Monopolizing Horror

Movie and TV themed Monopoly™ games have been around for years. And while the graphics get slicked up, game play is still the classic “buy/sell/buy/go to jail.” (It’s almost a certainty that whoever ends up owning Boardwalk and Park Place and built hotels on ’em will win every time. Unless you’re like me and load up on utilities. Hey, I had insider information…)

My dubious financial acumen aside, Monopoly™ has been around since the early 1900s (with the first Parker Brothers version coming out in 1933), and is the most popular and successful board game of all time, making about one trillion dollars a year. Give or take.

So no big surprise that Entertainment Earth™ is offering limited themed editions of the game, the latest being Cthulhu Monopoly™, based on the dark workings of horror forefather, H.P. Lovecraft. Check out this action…

“Set foot for Miskatonic University, and battle it out with other Cthulhu occultists to find out who truly is the Great Old One among you. This Cthulhu Collector’s Edition Monopoly™ game features fun Cthulhu and H.P. Lovecraftian style imagery, plus game tokens straight from the Cthulhu mythos. The winner of Cthulhu Monopoly™ shall be deemed most like the Great Old One and the most fit to inherit his mantle. Whether you win or not, you lose and become one of Cthulhu’s mindless zombies.”

I must own this game, no matter what. You – and me – can pre-order now for a December 2015 release for only $39.99. (Good thing it isn’t $40.00 as I need that coin to invest in railroads.)

And for fans of more zombies, there’s The Walking Dead™ edition Monopoly™. Instead of going to jail on a bad dice roll, you get your face eaten off. Neat!

Dead and Buried: Obscene But Not Heard

Dead & Buried, a 1981 lurid crap classic and, despite its budgetary limitations, actually added a new twist to the zombie genre without evening knowing it or promoting itself as a zombie movie. But to tell you what it is, I’d have to spoil the entire thing. By doing so, as the neighbor’s 4 year-old kid says, will have me “going to jail for a very long time.”

Since I don’t want to go to jail for any length of time, I’ll just give you a few of the juicy details – and by that, I mean oozing, shiny juicy gore.

Potter’s Bluff is a small coastal New England town where its residents act nice at first, then bash you over the head with hard objects, tie you up, then light you on fire while you’re still screaming about being hit with hard objects. As you’re doing your best Joan of Arc impersonation, this large group of PB’s citizens take pictures and home movie footage, all the while showing about as much emotion as someone totally wasted on Zima™.

If you somehow manage to live, you get taken to the hospital, where a nurse will give you a co-pay lethal injection in the eye. Then off to the coroner you go, while the local sheriff searches for clues as to who is wasting gasoline and matches on tourists.

Daily explicit and grisly deaths, with the recently deceased showing up soon thereafter, fit as a fiddle, looking no worse for wear and tear (emphasis on the tear). The sheriff is flummoxed (word of the day calendar –sweet), but slowly starts to assemble the clues. It isn’t until he stumbles across footage of the townsfolk’s handiwork that he loses it, especially since one clip involves his wife and… Uh oh.

During this, the emotionally distraught sheriff also discovers who is behind all this madness. And it’s right here we get the money shot. In a sweet twist, the horror of all this “bringing ‘em back to life” whack-a-do pays off like a max bet penny slot machine. Did for me, anyway.

FYI: Due to its unflinching gore and violence, Dead & Buried was initially banned as a “video nasty” in the UK in the early 1980s, but was later acquitted of obscenity charges and removed from the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list. Whew!

The Dead Belong In Jail

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: a bunch of dweebs sneak into an abandoned funeral home to party. Someone whips out a Ouija board, thereby unwittingly summoning the dead. One by one the dumb asses are possessed, hacked, sliced and diced by mean undead warriors with glowing evil eyeballs and machetes on loan from Friday the 13th (1980) — and not even graphically enough to warrant a G-rated bandage.

 

The gore in the lazily contrived Prison of the Dead (2000) is so PC’d, all you get to see is a couple of ketchup squirts simulating a violent act. They should give away french fries with this flick. And where the hell has illicit sex gone in these Z-grade handle jigglers? No one drops top anymore, which breaks the #1 cardinal rule of low-budget videos.

Prison’s most notable scene comes at the end where the “action” abruptly stops as though it were my car driving around on $1.25 of gas. The director either ran out of money or ran out of ideas. Hard to believe the latter as the whole movie is as cookie cutter as it gets. Someone needs to go to prison for this.