Bored Scared Stiff (1986) - Weasello Rating: {----} (Don't even waste your time reading this)

As this movie is incredibly incredibly horrible and isn't even really that entertaining, I decided to do an all-out plot description. Therefore, spoilers are contained in the "plot" section; if you don't wish to see them thar spoilers, just skip it!

Warning: Plethora of bad strikethrough jokes used in this writeup to help ease the pain.

Body Count: 3 or 4 on-screen deaths (one of which is questionable), all of which are ultimately questionable. Plus two already dead people.

Porn Count: You've probably already guessed that this movie is pretty bad, and if you have, you are correct. You would also venture to assume, that since this movie is of such suckage, it would include a big pile of boobs or maybe some man-ass to make up for the suck-tastic-ness. Unfortunately, you'd be wrong in that assumption.

The best you get is some bare ankle, and maybe a single shot of cleavage.

One sentence plot summary: I'll quote a user-review on IMDB for this one. I can't seem to top it. "Awful film about a family moving into a new house and falling prey to a rubber faced African voodoo monster that possesses a man and forces him to kill his family."

The Plot: Let's see if I can write out this whole thing without seizing up. If it suddenly ends without warning, it's because my brain has rejected my requests for more information, refusing to let my body run through this bizzarre form of suicide.

OK, so there's this Psychiatrist named David Young. A few months after treating a patient of his, Kate Christopher, he decides to get all romantically involved with her and she moves in with him. Kate brings her son with her, Jason (who is, incidentally, the worst child actor I've ever seen in my entire life ever of all time worst ever ever).

We are treated to some backstory of some sort, something about how two hundred years ago there was some slave trader living in the same house. This slave trader had an uncanny likeness to David, and guess what? His wife and son also have an uncanny resembelance to Kate and Jason.

Apparantly slave-trader-guy's wife felt sorry for some slaves and hid them in the attic of their house. The husband, an obviously huge rascist, immediately proceeded to the attic and blew away the hidden slaves as soon as he found out about them. Unfortunately for the husband, the slaves were doing their African Rubber Mask Voodoo Dance, and he became cursed and started turning into a scary monster guy. Thankfully, before they died, the slaves gave the old wife a sacred amulet to protect her and her son from the rubbery ultra realistic and scary monster thing.

Anyway, back in modern times, a diary is found and there are some corpses found in the attic of this new house. David gets the police to haul the bones away, and finds out that they were the bones of the old wife and son duo. It turns out (information via the diary) that the wife dropped the amulet when running away from the rubber-masked freak and it broke in half - so the monster thingy locked the pair away in a trunk to be suffocated and/or starve to death.

This is a nice little convenient back-story that makes sure the evil is still present today.

As things start going haywire and a little creepy around the house, Kate starts getting very nervous and freaked out. Being the stellar Psychologist he is, David gets very annoyed and angry with Kate and her "visions." Remember now, Kate is David's ex-patient of questionable mental health; but this is not alluded to in the film.

Things start getting creepier and creepier, with pigeons flying around the house and big rubbery transparancy special effects whizzing around, and Kate's had enough. She tries to take Jason and leave the house, but David stands in their way - looking just like the evil monster thing from before! I guess his anger pushed him over to the dark side or something. In any case, it looks like Kate goes trippin' out to some wacky land where doorways open into jungles and various rooms around the city (or adjoining sets in the studio, wherever).

In the end, Kate finds half of the amulet, and just before she gets strangled to death Jason finds the second half and they put it together. This turns the rubber faced voodoo thing that used to be David into a tron-like character and he disintegrates in a flash of special effects.

Oh yeah, and for that last paragraph, Kate and Jason time travelled back 200 years.

Now everything is back to normal, and Kate and Jason go running out of the house. David appears in the front door! Kate and Jason back up the stairwell to a big plate glass window overlooking a balcony in the backyard. Kate gets all freaked out, pulls a knife, and stabs the regular-looking-David in the stomach, who proceeds to fall through the plate glass window, stumble over the balcony into the backyard, then MAGICALLY APPEAR DEAD 30 FEET AWAY FROM THE HOUSE IN THE FRONT YARD, in possibly one of the biggest and most annoying continuity errors I have ever seen! ARrrgH!

The movie ends with Kate in the mental ward, with Jason giving her some flowers. This leads one to wonder - was Kate insane this whole time? Did she ever really move in with David? Or did she kill David then go insane? With the incredibly inplausible and confusing plotline, either is just as likely, and speculation is pointless.

We are then treated to a cameo of a Psychologist who looks just like the two-hundred-year-old husband guy, minus the big rubber voodoo mask. Oooh no! Could there be a sequel or something?!

My Opinion: OK, yes, I admit I watched and noded some pretty bad movies recently. I rented 5 cheezy horror films from the store, not knowing anything about them. I honestly did not know that three of those films shared an IMDB rating of 2.7 out of 10.

I think I'm being punished for something.

Filmed in Miami, Florida in the mid-eighties and definately dressed to match, the cast is composed entirely of horrible actors in horrible accurately-modelled 80's costumes, jewelry, and hair.

The music is also very horrible 80's, and oddly upbeat for a horror movie. The special effects are... Uh... Well, if it was the film maker's intent to inflict pain upon me as opposed to the victims in the film, it worked wonders. I was successfully writhing on the floor in agony. Let's see here. We had some nice transparency shots of some rubber voodoo mask with big teeth flying "out" of the screen, we had some rubber face masks that made "gross dead corpses" look like "Smurfs getting high in bad lighting," we had some more rubber masks depicting some African evil zombie thing that looked kind of like a cross between an Alligator and Howard Stern, and finally we had the technical wonder of a giant head-shaped lamp that flew down a hallway and almost hit someone. Oh, dang, I almost forgot the entirely realistic climatic death scene which topples even the Nightmare on Elm Street series from the title of "King of cheezy special effects death sequences." And then we had the ultra-high tech ColecoVision 3D special effects that come out of a computer screen! WOO Ow!

Usually when there's a really bad horror movie on, it's fun to laugh at and poke fun. This movie was so incredibly slow (yet suprisingly short, not even an hour and a half) and was so devoid of plot and special effects that there was nothing to really poke fun at.

I think we should do a re-do of that big hippy thing. You know, when they burned all them records or something? It was before my time and I never got to have that kind of fun. I think we should do it again with this movie.

This movie is not to be watched by anyone. Ever.

I hope the director feels bad about wasting (at least) 83 minutes of my life, and he should be forced to write apology letters to anyone who watched this movie. Damn, I can't even imagine paying to see this in theatres - I would have been furious!

Interesting Notes: Boring?
  • Yes, yes it is.
The Cast: Director: stupid-ass Richard Friedman
Writer: Richard Friedman and Daniel F. Bacaner

Tagline: There's no place left to hide from the boredom!

Running Time: 83 Minutes of pure hell
Sources: The oh-so-wonderful IMDB, my head, the box.

"Are ya ready to play?"

It's also a pinball machine released in 1996 by Bally and designed by Dennis Nordman, which is as absolutely excellent as the above mentioned film sounds dreadful. It stars Elvira, the Mistress of the Dark and camp horror hostess and prototype (along with MST3K) for those YouTube channels that giggle at terribad films, and involves her, surrounded by spoopy things like bats, spiders, and an old style CRT television set, flipping channels to find something that will cause you to be scared stiff. This is achieved by completing the six Tales of Terror on the playfield, and then activating the Stiff-O-Meter. Yeah, the ruleset isn't a super deep one, but it makes up for that by being incredibly fun and frankly ribald. Yeah, family friendly this isn't.

Playfield layout is a standard two-flipper affair. The ball is plunged and goes up either with a soft plunge into the Spider Hole, or with a stronger plunge through a channel and towards a saucer. Middle top of the playfield is The Crate, a model packing crate with evil glowing LED eyes peeking out of it, and behind that is a run of rollover lanes spelling DEAD. To the right of that is a glowing blue set of bumpers. Middle left is a lane that leads to the rollovers, and adjacent to that a ramp called The Bony Beast which is like a skeletal snake. It is huge, and ribbed. No, seriously, that's how Elvira describes it if you chain shots to it. I told you it was ribald. The lane can be diverted to a ball lock underneath The Bony Beast. Middle right is a bat ramp, and the spider hole, a scoop and vertical up-kicker into the bat ramp. Both ramps are all wiggly and go to the opposite side inlane. One thing about the playfield is that there's almost no dead space. Every single shot will likely cause something to happen. Even the posts on the ramps have spring-loaded bash targets on them that cause a little model frog to scream and leap up on a pole if hit. Even the outlanes can give you things, like the Telepathetic Power Award or casting THE SPELL.

Okay. So. Those tales of terror. They are:

  1. Eyes of the Bony Beast. Ride The Bony Beast twice to light this. It also lights the lock which allows you to get...
  2. The Stiff in the Coffin. Lock three balls and activate multiball. Jackpots are 250,000 each and lit by chaining alternate ramp shots, and if you do it enough "that's just made me STIFF!". You can also get jackpots in...
  3. Terror from The Crate. Hit the crate to light the evil eyes on it. If you do it enough then the next shot on the crate will cause the ball to fall into it by unlocking the front flap. Two-ball multiball will then start during which you can get jackpots if you "GET IT IN THERE!" I told you it was ribald.
  4. Return of the Deadheads. Complete the rollover lanes at the top to light this and advance the bonus multiplier. Of necessity the ball will fall after a shot into the rollovers into a scoop and the DMD will show a pun about a certain type of head. These range from lame, such as Fish Head ("Better practice your scales!"), suggestive, like Pumpkin Head ("Trick or Treat? Why not both."), ribald, such as Shrunken Head ("He always wanted a little head!") and then just plain raunchy, like Good Head ("YESS!!! YEEEESSSS!!!!").
  5. The Monster's Lab. Light this by hitting the bumpers 25 times. IT'S ALIIIVE!
  6. Night of the Leapers. Hit the leaper targets 10 times to light this, which also starts a mode called Leaper Mania. During this, frogs bounce across the DMD and if you hit the Leaper targets a further 8 times within a time limit it lights an extra ball.

There's a few other items as well. For instance, you can get a sneaky lock by doing a very gentle shot into the left lane so it goes up the diverter even if the lock isn't lit. And, of course, if the spider hole is lit and you shoot it, a big ol' spider in the backglass spins around and you can stop it with either flipper button to gain a random award. Also there's Boogie Man which is one of those random awards and causes the little critters on the slingshots to bounce up and down and you can gain bonuses by hitting sinkholes against the clock. Interestingly, the random spider awards are exhaustible and if you land the spider on an award that's already gone, you get nothing.

So, once you've done the six tales of terror, you have to get the ball into the crate to fire up the Stiff-O-Meter. This is where you see how stiff you can get. To do this you have to alternate, within 30 seconds, 10 shots, which must be ramp, then crate, then ramp, then crate. The last shot is always into the crate. If you manage this, you get Scared Stiff, the lights go off then random sounds and animations play and all the mechanical parts of the machine fire randomly, before giving you "MONSTER MULTIBALL!" which is basically a combination of The Stiff in the Coffin and Terror from the Crate as above. You also get to put your name on a special high score table with the time and date at which you were scared stiff.

It's really a very fun game. There's always something going on and Elvira coming out with innuendos and such is part of it. "Watch this. I'll get him up." "This thing is huge! And ribbed!" Chaining ramp shots causes her then to give off increasingly orgiatic yesses and then a snarky, "wake me up when you've finished." Even the art is ribald. The extra ball light appears in a remote control which has a switch to turn Elvira on or off. Early prototype art reportedly had a pseudo MPAA box saying "Rated R - Real Raunchy and Ribbed for Your Pleasure" but management made them take that out.

I think of all the DMD era pinballs, Scared Stiff is one of my favourites. Granted, it doesn't have the super deep ruleset of Star Trek Next Generation or Stern's Lord of the Rings, or the lethal speed of No Fear, nor the baroque and almost hypnotic play of Theatre of Magic. They were going more for fun and humour with this, a bit like Red and Ted's Road Show although it's way more ribald than that one. It also, unlike Funhouse, isn't actually terrifying (I refuse to play Funhouse because the creepy calliope music and the uncanny valley head on the playfield makes me feel uneasy.) It's just all round the most fun you could have in 1996 with one finger on each hand.

Oo-er.

(IN24/15)

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