Main cast: Byron Thames (Paul), Sasha Jenson (Matthew), Tori Spelling (Beverly), and Ashley Laurence (Jodie)
Director: Michael Brandon

The premise of The Match Game is pretty simple: Matthew, his girlfriend Beverly, Beverly’s good friend and horror-obsessed Jodie, and Jodie’s love interest Paul get together in a supposedly haunted house one night to share scary stories while playing the game mentioned in the title.

Sigh, those good old days when kids broke into empty houses to do drugs and have orgies. What happened to kids these days? They are such disappointments.

Anyway, the game is like this. One of them lights a match and tells a scary story. Once the match burns out, the next kid lights a match and continues the story.

I am not sure why teenagers are playing this game, because it sounds as fun as throwing oneself into quicksand. I suppose Monsters is for a younger audience and hence it can’t be too adult or scary.

Wait, did I say the show can’t be too scary? When the predictable happens—the dead owner of the house comes back to life to enact the story these kids told—the kills are pretty gory for this show, surpassing even Where’s the Rest of Me?. There are no discretion shots here: one of them gets their neck snapped in full technicolor, while another one has their head crushed in a very graphic manner that would have been awesome if the head being crushed weren’t so obviously fake.

Still, kids watching this episode may just crap their pants, become full-blown horror fans, or both.

The atmosphere and lighting are also solid in creating a mounting sense of dread throughout the episode, making it easy to forget that most of the episode is just about annoying kids telling a silly story.

So yes, story-wise this episode is pretty average, but when the horror gets going, it’s pretty awesome by the standards of this show. Plus, Tori Spelling isn’t too annoying and Kirsty Cotton from Hellraiser is in it, so it’s a solid episode all things considered.