Tedious movie based on board game; some innuendo, violence.
Parents Need to Know
Why Age 12+?
Any Positive Content?
Products & Purchases
some
This movie is based on the popular Parker Brothers board game of the same name.
Violence & Scariness
some
Murder done in a kind of slapstick manner, with bodies being dragged around and placed in awkward positions. A man is shown with his head bloodied. Gunshots in the dark. A woman is killed with a rope around her neck. Another woman is found with a knife in her back.
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Mild sexual innuendo and sight gags throughout. One of the characters is a madam in a brothel. The maid dresses in a sexy uniform; male characters often gawk at her breasts and rear end. There is a joke involving a sexual position, which two of the characters show while fully clothed. A man places his hand on a woman's rear end.
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The movie is too cartoonish and slapstick-heavy to have anything in the way of positive messages.
Positive Role Models
very little
The characters are too cartoonishly ludicrous to be considered positive role models.
Parents Need to Know
Parents need to know that Clue is the 1985 movie based on characters and objects in the Parker Brothers board game. As it's a slapstick farce of a movie, there is frequent sexual innuendo and double entendres. Male characters gawk at female characters, including a maid dressed in a sexy uniform. One of the characters is a madam in a brothel. There also is drinking, cigarette smoking, and pipe smoking. Although the violence is cartoonish, characters are murdered, and some characters are shown bleeding from the head or chest. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails.
I saw this movie in the theatre when I was nine years old, and then I’ve probably watched it over a hundred times since. In high school, I confessed to a friend that I was obsessed with the movie, and she said, “Me too!” I discovered two other friends were also secretly obsessed with it. I’ve met others as an adult who still remembered many lines, they’d watched it so many times growing up. So for this review to call the movie “tedious” is insane. INSANE! It is a hilarious movie, with witty, rapid-fire dialogue and many fun twists and turns. Home sick with my 8-year-old daughter for a week, I let her watch it with me against my better judgment. She loved it, and the inappropriate sexual references went over her head. As for the murders, she’s seen most of the first five Harry Potter movies, so she wasn’t uncomfortable with the dead bodies. Still, I think whether or not it is appropriate for your child depends on your standards and your individual child. But this is a great movie!
This movie is the best!! I don’t know how they came up with the word tedious- it’s a riot and kids love it.
The worst part of this movie is the men do seem to think gawking and grabbing women is acceptable. That said, everyone in the movie turns out to be a bad person who gets punished for their badness. So it’s not too hard to have the conversation that they were bad people and they were doing bad things? That also applies to the smoking, the drinking, the nurse ring, the call girls, or anything else you might find offensive.
The dead bodies might freak out the smallest children but this is far less gory/spooky than most of the mystical movies out there.
What's the Story?
Based on the Hasbro board game, CLUE attempts to explain how six unrelated, eccentric characters manage to become murder suspects while staying under one roof. The story is propelled and narrated by a character not found in the board game -- the butler (Tim Curry), who runs the show at a dinner to which the familiar characters of Miss Scarlet (Leslie Ann Warren), Colonel Mustard (Martin Mull), Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan), Professor Plum (Christopher Lloyd), Mrs. White (Madeline Kahn), and Mr. Green (Michael McKean) have been invited. The guests find out they all have been blackmailed by the same man, Mr. Boddy (Lee Ving), who joins the party halfway through dinner. After Mr. Boddy's inevitable death, the murders compound as the group stumbles upon several more bodies, including those of the maid and the cook.
There's really not much to this movie. There is a lot of recapping, which makes the already tedious story line even more tedious. Though the DVD offers three endings (and three murderers), none of the scenarios seems plausible or even likely.
Tim Curry is likable (and very energetic) and has moments of brilliance, but he isn't able to distract from the mess of plot holes and ill-planned nonsense. The rest of the main cast speak their weak lines as though their words are genius, but an understated style only works with a good script. Though there are moments of good comedic timing, most of the jokes and sight gags are obvious, flat, and crude. The juvenile humor and sexual innuendo will be best appreciated by the junior high and high school crowds.
Talk to Your Kids About ...
Families can talk about board games and which others, if any, might be good candidates for being adapted into a movie. How would the movie be different from the game?
If you could make your own movie version of Clue, what would it be like?
Which of the three possible endings did you like best? Why?
MPAA explanation:
mild violence; mild sexual innuendo
Last updated:
September 18, 2024
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