When VHS was all the rage, the VCR game was, alas, not. But dammit, they tried — some more than others. Spinnaker Video appears to have put all its chips of effort toward the kick-ass cover of Ellery Queen’s Operation: Murder, because the tape’s half-hour whodunit is half-assed at best.
Highly intelligent in the novels and also highly likable in the Jim Hutton-starring TV series of the 1970s, the Ellery Queen of this “You-Solve-It VCR Mystery Game” is just a smug jerk. Played by Michael Solomita, the unofficial detective enters the Doorn Memorial Hospital office of Dr. Minchen (Don Dill), who sparks immediate regret in viewers with this greeting: “Ellery Queen, by thunder! What on earth brings you down here? Uh, still snooping around?”
Indeed, Queen is, asking questions about rigor mortis in diabetics, to which the doc replies in a near-singsong, “Just a fortunate coincidence, I happen to have diabetes on my mind this morning.” Totally normal response.
It’s all related to Queen’s latest case, concerning the hospital’s comatose benefactor (Helen Cuftafson) being strangled to death before surgery, but after she changed her will. From a playboy little brother to a mad-scientist researcher, likely suspects abound, each thrown at you in time-heavy exposition too quick and too dull to properly absorb. At eight points in the story, a clip-art screen informs you to “PICK a RED or BLUE CARD MARKED EVIDENCE.” I can’t imagine anyone having the patience to play this game more than once.
Although based on a real Queen novel, The Dutch Shoe Mystery, the catchpenny Operation: Murder is amateurishly acted and staged. At the beginning of my professional journalism career in the early 1990s, I was assigned to observe a murder-mystery party at a local bed-and-breakfast. Quasi-cosplaying, the attendees all looked the part, but had little to no idea of what they were supposed to do. Across the parlor, I spotted an elderly woman with a stooped back shuffling my way. Clutching a tiny notebook and pencil, she looked me in the eye and said only three words: “Got any clues?” I replied I did not, and she wandered to the next person in vicinity and asked the same. That’s what Operation: Murder is like, except mercifully shorter. —Rod Lott