When I was a teen, I had three good friends. We were all homeschooled and belonged to the same 4-H club, which is how we met. Like most girls in the 1990s, we loved having sleepovers at each other's houses, which is how we usually celebrated our birthdays, plus any other event we could convince our parents to let us get together for.
And every time we had a sleepover at my friend L's house, we watched Clue (1985). And we usually played the board game Clue after watching the movie. Because, why not?
To this day, watching Clue makes me think of sleeping bags on the floor, nail polish fumes, and the faintly squeaky ceiling fan above us that I once dreamed fell on top of me during the night, ala a certain chandelier in the movie.
This is one of the few movies my husband enjoys watching more than once. That's very rare -- there are maybe a dozen movies he will gladly rewatch, so that puts this in fairly exalted company. I think he mostly likes it for Tim Curry's appropriately zany performance, and for the very unique way the film ends.
Clue is based on the 1940s board game, which is reminiscent of "house party murder mysteries" like many written by Agatha Christie, where a lot of people are at a big house for a few days, someone dies, and a detective (usually an amateur) has to figure out who killed the victim, where, and how. Was it Colonel Mustard in the study with the revolver? Mrs. White in the lounge with the candlestick? And so on.
The movie updates the setting a bit, to the 1950s. Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Mrs. White (Madeline Khan), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd), Mr. Green (Michael McKean), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull), and Miss Scarlet (Lesley Ann Warren) are all summoned by anonymous letters to a dinner party at a huge mansion in the middle of nowhere. They arrive in the middle of a thunderstorm. And each of them drives a car that corresponds to the color of their playing pieces in the board game, which tickles me.
The butler, Wadsworth (Tim Curry) welcomes them. The house is thinly staffed, with only a cook (Kellye Nakahara) and a maid named Yvette (Colleen Camp) to assist him with the dinner party. A certain sinister Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving) shows up partway through and reveals that he is the man who has been blackmailing all six of the guests for years.
The guests at first claim not to know each other, but that naturally turns out not to be true. People die. Bodies pile up. Innocent (?) bystanders get shot. Everyone runs around the house a lot. Literally.
There are really two aspects of this film that elevate it from campy, cheesy, slapsticky, screwball-ish nonsense to something truly hilarious. One of those is the cast. Everyone clearly is aware that they are making something quite wacky, and they have no qualms about being goofy and funny. I always have the feeling that they are inviting me to join the fun and not take anything at all seriously.
And I'm going to spoil the other essential part of this movie in the next paragraphs. Skip to the "Back to 1985" logo now if you haven't seen this movie and don't want to be spoiled about the ending, which is so great that I really, really, really don't want to mess up your first viewing.
For real. Shoo.
Okay, if you're still with me, then you probably have seen this movie and know what I'm talking about. This movie doesn't have an ending. It has three endings. Because every time you play the game Clue, you come out with a different combination of places, weapons, and murderers! So, of course the movie should have options too!
But here's something you might not know: They shot three endings, and on VHS and DVD, you get all three endings with little intertitle cards saying "That's how it could have happened" and so on. But when this was shown at theaters, it was shown with only one of the endings. Each of the endings were used, but they sent different versions to different theaters! Can you imagine seeing this in the theater, then chatting with a friend who lived a couple towns over and discovering that they had seen a different ending? How wild and wacky that must have been! I was only five when this movie came out, so I first saw it on VHS at one of L's slumber parties when I was a teen. But I can only imagine how much fun that must have been, when it was in theaters. I've read that some theaters did advertise whether they had ending A, B, or C -- and if I'd been in my 20s back then, I suspect I would have driven around to different theaters to see all the endings. But I like it best this way, as a sort of movie choose-your-own-adventure.
Oh, is this movie family friendly? Um, I'd say it's probably all right for most teens, but not kids. It has quite a bit of innuendo in the dialog, Yvette's costume is extremely revealing (and she flashes her panties at the camera at one point, for no actual reason), there's discussion of a character being gay and characters have various reactions to that, and (obviously) there are multiple murders. There's a smattering of bad language, too. So, no, not really family friendly.
