Monsters: "The Match Game"

Ashley Laurence is one of those actresses I can't stop looking at. Maybe it's because I'm a HUGE fan of the original Hellraiser (directed by horror auteur and author Clive Barker) but her expressive fearful eyes and general demeanor are an incredible cinematic turn-on. At least they were in the 1980s.

Here, she's treading familiar ground (Hellraiser had just been released a couple of years before) in a teen horror comedy that also stars Tori Spelling, right before "90210".

Ashley and her boyfriend (Byron Thames) break into Waverly Mansion, a great haunted edifice in California that bears a striking example of a curse or, at the very least, an urban legend circling its dark, dank, rotted rafters. Herbert Waverly (Tom Woodruff Jr.) was killed while visiting a lover. Hacked up for barbecue, he's tossed into a pond until the day he has an E.C. Comics, "Tales from the Crypt"-style resurrection, and comes shambling, like a zombie horror (which, I suppose he is), back, back to accursed Waverly Mansion, for revenge. (Against whom for what I am uncertain, but a guy that is hacked up and tossed into a river while just trying to get a little nookie, probably does have a right to be pissed.)

Flash forward to these kids (also included is Sasha Jenson) getting together for a little impromptu fantasy group storytelling about Herbert Waverly and his hideous fate as a shambling shuffler from beyond the grave, all the while holding a burning match (hence the title, "The Match Game") and we're in for a real treat. As the match burns out, the jaws flap on, and the kids take turns each embellishing a part of the tale as events transpiring around them (mostly in the form of creepy sounds) seem to suggest that the very words that they're speaking are coming to life.

There's an excellent scene of a ghoul crashing through a window. (Note: The next lines may contain spoilers.) Tori Spelling gets her head collapsed like a rubber balloon, and I'm reminded of that great scene from Santo and Blue Demon Versus the Monsters, in which a young man out necking with his girl gets his head stomped and it deflates like a rubber ball, as well. How in the hell they managed to get this stuff on TV back in 1988 is God (or somebody's) own private mystery.

"Monsters," for anyone not in the know, was a spinoff from "Tales from the Darkside", which was about as perfect an Eighties horror anthology show as the human mind is capable of conceiving. "Monsters" lasted for three short seasons, but the first season (undoubtedly always the best season), is something I've almost made my entire way through. It features many gory and horrific highlights, including severed possessed legs, huge, alien-like bumblebee heads, and an alien called "Glim-Glim."

Expect a rollicking, rambling, but otherwise masterful and excellent essay concerning the three individual seasons once I watch them all. Until then, you'll just have to make do with this, which is as short and sweet as a tall tale. (Remember, Stephen King, in the pages of that infernal book of cultural commentary examining the state of the horror genre as it was in our era of most persistent fascination, the late Seventies and early Eighties, Danse Macabre (1981), that a short story was like "a kiss from a lover in the dark." That's a long digression, but I feel it was necessary.)

However, like all good tales, this essay must draw to a close before it goes on far too long and makes everyone assume I'm just stuffing it full so I can meet a six-hundred-word word count. Maybe so. At any rate, pass me that match, cuddle up close, turn down the lights, lock the doors, and get real, real quiet. Can you hear that out there? Rain pattering on the porch? Footfalls squelching in the damp, muddy earth? Is that just your imagination or, is it...something else?

C'mon, just relax. We have all the time we need until Herbert arrives.

Monsters (1988) Complete Series -S1 E18 - The Match Game

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