Night of the Dribbler: A Basketball-Slasher Movie!

Night of the Dribbler was made in 1990 … and wasn’t released until 2009.

Night of the Dribbler might be the only film of its type … thankfully

Night of the Dribbler is NOT a good movie. But as far as slasher movies go, it might be one of one in the annals of horror film history. 

Sure, there are plenty of horror movies that are adjacent to basketball. But Night of the Dribbler might be the only horror movie ever that’s explicitly about basketball — to the point the mad slasher of the movie wears a basketball mask on his head. Pretty much the only other genre movie that has this many basketball scenes in it is Teen Wolf, and calling that a “pure” horror movie is being very loose with the term. But yeah, I guess you could say the same about Night of the Dribbler.

It’s probably more accurate to say Night of the Dribbler is a parody of slasher movies. Clearly, it’s closer to something like Wacko or Return to Horror High than it is Tenebre or Maniac, and the humor in the film is … lacking … to say the least. Think of Night of the Dribbler as the WORST possible thing National Lampoon could ever film and you kinda, sorta get the gist of the flick’s brand of comedy. It’s all cornball puns and low-hanging fruit, although a few lines of dialogue are almost funny in a cosmologically bad dad joke kind of way. Take, for example, a scene where a basketball player asks his coach why a certain strategy is called “King Lear.” To which the coach responds “because it’s a great play.”

Really, the story behind the movie is much more interesting than the film itself. It was filmed in Quebec in 1990 but was shelved for 19 years; it didn’t get a wide, physical media release until 2009. It was directed by Jack Bravman, who is probably best known for the z-tier not-so-cult-classic Zombie Nightmare, whose filmography mostly consists of outright pornos. And as for the cast, it features a star studded assortment of literally nobody you’ve ever heard of before. This is a movie that was genetically engineered to be forgotten at all costs, but hey, we’ve got to cover something to coincide with the NBA finals. The pickings couldn’t possibly get any slimmer at this point.

Night of the Dribbler is a difficult movie to review, not because it’s bad, per se, but because so very little stuff of significance happens in it. With visual gag-heavy films of the like, there’s just a threadbare, largely nonsensical story pinning everything down and the rest of the picture is just chaff. It’s a movie that has some moments, but it’s mostly a movie that lollygags and fumbles around just wasting everybody’s time. It could’ve been a five minute Mad TV sketch, or maybe even a two minute fake trailer a’la Grindhouse. But lucky us, we’ve been gifted an hour and a half of this stuff to sit through.

It’s your typical whodunnit slasher plot here. The setting is a community college in French-speaking Canada, although everybody speaks in English. Somebody wearing a rubber basketball Halloween mask is killing (or trying to kill) all of the school’s basketball players and what do you know, the big annual rivalry game is right around the corner. Can the mysterious killer be identified and brought to justice before the court-side bragging rights are determined? Look, just pretend to care for a few more paragraphs, OK?

The cast of characters are weird, to put it mildly. The coach looks like real life NBA coach Pat Riley, but he talks in a weird accent that makes him totally sound like Squidward from SpongeBob. Another character looks and talks just like Elvis, for no discernible reason whatsoever. And the guy who does play by play commentary for the basketball games does a whole bunch of terrible impersonations over the course of the film. Everybody is one-dimensional and generally flavorless, which isn’t exactly an aberration for the slasher sub-genre. But everything is played for alleged laughs, even the murder scenes. Which brings us to the most disappointing thing about Night of the Dribbler as a whole.

Look, very few of us watch slasher movies for nuanced plots and enlightened discussions of the human condition. If you’re going to market a movie about a psycho killer, even in a goofy comedy, you at least expect psycho killing to play a prominent part of the story. Here, the deranged slasher doesn’t do much slashing at all and virtually all of the kills (or maimings) are totally bloodless and devoid of consequence. For example, there’s a scene where the killer rigs a basketball net with razors so a guy who goes for a slam dunk gets his arms sliced off. Well, not only does the character survive the double amputation, they don’t even show the active appendage loss. Later on the killer bumps off a woman by simply locking her in a hot shower, and just wait until he slips a time bomb disguised as a basketball into the championship game. If you’re expecting Twitch of the Death Nerve here, be forewarned: the end result more closely resembles an old Wile E. Coyote cartoon than anything else. 

Even as a whodunnit there’s not much suspended to be found. Indeed, it’s glaringly obvious who the mad killer is barely 20 minutes into the movie and the film doesn’t even attempt to red herring us. None of the characters are all that likeable, none of them are relatable and outside of a few rare circumstances, nobody says anything even remotely funny or clever. But on the plus side, EVERYBODY in the film rocks some rad looking jump suits. So at least the movie has that going for it.

There’s obviously potential with the concept of a basketball slasher movie, but Night of the Dribbler totally misses at the free throw line. On a technical level there’s nothing completely amateurish about it, it’s just that the script doesn’t work in any facet. Which is a shame, really, because with some better writing behind it Dribbler COULD have been a halfway decent horror comedy. Still, it has some appeal as a derivative slasher with a hyper-specific conceit and to be fair, that psycho killer basketball mask isn’t that bad looking at all. 

This thing is just screaming for a remake, y’all. And it’s not like it could be any worse than Space Jam 2, could it?