Can You Really Make a Good Movie Out of a Board Game?
Celebrating the movies that rise above their source material
In a time when anything and everything is being turned into a would-be franchise — including board games like Ouija and Battleship — it’s a wonder that one movie in 1985 became a cult classic, when it could have easily been a forgettable cash grab (Super Mario Bros., anyone?).
We speak of course, of Clue, a mystery farce with a talented cast and clever dialogue. Whodunit? Well, that all depends on which version you saw… not that it matters. The comedy is what makes this movie work.
Instead of turning the popular board game into a serious murder mystery, the movie turned the whole genre on its head, spoofing murder mystery movies that take place in spooky houses.
Tim Curry as the butler and Madeline Kahn as Mrs. White steal every scene they’re in, but they’re not to be outdone by Christopher Lloyd’s Professor Plum (hot off Back to the Future earlier that year), Martin Mull’s Colonel Mustard, Eileen Brennan’s Mrs. Peacock, Michael McKean’s Mr. Green and Lesley Ann Warren’s Miss Scarlet.
Yes, all the characters from the game are present and accounted for, and it’s something of a campy dramatization of what it’s like to play.
Despite mixed reviews and tepid box office, the last three or so decades have been kind to it, and it’s developed a cult following, as well it should.
If any scene captures the movie’s tone, and its great comedic performances, it’s the “flames” scene with improvised dialogue by Madeline Kahn — in which a character’s motivations are explained in the most absurd way. (And only one third of the original theatrical audience even saw this, as it was in one of the endings.)
Want to check out all the hilarious, clever mystery for yourself? Watch Clue’s currently streaming on Tribeca Shortlist, and here are four other films which overcame their origins…
Mars Attacks!
Much like Clue, critics and audiences weren’t entirely kind to this big budget Tim Burton adaptation of a classic series of trading cards.
However, the sheer bizarreness and pitch black sense of humor (more than we’re used to, even from Burton) has made it a minor cult classic.
The trading cards were artistic renderings of a Martian invasion of earth, and much like the source material, this movie goes all out in terms of camp.
Featuring an all-star cast (including Jack Nicholson in two roles), in many ways the people of earth aren’t the heroes at all. Many of the characters are selfish, stupid and in some cases, war-mongering megalomaniacs. There are a handful of sympathetic characters, to be sure, most of whom live to see the post-apocalyptic landscape after the bloodthirsty Martians have laid waste to the planet.
The entire thing is an exercise in absurdity — to the point where it can be fairly called nihilistic — including the solution to stopping the Martians.
Keep in mind that this movie came a few months after Independence Day, so it served as an accidental spoof of that movie as well.
If Clue is a brilliant parody of murder mysteries, this movie does the same for the alien invasion disaster movie.
The Lego Movie
Few people went into a movie based on the classic building block toys expecting brilliant satire, and yet that’s exactly what they got with this 2014 hit.
Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks and Will Ferrell voice the stop-motion characters, including Emmet, who is going through an existential crisis in a world made completely of Legos.
The laugh-a-second writing is as sharp as anything by the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team, and might be one of the best family movies of a decade. That twist at the end is quite a stunner, as well, and the movie’s message is actually quite profound.
If you’d been resisting any movie about Legos, give it a look, as well as this year’s equally clever Lego Batman Movie.
Jaws
Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws is hardly considered a great work of literature. Many critics ripped it to shreds as having uninteresting, unsympathetic characters. Even the film adaptation’s director — a relative newcomer named Steven Spielberg — agreed.
Nevertheless, this is one of those rare examples of a movie that was much better than the book. Jaws set box office records one year after the novel was published, and is still considered one of the best thrillers ever made — plus it scared a lot of Americans away from the ocean for a while.
Those unlikable characters are made much more sympathetic thanks to great performances by Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw.
Of course, the direction by Spielberg is incredible, and it launched his career into the stratosphere.
New Times film critic Frank Rich wrote, “Spielberg is blessed with a talent that is absurdly absent from most American filmmakers these days: this man actually knows how to tell a story on screen. … It speaks well of this director’s gifts that some of the most frightening sequences in Jaws are those where we don’t even see the shark.”
Needless to say, Jaws is a must-see for any film aficionado… but skip the book.
Saturday Night Fever
By now, everyone knows this 40 year old film captured the disco zeitgeist and made John Travolta a bona fide movie star.
It was also a box office hit and critical smash at the time. Gene Siskel considered this his favorite movie of all time, the top point where he bought Travolta’s suit at an auction.
Critics raved about how it nailed the fact that dance can make an ordinary person feel extraordinary, such as a poor dreamer like Tony Manero.
What many may not know is that it’s adapted from a New York magazine article called “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” which was widely praised for explaining the disco phenomenon.
The reporter Nik Cohn would reveal many years later, however, that the entire article was a work of fiction. After a disastrous visit to a disco club in Brooklyn, the British writer proceeded to craft a phony story based on people he knew in the U.K.
That’s right, a great movie work of fiction was based on a work of fact, that was actually also a work of fiction.
As well-received as the article was, it was fraudulently presented to readers — so it’s fair to say that Saturday Night Fever unknowingly overcame its dubious origins.
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