“MURDER! MURDER!”

Justin’s rating: Miss Scarlet with the wrench in the observatory

Justin’s review: Earlier this week as I write this, I showed my four kids the 1985 classic comedy Clue for the first time. They were a little wary at first, not ever having sat through a murder mystery, but by the end they were giggling, shrieking, and demanding to see it again. So what better frame of mind to tackle the completely unrelated (save for the tenuous connection to its source IP) Clue VCR Mystery Game?

Like all of these VCR board games, Clue was meant to accompany actions taken with a physical game in real life and not necessarily meant to be watched solo as I’m doing now.

Filmed in New England with local talent, Clue is charming in its mixture of colorful characters and straight-forward storytelling. Everyone here looks and sounds as if they are normal people who got dolled up for a whodunit dinner party, and their outlandish looks and behaviors helps to keep the 10 of them straight.

It’s a dark and stormy night — of course it is — and a will is being read to a group of people who more or less know each other and are fondling all sorts of weapons. I was quite fond of the professor mixing together poisons in the hallway and kitchen like this is a completely sane, completely normal thing to do.

When the party finds out that the will only pays out to the last surviving member of the group, the stage is set for a string of murders to speed things along. And oh boy, have you never witnessed a movie where everyone is so gleefully homicidal. There’s so much poison and weapons floating about to trigger a second Jonestown.

Strangely enough, nobody gets killed on screen despite all of the willingness to do so. The only explanation is that everyone keeps getting distracted by all of the soap opera developments and the machinations of a teddy bear that takes center stage in more scenes than you should assume.

This isn’t an outright comedy like the 1985 movie, but that doesn’t mean that this VCR game isn’t humorous in its own way. Personally, I found the overly complicated instructions doled out by the butler Didit to be funny as I imagined friends going cross-eyed trying to figure out how to simply play this. And I snorted when he told players to be “good losers” when they guessed wrong.

But unlike some of the other VCR games I’ve watched, at least Clue is a straight-forward narrative that continues a story from start to end. However, you have to have a high tolerance for stereotypes and stage-like overacting to make it through this… and a lack of fear for threatening teddy bears, blackmail letters, and campy seances.

Intermission!

• Lots of people fondling weapons at a dinner party
• All jars of poison should have a giant skull and crossbones
• “You don’t have a clue!” Hey that’s the name of the game.
• “I can swim to the next town!”
• The policeman has amnesia
• These people are too excited to talk about poisons
• “He never made me taste… the salad.”
• You should never leave poison around food.
• Everyone stuffing poison into various rings and sleeves and whatnot
• You can send out for “French food?”
• This guy really, really wants pizza
• The cop throttling the teddy bear: “HE STARTED IT”
• The butler being fake murdered to get the murder train started
• Everyone in chapter 2 wearing bandages and slings
• Haha Miss Scarlet shooting the TV
• And then the second TV getting taken out by a candlestick
• The teddy bear holding the knife
• Gypsies stole her baby?
• All of the spirits jockeying to be heard
• And suddenly we’re hearing what they’re thinking?
• You can buy a French accent from someone else
• MAGNET HEAD!
• Everyone going absolutely bat-crazy at the end… and tying up the teddy bear