Clue finds six colorful dinner guests gathered at the mansion of their host, Mr. Boddy -- who turns up dead after his secret is exposed: He was blackmailing all of them. With the killer among them, the guests and Boddy's chatty butler must suss out the culprit before the body count rises.
18 Nov Clue (1982)
Hasn’t a Clue
No genre has more opportunities for mind-bending and/amusing bends than the mystery. Especially film mysteries. And this one has a very promising foundation: a parody of a parody: ‘Murder by Death,’ which itself was rather clever in a lowbrow sort of way.
Add to this the also clever notion of building on the popular board game where fates shift and each edition is different. This led to a theatrical release where you could see different ‘solutions’ depending on what day you paid. Add in some rather good actresses (for this, you don’t need good actors) and things are off to a good start. Especially when one of the ‘solutions’ is that everyone was guilty of a murder (related to past sins for which they are being blackmailed).
But alas, this fell under the gaze of Gruber and Peters. They are not the worst offenders in the history of the dumbing down of film imagination, but they were the most consistently bad. (Add your own retroactive curse here.)
So what we have is all but the last ten minutes of dog poop, breast jiggles, and supposedly comic reactions. The whole thing is pasted together by a hack director. This film has only one brief moment of value: in one of the endings, Madeline Kahn admits that she killed someone and she has a little bit about fire coming out of her head. It is so deft, and so wonderful, one wonders how it survived.
Posted in 2002
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
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