of some terminatin’ of her own when she bumps into college newspaper reporter and expert cigar chomper Alex (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds) while hiding from an assassin. He’s pretty intrigued by this film noir femme fatale and starts following her to write a piece on this underground activity that’s already frazzling the college board.

While Alex is scoping out the, erm, competition, one of the TAG players finds himself facing a mental break. Gersh (Bruce Abbott, Re-Animator) is the top champ at the game… until he gets shot one day — pretty much by accident — and loses. That absolutely cannot happen, he reasons, and so Gersh decides to graduate to the next level by hunting players down with a real pistol. I guess he’s kind of like Tom Hanks’ character in Mazes & Monsters who also gets too deep into a game that it becomes dangerous.

TAG isn’t one of the more well-known films from the ’80s, and I can tell you why. It wants to be two very disparate things at the same time: a cheeky action flick and a tense slasher. These don’t work well together, so the tone ricochets back and forth between some more amusing parts and this psychotic killer stalking his victims.

To pile on a little more, the sound and video quality (at least on the version I saw) is very poor, suggesting an extremely low budget. So much of this film takes place in the evening or at night, and with this film stock and bad lighting, it’s incredibly hard to see what’s going on half the time.

Yet TAG is somewhat engaging even so. I think it’s pretty cool to have a movie set on an university campus that’s not exactly your typical college film. If they didn’t make Gersh an actual killer, this could’ve been a much better story with consistent low stakes of this game played with high intensity.

This is also stocked with some big names. Linda Hamilton is sultry and confident and has pretty good chemistry with the more laid-back Carradine. Their budding romance is tested in the forge of real danger, paving the way for some hefty couples counseling bills in the future. There’s also Michael Winslow (Police Academy) and Forrest Whitaker (Ghost Dog) in some early roles.

Honestly, TAG should’ve picked a lane and stuck with it instead of trying to be a couple different things half-heartedly. Still, it’s fun to see Hamilton giggling and prancing around like a fun-loving college kid for once.

Intermission!

• Writer-Director Nick Castle was a protegee of John Carpenter, involved in projects such as Halloween and Escape from New York. He’d later direct some cult flicks like The Last Starfighter and Major Payne. Castle was originally tapped to direct Hook, but Steven Spielberg pushed him out of the project.
• In a strange coincidence, Carradine’s Revenge of the Nerds co-star Anthony Edwards starred in a similar movie: 1985’s Gotcha.
• That newspaper with cut-out eyes is very sneaky and not noticeable at all. Oh wait, he got noticed.
• The James Bond parody credits
• Hearing Linda Hamilton giggle is so bizarre to me. I’m more used to hearing her scream “NOOOOO!” at giant robots
• College newspapers have an awful lot of frosted glass-enclosed rooms for offices
• The operator pinching her nose to talk nasally
• Booby-trapped door
• Throwing the girl back into the pool after her ruse was humorous
• “I don’t even hear you, dead men don’t speak.”
• She gets upset when he sneaks in her room, even when she did it to him?
• Car phone in 1982!
• There’s so much smoking in this film
• Carradine smirks in that way that looks exactly like his nerd persona
• “Everybody likes to play games, don’t they?”
• That’s a sad race
• The guy standing behind the headless statue framed in a way that looks like he’s got breasts
• Michael Winslow speaking only in sound effects
• Apparently, there are no rules against having a mouse partner
• “Hold the front page, Alex got laid!”