Someone else is coming down the chimney tonight in the brutal French HOME ALONE-precursory DEADLY GAMES, on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome.

The son of a wealthy department store owner, ten-year-old Thomas (Alain Musy) has everything he could want but friends. He has a high IQ and a creative imagination, living out fantasies of playing Rambo in the family chateau of secret passages going back generations and newer traps created by the boy who has set up a high-tech security monitoring system with one goal in mind: to prove the existence of Santa to his classmates, getting the jolly old man on video and maybe even capturing him. When Mom (Brigitte Fossey, FORBIDDEN GAMES) and her colleague/boyfriend Roland (François-Eric Gendron, TOO BEAUTIFUL TO DIE) are away for the Christmas Eve sale extravaganza, leaving Thomas to take care of his hard-of-hearing, cataract-afflicted, diabetic grandfather (Louis Ducreux, THE DOUBLE LIFE OF VERONIQUE), Santa comes down the chimney at midnight… and kills Thomas' dog when it senses danger before coming after Thomas and his grandfather. Unbeknownst to Thomas, Santa is a mentally-unstable vagrant (Patrick Floersheim, DIVA) who Thomas' mother just fired as a mall Santa. Utilizing his security system to track Santa and setting up an array of deadly (and explosive) traps, Thomas must elude Santa long enough for his mother and the police to arrive. All Thomas believes is his mother's warning that if he tries to see Santa, jolly old Saint Nick will become an angry ogre… but can Thomas kill Santa Claus to save himself and his grandfather?

Bearing a superficial resemblance to the American Christmas comedy HOME ALONE, DEADLY GAMES – also known as DIAL CODE: SANTA CLAUS and GAME OVER – is considerably darker, a brutal coming-of-age story patterned itself after the eighties action films of which Thomas is so enamored, with Bonnie Tyler's theme song underscoring a third act montage in which Thomas mourns his best friend (and his childhood) and painfully treats his wounds with makeshift supplies. Musy, the son of director René Manzor and now a visual effects producer for prolific British company Cinesite, is expressive and carries the film's emotional core with support from Fossey and Ducreux while dubbing artist Floersheim (who died last year) manages to be both frightening and pitiable when he becomes mesmerized by a musical wind-up train that Thomas has strapped with a grenade (actually a toy grenade packed with real gunpowder). Manzor's direction is flashy in the best of the eighties style, incorporating plenty of Steadicam, motion control moves, and editing that scream eighties but still seem more state-of-the-art than the heavy push onscreen of the Minitel teletype model-based computers and public kiosks rolled out in France earlier in the decade (the French title 36.15 CODE PÈRE NOËL referring to a number for children to call up Santa during the Christmas holiday). Manzor was a contemporary of the post-New Wave generation of French directors like Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix who embraced mainstream Hollywood influences, although Manzor's move to Hollywood consisted of directing television episodes of RED SHOE DIARIES, THE HITCHHIKER, HIGHLANDER: THE SERIES with a number of feature-length episodes of THE ADVENTURES OF YOUNG INDIANA JONES the closest he got to Hollywood cinematic exports while his other two subsequent features the comedy A WITCH'S WAY TO LOVE and the thriller LABYRINTH only found distribution outside France in European and Asian territories.

Unreleased in the United States – possibly due to the U.S. controversy over SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT and the U.K.'s concern post-Video Nasty with "imitable behavior" – DEADLY GAMES was remastered in 2K from the original camera negative as a joint venture between the French boutique label Le Chat Qui Fume and German label Camera Obscura who both put out Blu-ray/DVD combo editions in 2017. Both editions featured English subtitles for the film but only the German edition subtitled the shared extras. Vinegar Syndrome's UltraHD/Blu-ray combo comes from a new 4K restoration of the original camera negative and looks truly astonishing, retaining the saturated colors of the smoky, backlit eighties photography and a tactile sense of fine detail that makes the violence even more impactful along with the vulnerability of the boy and his grandfather while model shots and mockups of the exterior of the chateau also hold up well. The sole audio option is a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 stereo encoding of the original French Dolby Stereo track – although an English-narrated trailer exists for the film, it does not appear to have been dubbed into English – with optional English subtitles.

The UltraHD disc only includes the feature in 2160p24 HEVC 1.85:1 widescreen (their first HDR 4K title) while the Blu-ray includes the feature in 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen along with all of the Le Chat Qui Fume/Camera Obscura extras starting with "Forbidden Toys" 2017 interview with director Manzor (88:46) in which he makes the annoying claim that there was no genre cinema in France after the war until his film, dismissing the work of filmmakers like Jean Rollin, Jess Franco, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In addition to pre-war fantasy filmmakers like Jean Cocteau and Maurice Duvivier, Manzor holds up Hollywood filmmakers like Spielberg and De Palma among his influences along with mainstream French directors derided by the New Wave crowd, referring to his choice of studio shooting as revolutionary at the time and suggesting that it is the reason he is disliked by arthouse critics. He discusses the reception of his previous feature THE PASSAGE in spite of headlining Alain Delon, and how difficult it was to find work after it; however, he found himself developing a better visual sense as a director in the interim by editing trailers. Of DEADLY GAMES, he recalls that his son was the natural choice after having revealed a natural talent in THE PASSAGE where he played Delon's character as a child, former child star Fossey's more recent notice as Sophie Marceau's mother in the hit youth film LA BOUM, and Floersheim's popularity as the French dubber of several Hollywood stars (fluent in English, he also dubbed Delon's performance for the English dub of THE PASSAGE). He discusses the challenges of directing his son in a more demanding role, with his wife being on set to mother the child while he directed him through a series of games. Vintage video footage reveals a surprising maturity in ten year old Musy who expresses his dislike of the character Thomas's love of war and violence.

In "To Become a Man" (40:50), a grown Musy reveals that he never thought of himself as an actor, just playing a series of games with his father and the cast, recalling his experiences with Delon on THE PASSAGE, and suggesting that his father was motivated to write DEADLY GAMES by his own mourning of his son growing up and leaving childhood behind. He also reveals that his father and the producers tried to keep Floersheim away from him until the shoot by telling him the actor was unstable, but he discovered that was untrue upon seeing him with his own children and managed to play against the older man while enjoying a friendship off-camera (noting that he psyched himself up for their first confrontation as much as Floersheim who actually did crack his head on the car windshield to splinter it). "Simon Says Roll Sound" (8:47) is a behind the scenes short from the time of production following Musy around the set and introducing cast and crew members while Manzor's award-winning 1981 animated short film "Synapses" (5:20) is also included to show his developing visual sense. Unlike its playback in the film, Bonnie Tyler's "Merry Christmas" music video (2:54) features optional subtitles for the lyrics. A still gallery (18:13) has subtitled French audio commentary by Manzor in which he points out the crew members in the photographs and discusses the budget-conscious production.