MERRY CHRISTMAS, FRIENDS!! Hope everyone is enjoying time with their loved ones this holiday season! In the spirit of Christmas, we’re looking back at the games we might’ve opened back in the day – and what their movie counterparts would be in modern times.
Because apparently movie makers can’t come up with original ideas anymore, there is a live-action film based on the board game Ouija that is coming out today.
In the movie version of the game, a group of teens try to contact their dead friend but have to confront their “most evil and demonic fears” when they dark powers of the Ouija board come to life. That’s the real plot. Of course the concept of taking a board game and making it into a movie is nothing new, with the likes of Clue and Battleship before it, but I feel like it hasn’t been until recently that producers are looking to kids for ideas. I mean look at Transformers and The Lego Movie, which were blockbuster hits. There must be other board game movies in the works, but until those come out, here are a few suggestions from iconic 90s games that should head to big screen.
13 Dead End Drive
Pitch: Aunt Agatha, the matriarch of a rich family in the Hamptons, with a similar demeanor to the Dowager Countess of Grantham, dies at the age of 110, much to the delight of her greedy family. They fight over her estate and assets over the course of a weekend in her Long Island mansion, but her offspring are each secretly trying to kill each other in order to get the most money out of her will. Keep your eyes out for that sneaky cat that might actually trump the humans in the game of trickery.
Mall Madness
Pitch: Set in the 1990s in Minnesota, twin sisters are given a credit card to spend any way they want in the Mall of America for their birthday. But when their parents set them loose, they go a little crazy with their spending habits, running around the mall from store to store swiping the card willy nilly, despite their parents telling them to only spend $150 each. In the process, they witness a man stealing from the local Foot Locker and spend the rest of their day trying to catch him. It’s a big screen version of The Adventures of Mary Kate and Ashley: The Case of the Mall Marauder.
Dream Phone
Pitch: Jennifer, Kaci and Veronica are having their monthly sleepover and decided to prank call a bunch of cute guys from their school. But when they misdial a number, they end up talking to a man who isn’t as friendly as he sounds and they spend the rest of the night trying to avoid his calls – and his unwanted visits to their house.
Don’t Wake Daddy
Pitch: The girl who plays Lily on Modern Family and the kid who plays Cory and Topanga’s son on Girl Meets World are siblings who secretly stay up to play a game that’s like Rock Paper Scissors and Russian Roulette late at night and whoever loses each round has to go into their parents’ room and play some sort of prank of their dad – without waking him up. Luckily he’s a narcoleptic so it’s easier done than said.
Pretty Pretty Princess
Pitch: Set in Renaissance-era France, this movie is a coming-of-age story about a young group of boys sneak into one of their dutchess mom’s rooms to try on her clothes and jewelry and one of them secretly likes dressing up in women’s attire more than the others.
Perfection
Pitch: Mary Anne is a high school junior who has always been a perfectionist and at the head of her class. Lately, college tours, application essays, the SATs and the regular grind of school have been making her go a little crazy, so she keeps having odd recurring dreams. The main one involves her trapped in a labyrinth where the main goal is to put huge shapes into their proper corresponding holes before a giant buzzer goes off and she’s ejected from the game and has to start all over again. Starring Ed Begley Jr. as the Games Master.
Splat!
Pitch: A modern tale of a twenty-something Brooklynite who already trouble balancing her job at the local coffee shop and her dog walking job, and the fact that she’s in a long distance relationship with a boy from New Jersey. It only gets worse when she gets bed bugs.
Ask Zandar
Pitch: Zack and Elisa find an old board game in his mom’s attic, and it contains a weird fortune-telling wizard as the main component. Zack is the ever cynical one of the BFFs, but Elisa knows there’s something more to the crystal ball than they think. They end up seeing parts of their future that they like, but a lot they wish they had never seen at all.
Girl Talk
Pitch: Three high school girls stay up all night talking about boys, school, playing MASH and eating Halloween candy, but what they don’t know is that someone is following their every move and recording everything they say. The next day at school, their secrets are exposed and it’s up to the trio to find out who is out to get them.
*Yes, that is me and my two friends from high school, because we were really cool back then.
Gator Golf
Pitch: A group of friends decide to spend their Saturday night at the local mini golf place after plans for a pizza party fall through. At the final hole, they assume the ball goes through the giant gator and down to the golf clubhouse, but one brave soul figures out that by going into the gator’s cave-like mouth, there is a tunnel of secrets underneath the seedy underbelly of the mini-golf course that the owner never wanted exposed.
Cookies + Sangria 