“No! Anything but disco!”

Justin’s rating: My closet is nothing BUT creature cards

Justin’s review: It’s time for another trip back to pop culture’s extremely brief attempt to make VHS board games a thing. In 1986, Pressman Toy Corp. put out a pair of its own original creations: Doorways to Adventure and Doorways to Horror. These plundered copyright-free material from old Hollywood to stitch together into a strange and often silly party game experience.

As the opening scroll says, players would encounter “goofy ghouls,” “whacky weirdos,” and “cantankerous creations” as they rolled colored die and then fast-forwarded the VHS tape until they saw a doorway with the matching color. A short scene from some ancient horror flick was shown, and players would select a card to see if they could capture that beast and earn gold.

None of these clips are attributed to any film, which is a shame, but a narrator does provide some context to draw the player into the scene. This is invariably followed by a groan-worthy pun, sometimes bordering on outright riffing on these scenes. That’s right, this is a proto-MST3K experience, a couple years before Joel and the Bots started doing their stuff.

What’s a little strange is that there’s rarely any sound from these movie scenes — the board game creators overlay their own cheesy music and narration instead.

While I do wish that they had given on-screen attribution to the source of these movie clips, especially since some looked interesting enough to want to see in their full format, Doorways to Horror is a passibly entertaining trip even so. It’s a parade of bad costumes, goofy makeup, and over-the-top acting. I’m willing to bet that watching this would’ve been the first time a lot of viewers would be exposed to these titles, some of which obviously date back to the Silent Film era.

As this plays out in under an hour, it’s a quick watch that’s more like getting a clip show than a running narrative story. It’s a curiosity, maybe perfect to put on in the background at a Halloween party.

Intermission!

• The magic of COLORSCAN!
• Seaweed monster! “Just yell KELP! and run.”
• “Now that was a close shave.”
• It’s Night of the Living Dead!
• It’s Nosferatu!
• Gravedigger’s Local 16 did us all a huge favor by compiling a full list of all the movies referenced here
• “Now pause the tape because… I think I hear Santa Claus coming!”
• It’s Little Shop of Horror!
• Vampires are an “equal opportunity profession”
• This music loop gets old, fast