Five Obscure Super Nintendo Horror Games

A handful of off-the-beaten path cartridges that'll definitely get you in a Halloween mood in a hurry.

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

When it comes to 16-bit horror games, the group consensus is that the Sega Genesis beat the Super Nintendo silly. This is hardly debatable, seeing as how the Genny was absolutely inundated with console exclusive monster mashes like Splatterhouse 2 and 3, The Ooze and Haunting Starring Polterguy, plus iterations of Castlevania, Zombies Ate My Neighbors and Ghouls ‘N Ghosts that, in the eyes of many, totally eclipsed their analogues on the SNES.

That said, if you looked hard enough - and didn't mind finding ways to reverse engineer your North American unit to play PAL and Japan-only releases - you would have found quite a few decent to really, really good to almost great horror offerings on the console Super Metroid and Earthbound likewise called home. To help ring in the Halloween season, I decided to peruse the SNES and Super Famicom libraries for a couple of less discussed horror-themed video games - while the inherent quality of the five games below fluctuate, one thing is for sure: if you're looking to get into the All Hallows' Eve spirit, any of the offerings below ought to get you feeling the holy ghost of Samhain in no time at all...

Clock Tower

(Human Entertainment, 1995)

Yes, before the vaunted survival horror series made the great migration to the Playstation, it first appeared on the Super Famicom in 1995. In terms of sheer atmosphere, this has to be the best "pure" horror game on the system. This is a game tailor-made to scare the dog shit out of you, with an especially effective emphasis on strategically timed scares. For the most part an adventure game, you use your D-pad to steer the main character across a huge mansion. A mini-triumph of minimal game design, you really only have to use two face buttons - a context-sensitive "action" button that opens doors, turns on lights and opens boxes and another one that forces your character to run like hell (yeah, you'll be using this one, a lot.) While some may be put off by the deliberately slow pace, hardcore horror fans will absolutely LOVE the game mechanics, which allow you to hide, outsmart and outmaneuver the pinking shears-wielding antagonist by locking yourself in bathrooms, concealing yourself under beds and taking advantage of all sorts of impromptu weapons liberally sprinkled around the abode. There's a lot of backtracking, but since the game features randomly-generated room layouts, no two playthroughs of the game ought to unfurl the same way. The controls and tempo take a while to get used to, but if you've ever fancied yourself a fan of the oeuvre of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, this is a game you owe it to yourself to play.

Laplace no Ma

(Vic Tokai, 1995)

From the same fine folks who gave us Clock Tower (as well as the outstanding Fire Pro Wrestling series) comes Laplace no Ma, a traditional JRPG-dungeon crawler that, in some respects, is quite similar to the Famicom masterpiece Sweet Home. While I don't think Laplace is anywhere near is innovative or awesome as that 8-bit classic, I do think this is a fairly solid role playing game, if only noteworthy for its strong horror overtones. Set in a small New England community, you get to run around a sleepy hamlet, where in the 1920s, some really freaky shit went down at this one mansion. Of course, this being a video game and all, your avatar can't help but amble on in and try to solve the decades-old mystery, which - naturally - also entails killing the living shit out of all sorts of monsters and rabid monsters lurking all over the place. Granted, the combat system is pretty straight forward, the story isn't going to win any awards for creativity and the backdrops are practically interchangeable no matter where you go, but it's pretty hard to hate on any game that lets you stab werewolves and miniature Cthulus with silver daggers. And man, you have gots to love that strangely life-affirming, quasi-philosophical ending!

Musya: The Classic Japanese Tale of Horror

(Seta USA, 1992)

Musya is one of those games that has some pros, but ultimately, a lot more cons (you know, sort of like the constituency of the Minnesota Vikings ... zing!) First, the good: the visuals are really nice, there are a shit ton of monsters everywhere (and there's a pretty good mix of the undead, too, and not just three or four enemy types that keep getting recycled) and your protagonist has a downright awesome spinning javelin attack that is easily one of the 10 funnest "spam" moves in the history of 16-bit gaming. Furthermore, it's a pretty long game for its genre, and the bosses - for the most part - are fairly inventive. And as for the bad? Well, there's really no delicate way to put it: the controls in this game absolutely suck, with jumping mechanics so floaty it might as well be considered a totally broken component of the gameplay. And if that wasn't bad enough? The slowdown in this game is absolutely absurd, with some of the worst flickering I've seen in any game on any console ever. To be fair, there are certainly some neat things to be found in Musya, but to be frank, the amount of patience required to experience that handful of cool stuff clearly outweighs whatever short-lived fun you're likely to wrench out of the cartridge. Tis a pity, too: the whole Ghosts N Goblins meets Ninja Gaiden gameplay had plenty of promise - and had publisher Seta actually taken the time to polish the game and overhaul its controls, it probably could have been a miniature cult classic. 

Majyuo

(KSS, 1995)

Ahh, shit, this game rules. Imagine, if you will, what would happen if one evening, Castlevania and Contra got rip-roaring drunk and made sweet, Satanic love all night. Well, nine months later, I'd imagine the horrid abomination crawling forth from the womb to resemble something like Majyuo (the name roughly translates into "king of the demons"), a run and gun platformer that has so many awesome little touches that, at times, you almost want to pause the game so you can soak up all the kooky awesomeness. Initially playing a dude who looks like Rambo cosplaying as Hank Hill, eventually the side scrolling shooter takes an unexpected turn into Altered Beast territory, with your avatar turning into - among other things - a laser blasting insect warrior who can teleport underground and emerge in a blaze of enemy-destroying hellfire, a winged peacock dude who can shoot mind boomerangs and do capoeira rolls and, my personal favorite, a purple dragon with a beer bully whose fully charged special attack appears to be the ability to barf full-screen sized wolf ghost heads at people. This game has to have some of the most inspired backdrops of any SNES game (really, they are so trippy, they make Yoshi's Island look like an Excel spreadsheet) and the boss fights - while hard as fucking shit - are nonetheless a hoot to churn through. The steep difficulty curve may turn off most gamers, but if you have a thing for weird-ass (and hard-ass) action platformers, Majyuo is DEFINITELY a game you need to go out of your way to experience.

Nosferatu

(SETA Corporation, 1995)

OK, so basically, Nosferatu is a blatant Prince of Persia clone. Still, it's a Prince of Persia clone that allows you to punch the heads off zombies and run face first into a solid stone surface and sell it like it was Three Stooges eye poke, and that's mighty fine with me. Taking a page out of the Out of This World/Flashback: The Quest For Identity playbook, the gameplay is largely anchored around single screen, labyrinthine puzzles, which - of course - are littered with all sorts of death traps. What makes Nosferatu stand out a little is its combat system, which, all things taken into consideration, really isn't that bad for an action-platformer (and trust me, you really can't say you've truly lived into you've spin kicked a virtual orangutan in this game.) While the controls are pretty solid and the animations are downright tremendous, the game does have its fair share of flaws. For one thing, the puzzling elements get real repetitive, real fast and really, there's not a whole lot of variation - structurally or aesthetically - from one castle to the next. On top of that, the boss fights are usually pretty unimpressive, and the final showdown with Nosferatu himself - whom, by the way, looks nothing like the iconic silent movie creation played by Max Shreck - is a big letdown. Still, there are more positives than negatives here (especially the music, which is a nearly perfect combination of creepy and corny) and if there's any time of year where trial and error gameplay is most tolerable, it's definitely at 3 a.m. during a rainy October morn. 

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B-Movie Review: "Cry Baby Lane" (2000)

A decade and a half after it's one-and-done airing, does the (allegedly) banned made-for-Nickelodeon movie still have some ... or any ... bite?

By: Jimbo X
JimboXAmerican@gmail.com
@Jimbo__X

The year 2000 is an extraordinarily weird one in terms of pop culture. Socioeconomically, times were about as good as they've ever been in the States, with a roaring stock market and record low unemployment. Wedged snug between Columbine and Monica Lewinsky and the dot com bust and 9/11, it's culturally something of a lost era. I mean, I was totally cognizant of the year, but I struggle to recall anything truly memorable about it. Sure, you had the presidential election and Survivor and Elian Gonzalez, but beyond that? Really, it's nothing more than a hazy, barely recognizable fog of WWF wrestling and Sega Dreamcast.

As a 14-year-old making the oh-so-awkward leap from middle school to high school at that point in time, I could relate to the growing pains experienced by Nickelodeon circa 2000. I was part of an entire generation weaned on Doug and Salute Your Shorts, but now? I -- and everybody else in what we would now call the "tween" demographic -- were just too cool for that kind of stuff. I was a year away from getting my learner's license, and I even had a few friends who had already lost their virginity and tried hard drugs. You really think we're going to risk our popularity by spending our Saturday nights at home watching Keenan and Kel reruns? 

Aye, it was a problem the suits at Nickelodeon were well aware of. With newer fare like SpongeBob and Drake and Josh, the network still had a chokehold on junior high America, but it was losing favor with teenagers fast. So, how do you reel in ninth-graders, who had already began eschewing Rugrats for weed and makeout parties?

Simple -- you start producing your own really shitty horror comedy TV movies. 

The backstory behind Cry Baby Lane really overshadows the movie itself. Originally broadcast in October 2000, the made-for-cable fright flick was never re-aired (a fate comparable to Internet Is In America USA "original" favorite Beer Money.) At the time, no one really cared, but over the years, its obscurity has given it an almost mythic status among today's aficionados of off-the-beaten-path pop culture.

"Hi, I am an early 1990s junk culture throwaway here to talk to
 you  about an early 2000s junk culture throwaway..."

Legend has it, the film was deemed "too scary" for the core Nick demographic, so Viacom decided to yank it from the tape library. And for almost a dozen years, the alleged "lost movie" went unseen ... that is, until somebody who had taped it the night of its original airing posted it on YouTube. (Interestingly -- and ironically -- enough, the Interwebs hearsay about the movie actually goaded Nickelodeon into rebroadcasting it shortly thereafter on one of their 15 million-bazillion channels, complete with advertisements claiming it was "banned" from the airwaves.)

Of course, the movie was never banned, and Viacom most likely never gave a shit even if it gave eighth-graders nightmares, anyway. It was just a fleeting piece of ephemeral, late Clinton era kiddo junk, which was already woefully dated by the time 9/11 rolled around. There is no way the could have possibly had the foggiest idea that, a decade later, there would be an entire subculture out there of overly-nostalgic saps desperately in pursuit of -- and demanding -- rare crap culture. In that, Cry Baby Lane went from being a casualty of modernity to being an unexpected beneficiary of later modernity.

All right, so what is this Cry Baby Lane I keep yammering on and on about? Well, I am glad you asked -- and so is Melissa Joan Hart (at the time, star of ABC's Sabrina the Teenage Witch), who serves as our celebrity intro and outro host. Right from the beginning, Clarissa makes a cheap appeal to the "tween" demographic, saying the film -- loaded with gross-out special effects and toilet humor -- was precisely the type of highly discriminate entertainment "us teens" have such a fondness for. Keep in mind, the average age of those actually watching the movie that night couldn't have been older than 12, and that MJH was damn near 30.

Once that pandering is over and done with, we hop right into the feature presentation. The credits was over some black and white farmhouse footage, while a disembodied narrator tells a yarn about a pair of conjoined twins -- one of whom was a downright evil little sucker. The gist of the backstory (which is based on some sort of weird Rust Belt folklore) is that the Siamese twins were severed, Basketcase style, and the titular Cry Baby Lane is where the demonic one is buried ... or is he? 

Frank Langella is the best thing about this movie. In fact,
he's the best thing about any movie he is in.

From there, we jump to Frank "Skeletor" Langella, who plays an undertaker talking to two kids about swallowing spiders in one's sleep. We are introduced to his budding taxidermist nephew, who makes the hilarious quip that "it's dead here." Get it, because it's a funeral home and shit!

So, the credits wrap up and we watch those two kids from earlier riding their bikes through a very Pete & Pete-ish small town at night while this funky surfy-rock music plays. The younger of the two has a nightmare about glowing worms and hacksaws, so he asks his mama and daddy if he can sleep with them (the kid, by the way, looks nearly old enough to be in high school.) Mom, ever the in-tuned sort she is, tells her kids to stop going to that goddamn funeral home and visiting that creepy old undertaker ... but not for any of the reasons any sane parent would issue such a diktat. For extra giggles, the assholish older brother is a big pro wrestling fan (can you tell this thing was made in 2000?), complete with a poster in his bedroom wall of a certain iconic, undead grappler (hint: it's The Undertaker.)

The younger brother, named Andrew visits his best pal Hall, a diminutive African-American lad who has a "Hobbit hole" playhouse and is utterly obsessed with Tolkien (an interesting little subplot, seeing as how the first LOTR movie didn't come out until a year after this one aired.) Oh, and he likes playing with a toy lightsaber, too. Because pop cultural reference, that's why.

As the music alternates between happy-crappy wobbly surf rock and cheesy, spooky piano music, we encounter the two brothers setting up a prank in a graveyard. They invite three local girls over for a seance, complete with a really out of left field Princess Di joke. The older boy, Carl, recounts the Siamese twin tale and we get up-close images of those radioactive glowing worms and then real crying sounds emerge from the hinterlands. Andrew suggests the seance "worked," to which Carl ripostes "and maybe I'm Stone Cold Steve Austin." Man, this shit is more 2000 than dial-up AOL and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 on the Nintendo 64. 

Next up, there's a scene where Frank talks to a Hispanic grave digger who sleeps in a backhoe about a Price is Right dream he keeps having. They uncover the kids candles and

Don't let the black and white cinematography fool you: this
thing is still more All That than Night of the Living Dead. 

cassette player from the seance and uh-oh! We have a wild dog attack, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. The two siblings fart on each other (there's that mature, teen humor we were promised!) and their mom chides Frank for stirring up their imaginations and also messing up her mom's embalming. Well hell, that's kind of dark.

The glowing worms possess a Girl Scout, and Andrew argues with his overprotective ma. Meanwhile, Hall asks Andrew to marry his mom, which leads to this "action sequence" in which Andrew and his older brother try to outrun a train on their bicycles. 

As Carl gloats, he's dragged off into a grove by three demonic girs, only to reappear seconds later "all normal" to his younger sibling (not that I really need to tell you this, but the editing in these "fantasy sequences" is pretty gosh-darn bad.) This leads to an argument between mom and dad about the father not caring that the kids are missing, which dovetails into a scene in which Andrew is stripped down to his skivvies and gets pegged with water balloons. Uh ... did the same dude who directed Clownhouse direct this one under a pseudonym or something?

Following a wild bull attack (no, really), Andrews runs halfway across town in his underwear like Arthur in Ghosts N Goblins, accosting a bunch of demon hillbillies who set boats on fire for kicks and giggles. This leads to Andy telling Frank about what really happened at the seance, and oh shit, there appears to have been a burial mix-up. You see, the evil kid was buried in the cemetery, while the good twin was buried at Cry Baby Lane, and now, all sorts of wacky demonic shit has been unleashed on Ohio (just overlook the kids playing around with Minnesota Vikings helmets, naturally.) Just before he can figure out how to reverse the curse, his mom shows up and drags him away from the funeral home. 

At home, the demonically possessed Carl pretends to not be possessed (you see, all the demons have to do is touch you and you become a demon, too.) Not that this is really integral to the plot or anything, but man, does it bring a nostalgic tear to my eyes to see so many generic VHS tapes just sprawled out on that kid's bedroom floor. 

Get it! Because it harkens back to the part at the beginning of
the  movie when the undertaker was talking about swallowing
spiders in  your sleep!  Eh, that's probably giving the producers
too much credit. 

And back to the saga of Frank and he gravedigger, who is anxiously awaiting a hot date that never arrives. As it turns out, cutting grass to close to a headstone unleashes the hounds of hell, and that's the cue for the little black kid -- now a demon possessed little pipsqueak himself -- to enter the fray, beat the crap out of Frank and steal his ring, Gollum style. 

Carl tries to set Andrew up in the shower so he can possess him (fuck it, Victor Salva directed this) but Andrew outsmarts him and uses the downtime to get an early head start on fleeing town. Then, we learn that the ONLY way to stop the curse is to find a root growing out of the evil twin's heart and slice it in two. So, Andrew and Frank's nephew hop inside a hearse, and get involved in a low-speed police chase with a demonic cop. Once that is over and done with, Andrew has to evade his evil brother in a corn field plus a possessed farmer trying to chew him up in a mechanical combine. Andrew then finds himself in an open field, surrounded by the evil girls. The girl he has a crush on almost beckons him with a soul-stealing kiss, but she freaks him out with the arachnid hanging off her tonsils. This embroils Andrew in a chase against Chee-Chee (the towering, manliest of the demonic lasses) until he gets sucked inside the evil twin's grave, who is now a fully grown, pasty-faced, worm-chewing teenager. Eventually, he fumbles his way through the darkness and finds the infant's skeleton, the corresponding "heart root," and severs it.

Immediately, Andrew wakes up to a brand new, sunny day, with the spell broken and nobody having any recollections of what happened the night before. After Andrew and his new gal pal visit Frank at the funeral home, the movie concludes with Carl and that little black kid 'rasslin in a club house ... because, yet again, this thing is 2000 as fuck. The credits roll, with MJH in a sidescreen recapping the "lessons" learned from the movie, like don't consort with the undead and don't stick your tongue inside the mouth of people who eat spiders. And once Clarissa is done dispensing her sage advice, this one is all over, amigos y amigas.

Well, you don't really need me to tell you this, but Cry Baby Lane really isn't that good a movie. The acting is unremarkable, the characters are uninteresting, the special effects are blah and the "horror" sequences are about as thrilling as the first five minutes of a game of Monopoly. Indeed, the only reason this utterly forgettable piece of late Clinton era fluff is even remembered nowadays is because of its needless vaunting (and overvaluing) on sites like CreepyPasta and Reddit. Oh, and all those back stories you've heard about the movie being "banned" by Nickelodeon? All a bunch of hogwash, as the executives merely shelved it because a.) the audience numbers were so low, and b.) nobody in the general public clamored for its release until a bunch of nostalgia-obsessed Gen Y dweebs got on the Interwebs and started bellyaching. 

The movie was directed by Peter Lauer, a dude with an extensive background in television whose credits include The Adventures of Pete & Pete and Strangers with Candy. He co-write the script alongside Robert Mittenthal, who, in addition to penning a few Pete & Pete episodes, also wrote most of the old, animated sketch-comedy show KaBlam! 

Unsurprisingly, the movie does feel quite a bit like an episode of Pete & Pete at times, albeit deprived of the show's wit, warmth and way-ahead-of-its-time post-post-modern humor. These fellows might be pretty good at writing kids comedies, but they sure as heck don't know how to write engaging juvenile horror, that's for damn sure.

Outside of Frank Langella and Jim Gaffigan (who has a twenty second cameo as an irate dad), nobody in the film has really gone on to stardom. Lead actor Jase Blankfort doesn't have an IMDB credit past 2003, while the actor who played his older brother had a nine-year break in between acting gigs after filming Cry Baby Lane (and per the IMDB, his only doing shorts these days.) Interestingly enough, the actor who played Hall appears to have had the most post-Cry Baby Lane success, having garnered bit parts in Monsters, Inc., Spider-Man 2, Get Rich or Die Tryin'. There is also a photograph of him on his IMDB page with Hulk Hogan, which -- in hilariously, tragically ironic hindsight -- is all shades of foreboding. 

So, at the end of the day, what are we to make of this antiquated, bygone piece of veritable nothingness from 15 years earlier? Other than expose the fact that our memories mislead us and we had poor tastes in entertainment choices before 9/11, precious little. It's not an out-right terrible film, but is is nonetheless a rather dull, laborious experience, a film that tries desperately to work outside its meager aspirations but just winds up coming off more inept and half-assed than anything. The manufactured Internet interest aside, this is about as value-less a throwback to the early 2000s as I can imagine; although I am sure SOMEBODY on the Web will remember another piece of long-forgotten ephemera from the era and drum up inflated support for its return to the public spotlight, too. 

Of course, they will go on to be sorely disappointed, as the case with Cry Baby Lane. That's the rub with 'nostalgia,' folks: once that forgotten thing exists beyond your memories, it suddenly loses its retroactive value -- and with it, almost all of its appeal. 

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