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Fatal Games

Tagline: "There can only be one winner in this contest. Their mistake was to even compete!"

🎄 Holiday Cheer Breakdown 🎄

No specific holiday elements identified.

Director: Michael Elliot

Release Year: 1984

Runtime: 88 min

Streaming Platforms: AMC Plus Apple TV Channel , AMC+ Amazon Channel, AMC+, Shudder, Shudder Amazon Channel, Cultpix, Shudder Apple TV Channel, Troma NOW

Plot Summary: The young athletes of Falcon Academy are training hard to earn their place in the nationals. But when these burgeoning sports stars start disappearing one after the other, Dr. Jordine and his team - who’ve started plying their athletes with new and untested performance-enhancing drugs - are baffled.

Holidays: N/A

A seven member gymnastics team—Annie Rivers, Sue Allen Baines, Nancy Wilson and Frank Agee, gymnastics; Joe Ward and Phil Dandridge, track and field; and Lynn Fox, swimming—at the Falcon Academy of Athletics in Brookfall, Massachusetts is up for a Nationals competition. Dr. Jordine and his assistant, Diane, oversee the athletes' progress and administer them a number of performance-enhancing experimental steroids. Diane expresses to Dr. Jordine that she feels their medicalization to be unethical, but wavers as he tells her this is the culmination of his life's work.
In the days leading up to the Nationals competition, the athletes at Brookfall begin to disappear, first with Nancy, who is impaled with a javelin by an assailant in a black tracksuit with an obscured face. Meanwhile, Annie is struggling to balance her studies and school as well as her commitment to her athletic pursuits. Phil, her boyfriend, is a source of emotional support.
As the members of Falcon Academy continue to be murdered by the javelin-armed killer and disappear, Annie and Phil attempt to uncover the source for their teammates' disappearances. Frank is subsequently injured in a training accident that leaves him with a broken leg and requires him to use crutches. While investigating the academy one night, Frank finds the corpses of the murdered students in unused lockers in the basement before being confronted by the killer, who murders him with the javelin on a staircase.
Simultaneously, Annie has also entered the academy, and hears Frank's screams before being chased by the killer herself. She narrowly manages to escape the assailant, who stabs her before she is saved by Phil. Phil brings an injured Annie to Diane's training office to locate medical supplies. Unbeknownst to them, Diane is revealed to be the killer, and she quickly removes her disguise before the two see her in the office. Phil leaves to get help, assuming Diane will treat Annie's wound. Annie notices a newspaper clipping in the office detailing how the once Olympic hopeful Diane underwent a botched gender reassignment surgery and was disqualified from the Olympics due to her testing positive for a significant amount of male sex hormones. Realizing Annie has discovered her ruse, Diane—now speaking in a lower register—attacks her, revealing her motive to disqualify the competitors out of jealousy. Diane chases Annie into the gymnasium and climbs onto a painter's scaffold in the rafters, from which Annie manages to push her off. Diane falls onto a table in the gymnasium, where she is impaled to death by a competitor trophy.

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