Also known as Deception, Reindeer Games gets off to a good start with Ben Affleck in jail, but then hes released and hooks up with Charlize Theron and Gary Sinise, who are planning to rob a casino. At Christmas. While dressed as Santas. Dimension Films had so little faith in this movie that they removed it from their Christmas 1999 line-up and instead released it in the US the following February, the traditional dumping ground for movies the studios want to be rid of. In the UK, the movie was released in June, and you can imagine how it fared at the box office. The endings a classic: after killing Theron and Sinise, Affleck walks home, stuffing his ill-gotten gains into mail boxes along the way. In the final shot, hes shown eating Christmas dinner with his folks, and nobody thinks to ask why hes dressed as Santa when he just got out of prison.
Ian Watson is the author of 'Midnight Movie Madness', a 600+ page guide to "bad" movies from 'Reefer Madness' to 'Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead.'
