Recap: Goosebumps "The Haunted House Game"

In 1981, Chris Van Allsburg wrote and illustrated Jumanji, a short story about a magic board game that raised all sorts of jungle-related Hell when you played it.

In 1995, TriStar Pictures distributed Jumanji, starring Robin Williams. It expanded on the book and took a few liberties with the source material, becoming a fondly-remembered '90s film.

It is currently 2017, and a sequel/reboot called Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle comes out this month. But I'm not here to talk about the reboot. Or the original film. However good or bad the new Jumanji movie ends up being, I know for a fact that it can't be worse that that time the Goosebumps TV show jumped on board the "supernatural board game" bandwagon.

You know, the last time I covered a short story from a Goosebumps anthology that focused on a haunted house, we got a slow, meandering episode that was mostly padding.

So this can only end well.

The episode begins with two Canadians walking down the street. These are Jonathan (Benjamin Plener) and Nadine (Laura Vandervoort). Wait, why do I recognize the latter name?

Oh, hey, TV's first Supergirl.

Nadine badgers her pal to make sure his camera's full of film and ready to go for the pep rally they're going to. As they head down the street, they walk by a little crying girl who seems like she walked straight out of a horror film. They ask her what's wrong while the soundtrack gives us a few spooky piano plinks and plunks, and the girl says that her pet cat ran inside the scary house behind her. And that's why you should keep your cats indoors.

Jonathan and Nadine are already late for the pep rally, but they decide to do the right thing and help find the girl's missing kitty cat. They head inside the house and find your usual old-house-type stuff. Dust, antiques, darkness...

...inexplicable green lighting, which I hope for Nadine's sake isn't kryptonite....

...but little in the way of cats. The episode kills a minute or so by splitting Jonathan and Nadine up... Meaning that it's already resorting to padding. Which I'm positive is a good sign. Jonathan wanders around for a bit, calling "Nadine" over and over until they finally find each other. They also end up finding "The Mansion of Terror Game," meaning that the titular game is not actually called "The Haunted House Game." Having the episode not be directly named after the evil board game is the only change to the original text that makes this episode less similar to Jumanji, by the way. I'll elaborate in the Review.

Nadine: "Hey, it looks like this heuse."

...Maybe? I guess?

She opens up the box, and Jonathan notices something written inside the lid.

Nadine: "'Rules of Play.'"

"Do not begin unless you intend to finish."

Nadine: "'Rule number one: Don't open the box'?"

Rule number two: Don't open the box.

Nadine: "Why wouldn't they want us to open the box?"

Maybe it's like Risk: Legacy? There's a pack of cards in that game you're not supposed to open, and part of the rules hinge on ripping up cards and things like that. And not just to abuse a loophole, like with Magic: The Gathering's Chaos Orb. So maybe this is one of those weird, post-modern board games? The fact that the game box is filled with clouds would seem to suggest that this ain't your granddaddy's board game.

Anyway, much like Jumanji, the two kids get sucked into the game. Or rather, they poof away, which is a cheaper special effect. We then cut to some kind of strange board game world where the kids suddenly appear in one of the worst crossfade effects I've ever seen. Even without pausing, you can tell that the camera wasn't lined up properly for the second shot, meaning that the world suddenly shifts as the two kids appear.

Goosebumps's special effects have failed to meet the low expectations the show has fostered within me. For shame.

Nadine: "Jonathan... I think... I think we're in the game!"
Jonathan: "Yeah? Well, I don't wanna play any stupid game!"

Unfortunately, according to the nearby rules, Rule #2 is "PLAY AS A TEAM." Kind of like the newer Mario Party games. So they're both stuck there until they win or lose.

The rest of the rules are standard board game fare.

3: Roll the dice, move a square... Wait, shouldn't that be to a square?

Unless this is a Canadian thing? Like how British people say that somebody's in hospital, instead of in the hospital?

Anyway, move a square, take an action card. The object of Round 1 is to collect keys for Round 2.

4: The only way out is in. (You have to play the game to leave.)
5: Roll a seven, go to heaven.

I'd hate to see what happens if you roll a twelve.

...

Because... because you'd go to Hell... ve. Okay, it's not my best pun. Sorry.

So with only one way to leave, their first turn begins as novelty dice rain from the heavens. They find the two normal-sized dice and reluctantly begin. They roll a 5. So they step onto the start space.

Jonathan: "One..."

No, you don't count the "START" space as a space when you start a game, just like you don't collect $200 for passing GO on your first turn of Monopoly. Where did you guys learn how to play board games?

They land on a space that says "Pay Your Last Respects" and get whisked away to a random room that seems to recently have featured a funeral. And the casket's still there. They find a pice of poster board, and realize that it must be the big ol' Action Card.

Nadine: "'Find the finder, and take it if you dare, but watch eut, you might be in for a scare'?"

Players beware, you're in for a scare.

Nadine suggests checking the casket, since, let's face it, this whole room is set up to get them to root around inside a casket. They find a corpse.

Nadine: "Maybe there's something under him."

So she eagerly roots around under the dead body in search of treasure while being much less uncomfortable than she should be. But she spots a compass in the corpse's hand, which she guesses must be the "finder."

Jonathan: "If you think I'm touching him...."
Nadine: "I'll get it."

Seriously, she's a million times too much enjoying touching this corpse.

She'll literally have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.

When she grabs the compass, she accidentally takes a finger with it.

Jonathan: "Nadine!"
Nadine: "I couldn't help it!"

Riiiiiiiiight. You just wanted a souvenir and got caught, didn't you?

She shuts the lid, and the two are attacked by a suddenly-appearing zombies.

"'Scuse me, guv'nah! Might ye spare a pint o' brains?"

So Jonathan rolls the dice, sending them back to the game board. Having narrowly avoided the living dead, Jonathan tries to quit, only for an invisible forcefield to prevent him from leaving the game board, meaning that rage-quitting is not an option.

Nadine rolls a three, sending them to a space marked "Reel Scary." They teleport to what appears to be the mansion's study, where an Action Card awaits with the message "Grab some R&R." They split up, check the assorted knickknacks, and Jonathan realizes that "R&R" refers to "Rod and Reel," meaning that they need to take a nearby fishing pole. Then a haunted boat sails into the room on a cloud of dry ice.

Because of course it does.

A zombie fisherman sends out a net to catch Jonathan, but Nadine manages to roll the dice in time, sending them back to the game board. The next space simply says "Rest in Peace."

Jonathan: "We're dead."

And so, the two are teleported away to some kind of bedroom. Ghosts appear to play backgammon or something while the kids read the Action Card.

"Ask and you will receive."

Nadine: "Excuse me...."
Ghost: "Hmm?"
Nadine: "Do you have something for me?"
Ghost: "Yes, my dear, I do."

And after solving that not-actually-a-riddle, Nadine gets some kind of necklace. Unfortunately, it forces her to begin aging rapidly. As with every other peril so far, this is solved with a roll of the dice. The only thing that adds the slightest amount of tension is the fact that the dice roll into some broken floorboards. So Jonathan steals some dice away from the backgammon ghosts, rolling to safety.

Once the kids materialize on the giant board game gain, a space lights up that says "Advance to go back," and a pathway opens up to a facsimile of a haunted house. The front door of the house has a mat that says "Enter to exit," which they assume means that they have to enter this prop house to exit the real house.

They head inside a darkened room, where Jonathan gets the idea to use his camera flash to light the room for one millisecond at a time, which primarily succeeds in creating a spoopy strobe light effect as a couple of ghouls come after them.

But suddenly, the lights come on and the ghouls are replaced by two other kids, which should immediately be suspicious.

Before...

After. Seems legit.

But rather than question why two adult male ghouls suddenly turned into a pair of kids, Nadine and Jonathan decide to trust them. The kids introduces themselves as Noah and Annie, and they claim to be a couple of Alan Parrishes who got trapped in the game long ago and are still looking for a way out.

Apparently, even though Nadine and Jonathan entered through the front door, they ended up in the basement, disregarding any and all warnings this series gave kids to stay out of there. The house is not built to any sort of standard of sanity, which is why Noah and Annie have been trapped for years. They know for a fact that the front door is the exit, but they simply can't find it. So the party has expanded to four players working together.

Noah: "How many keys did you get?"
Jonathan: "Keys?"
Noah: "Yeah. You know, the things you collected in round one?"

Apparently, the random junk from Round 1 allows them to make their way through the house. This seems to imply that if you don't have enough keys, you can't continue. Which means that it's entirely possible for Round 2 to be unwinnable if you failed to collect enough keys. This is the sort of thing that should have been addressed in play testing. No wonder Noah and Annie have been trapped for so long. They literally can't win.

Jonathan suggests an entirely new way of beating the game, though. Cheating!

Jonathan: "Maybe we could bust out the window."

They briefly debate the wisdom in this, but Noah suggests that "a little cheating never hurt anyone." Unfortunately, there are a couple problems with this plan. Not only does it appear that busting through the window would simply take them back to the game board, rather than the real world, but there are bars on the window.

More pressingly, Noah is attacked by a laundry monster and sucked into a hamper.

I mean, there's very few ways to make basement clutter scary.
Dirty laundry monsters are pretty much your only choice.

When the other kids quickly remove all the laundry from the hamper, Noah is nowhere to be seen. And the rest of them are still stuck in the basement, thanks to a locked door.

Now, as any point-and-click adventure gamer will tell you, there comes a time when you have to click everything in your inventory on everything in the world to solve a puzzle, even if it doesn't make sense. In a similar vein, the kids try their random junk on the locked door until they finally hit upon the correct item: the necklace, which now bears an inscription. "To reverse the effect, use the 'un.'"

Jonathan: "Before, it was just a locket. Now, it's an un-locket."

And waving the locket in front of the door actually works. Which is a solution that I think even Roberta Williams would call a bit of a stretch.

The trek through the house continues as they look out a window to see the board game... As well as the front door of the haunted house. Meaning they walked in the door, ended up in the basement, left the basement, and ended up fifty yards in the opposite direction.

Annie: "Told you this house was a puzzle."

Speaking of puzzles, here's the next one: a twisty maze of rooms. This one is bypassed quickly by using the compass, which is one of those magic Jack Sparrow dealies that doesn't point north. This one has three directions: Hot, Getting Warmer, and Getting Colder.

With that puzzle sorted, they meet up with Noah, who was apparently wandering the halls after being warped away by evil clothes. Along with Noah, they find a staircase. But the father through the room they walk, the further way it gets. So they cast out a hook with the fishing rod and wind the reel in, pulling the hallway toward them. Seriously, whoever wrote this episode played way too many King's Quest games beforehand.

They emerge through the door at the end of the hallway and find themselves at the top of the staircase in the foyer, face to face with their final challenge, made up of the various dead people they encountered while getting the keys in Round 1. With no keys left, Jonathan accidentally triggers his camera to discover that they're afraid of the flash.

Hey, I'd be afraid of the Fastest Man Alive, too.

Despite his comments earlier, Noah seems to be against using the camera to cheat, but Jonathan does anyway. When the ghosts poof away, so do Annie and Noah.

They reappear in Nadine and Jonathan's way, revealing that they were ghouls this whole time! In fact, not only were they part of the game, they were playing it themselves. It's a bit vague, but the implication seems to be that the two ghouls set up this old house to trap kids inside, whereupon the ghouls design puzzles and traps to stump the kids like a couple of monstrous Riddlers.

And all the kids they outsmart get turned into bargain bin figurines.

But what's clear is that neither ghoul can agree on which one of them is the real winner here. The one that pretended to be Annie accuses the other one of cheating with that little laundry-disappearing trick (which he apparently did to bring the ghosts from Round 1 to the foyer), and they stop creeping toward Jonathan and Nadine in order to argue the point.

Annie Ghoul: "You bet me that they couldn't find the front door, and they did, so I win!"
Noah Ghoul: "Doesn't count if you cheat! It isn't fair!"

While arguing, they mention the "Roll a seven" thing, which gives Nadine the idea to roll the dice one last time. As convenience would have it, she rolls a seven, sending the two ghouls directly to heaven, do not pass GO, do not collect $200. Before anyone can question the theological implications of any of this, the episode ends as the little girl from earlier tricks two more kids into the house with her "lost kitty" sob story.

And if you think I've been rushing through the last part of the episode, well, that's only because the episode itself has been rushing to wrap itself up. So let's review.