In Bill Rebane’s accidentally entertaining The Game, three bored and elderly millionaires named Maude, George and Horace (Carol Perry, Stuart Osborn and Don Arthur, respectively) recruit nine healthy adults to gather at an island hotel to play the fogies’ annual overnight “Game of Fear.” That just means the old folks creep around at all hours in an attempt to scare the contestants into leaving, with the last man (or woman) standing the next day to be awarded $1 million, essentially making this Rebane’s Lake Resort on Haunted Hill.
After sharing the rules, either George or Horace — it doesn’t matter whom — tells his assembled players, “We’re quite proud of the creativity that went into this.” What else to call flashing lights, dry-ice fog, “bwa-ha-ha” sound effects, dummies hanging on rope, a locked sauna, a fake shark fin in the swimming pool, real tarantulas in the soup bowl, a jail cell filled with rats, a grounds-roaming hunchback and — yikes! — nonflushing toilets? There’s also a round of Russian roulette, but the scariest element of all actually arrives pregame: a gratuitous disco sequence in which the spinster Maude wipes her hand up the butt of the skeeziest contestant (Jim Iaquinta from Rebane’s Rana: The Legend of Shadow Lake).
However, the best scene in The Game (findable here and there as The Cold) occurs when a young lady in silky undergarments is spread out on the bed as Rebane’s immortal The Giant Spider Invasion plays on TV. Her slumber is interrupted as a worm-like hand puppet bursts through the sheets, then vomits. I can’t tell you which character it is, because they are nigh indistinguishable, save for two: Pamela Rohleder’s Southern belle, whose voluminous bra size surpasses her IQ, and the aforementioned Iaquinta’s human form of gonorrhea, ready to take advantage.
While the script by William Arthur and Larry Dreyfus (who later co-wrote the director’s 1988 talking-truck movie, Twister’s Revenge!) is born from a legitimately good idea, Rebane artlessly bungles it. Foremost among his errors is scoring the horror film with ragtime ditties as the merry, maniacal and masked millionaires dance down the hallways toward their latest scheme. At one moment late in The Game, Maude, George and Horace sing — and then debate — that folk nugget “Jimmy Crack Corn.” And I don’t care. —Rod Lott