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

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Upon the death of her rich uncle, Elizabeth (Erna Schurer, Strip Nude for Your Killer) travels to his castle for the reading of his will. With her fiancé (Roland Carey, The Diamond Connection) in tow, she learns she is the sole beneficiary of his estate, castle included! It’s such an incredible piece of property, if you can pay no mind to the still-in-use torture dungeon or the insane woman in one of the bedrooms.

In the two-day wait for paperwork processing, some locals tell Liz her uncle was planning to sell the place, which is news to her. Others are pushier, needling her about taking it off her hands. At any rate, the requisite strange things begin to occur, from nocturnal visions and a tree bursting through the bedroom window (13 years before Poltergeist) to, yep, that old chestnut known as first-degree murder.

A good reason exists for Satan’s Doll being obscure: so is its writer and director, Ferruccio Casapinta, whose filmography starts and ends here. Despite its nasty-sounding title (no doubt made nastier if confused with an X-rated film from 1982 with almost the same name), the movie is rather cheerful in its coloring and overall harmless — a minor giallo more Scooby-Doo than Sergio Martino. Instantly forgettable, this Doll contains enough of the “old dark house” trappings to interest viewers, even if the mystery at its core is hardly the stuff of Agatha Christie. —Rod Lott

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