Hey! Tell you what, lets create a board game based around Mexican drug running cartels! That'd a be a great game for all the family. Beat The Border was published by the appropriately named Border House Ltd., in 1971. A game for 2-4 players, where your job is to buy kilos of drugs from over the border and then sell them on back in the United States at profit. The aim of the game to make as much money as possible from your drug dealing. 

Think Breaking Bad the board game... Where you start with $1000 seed money to buy your drugs. Nip over the border, do a deal with Edwardo, Renaldo, Jose, etc... Then get back over the border without being detected, so you can sell them on in cites across the United States.

If you're carrying kilos you can be busted by various U.S. government agencies. But there are additional things you can buy throughout the game to help you get away with your new business venture, like dodgy lawyers and fake I.D.'s. You play the game until one player reaches the pre-set financial goal, usually around $25,000 to $100,000, as the suggested limit of the game rules. So get your big bad  Heisenberg on and see if you can Beat The Border!

You really have to wonder what they were thinking with Milky. Especially with Kenner, it's maker, pitching it as a pre-school toy for ages as young as 3. Why? Because Milky produced "milk", that the kids couldn't drink, under any conditions. Instead of Milky The Marvelous Milking Cow, she should have been called Milky The Child Poisoning Cow. To compound things Milky was made as a promotional tie-in with General Foods, to promote breakfast cereals.

The advertising blurb with Milky read: "Milky, The Marvelous Milking Cow. Milky drinks from trough, gives pretend milk. HOW IT WORKS: Fill see-through trough with water, place "milk" tablets in udder. Push Milky's head in trough, pump her tail, she drinks. When she's has enough, she raises her head and "moos". Then she's ready to be milked through her rubber udders. Comes with bucket, cow bell, vinyl pasture pad, non-toxic [still don't drink the milk!!!] tablets and booklet the tells the story of how milk gets from the cow to the home."

The true bizarre wonders of Milky can best be experienced by watching the TV commercial for her. Forget the dodgy milk that you had to warn kids not to drink! You were also teaching them that it is okay to ram an animals head into its feed bucket and force feed it, grab her tail and pull on it, until it wails out "STOP!!! No more!" Or "moos" in cow language. Milky the "Let's Pretend" toy of fun animal abuse for all the family. There's no wonder it has since become a cult toy.

Released in 1977, during the Cold War, After The Holocaust is a strategy board game for 3-4 players. The game is set, some 20 years after a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The players control regions of the nuke ravaged United States and Canada, as they play out a economic, military and political simulation in ten turns. 

Each turn of the game consists of five rounds, which are; a production round; a trade round; a consumption round; a military/political round; and a finance round. The rounds contain distinct phases within them. Like the production round, contains a basic production phase, a second production phase and a mobilization phase... Bored yet? Yep, After The Holocaust is one of those games that is so long and involved, that you get it out, set it up. And decided it's better to go down the pub, than spend the 6 hours playing time on this thing.

But there are those that have bothered, and even gone further. With the Weird Wide Web full of forums dedicated to the game. People have designed economic strategies, flow-charts of play, expansions, and play variants. But that's not the strangest part of the game. Hidden with the complex rules, and explanations, is that despite the devastation of the country, and people being taken back to the Dark Ages. The Federal Reverse Bank still exists and is still a functioning entity. So it's not the ants or the cockroaches that'll survive Armageddon, it's the American dollar! 

The Mighty Tint Record Player was produced by Ohio Art in 1970. Ohio Art are famous for the creation of Etch-A-Sketch. the Mighty Tiny Record Player, described under the tag-line "World's Smallest Record Player", ans came packaged with 3 "tiny" 2" records to play on it, each only lasting a matter of a few seconds each. The records themselves were so small, and as it was only lasting a tiny amount of time, they came without labels. Due to them all looking the same, each had a small number etched onto it, so that you could match it up with its sleeve, if you mixed them up. 

The Mighty Tiny Record Player itself was little more than a motorised turntable, and a steel needle that played the record. The needle itself vibrated against a domed piece of plastic, that acted as the player's speaker. The player was turned on by closing the lid, and had no way volume control or ear-phone jack to enhance the sound or listen to the tiny tinny sounds it produced privately. Though the turntable did have an adjustable speed, as the motor was prone to speed fluctuations, that would distort the sound of the record. Another model of the Mighty Tiny was produced called the Stereoper, which resembled a home cabinet stereo system of the period. 

Weird and obscure 1970s comedy horror, in which the main character is a corpse in a coffin. Arnold, the stiff, marries his girlfriend Karen, much to the dismay of his relatives. Thus the scene is set for Arnold's money grabbing relatives to gather around the newlyweds, in an attempt to get their hands on his money. Unfortunately someone has other ideas, and the relatives start dying in the most ludicrous and inventive ways.

Arnold was a production of the short lived Bing Crosby Productions, who managed to knock out some of the worst b-movies ever. Arnold in particular stands out as a bizarre little gem. A weird campy schlock dark comedy horror farce, a kind of pre-slasher murder movie with a dead protagonist. From the opening song to the dark ending, Arnold is a gobsmacking piece of cinema, that will leave you equally amused, bemused and confused. With a star studded cast of TV stars, and b-movie actors, that included Jamie Farr, Roddy McDowall and Stella Stevens.

Arnold is a movie that'll leave you confused as to what you just watched. Is it a so-bad-it's-good movie? One thing Arnold certainly is, it's a movie that'll leave you wondered what the hell did I just watch. And for that alone, it's well worth digging up, dusting off, and giving a go. Director Georg Fenady and his producer brother Andrew J. Fenady shot this film back-to-back with "Terror in the Wax Museum," with some of the same actors.

I was AFK all day yesterday, so no Cult Film Friday post. So instead it's a Cult Cinema Saturday, with the brilliant British-American sci-fi movie Phase IV, directed by the film-maker and famous graphic designer Saul Bass. Bass's only full length movie he directed. Bass is better known, for his graphic design work on some of the most iconic movie posters ever made.

The film, which was shot in both England and Africa, despite being set in Arizona, was a commercial failure on initial release. However it quickly gained a cult status through regular TV runs in the mid to late 70s and early 80s. 

Due to a cosmic event, known as a "phase", ants in a remote desert location develop an intelligent hive-mind and begin to attack the desert inhabitants and facilities of the scientists that are studying them. The movie became well regarded for its stunning cinematography, especially the close-up shots of ants, which were filmed by wildlife photographer Ken Middleham.

Bass originally filmed a spectacular, surreal montage lasting four minutes, showing what life would be like in the 'new' Earth, but this was cut by the distributor. The montage was supposed to suggest that the two surviving characters were altered by the ants creating the next step in evolution for humanity and insects. Shots from the original montage sequence appear in the theatrical trailer, which was likely prepared before cuts were made to the film.

Death Race, was a controversial video arcade game, released by Exidy in the United States in 1976, inspired by the cult 1975 film Death race 2000. Approximately 500 units of the game were made, making it a rare find. Despite it's primitive blocky black and white graphics, the game was considered too violent. The game was originally entitled Pedestrian, as in the two player game, the goal is to mow down the "pedestrians". Which were renamed as "gremlins", to make the game sound less blood thirsty. Pedestrians or gremlins, they were only vaguely humanoid shaped at best. Once run down the "victims" turn into crude cross-shaped tombstones.

The criticism of the game reached the national media, being featured on video game violence in 60 Minutes and featured on NBC's Weekend news show.

The game also made the pages of the tabloid trash, the National Enquirer, and the National Safety Council denounced the game. 

Such controversy seems laughable today, by the standards of the hyper-realistic gore filled games of today. The game was part of Exidy's chase and crash style arcade games, following the popular Destruction Derby from 1975.

Death Race has gone down in retro gaming history, as the first video game to court controversy, and is considered as one of the most controversial video games of all time.

Now there have been a number of attempts to make a good Fantastic Four animated series over the years. All of them have failed. Possibly because the Fantastic Four, just really aren't that "fantastic". There was the 1967 version, 1994 they tried again, and more recently in 2006. But the biggest "fail" of them all has to be the utterly awful 1978 version, entitled The New Fantastic Four, due to the fact that the makers decided to replace the Human Torch with a cute little robot called H.E.R.B.I.E (Humanoid Experimental Robot, B-type, Integrated Electronics). As with many animated series of the period, it (and I find I'm repeating myself with this) only ran for one season of 13 episodes. The show was first aired on NBC

There are rumours abound as to why the Human Torch wasn't included in the series. Which include the wild urban legend that the makers thought that the Human Torch was an inappropriate role-model for kids. That his ability to set himself on fire, may influence kids to try and become a human torch themselves. All complete rubbish. The truth is simply that the rights to use the character had been optioned to Universal Studios, for a possible pilot TV movie and series of the Human Torch. And so the executive decision was made to replace him, not with another wise-cracking superhero, but with a cute robot with no discernible super-powers at all. Now some cynics claim that Stan Lee introduced H.E.R.B.I.E the robot side-kick, as a blatant rip-off of the popular robot side-kicks R2D2 and C3PO from Star Wars, which had been released only a year earlier in 1977.   

The show was briefly revived in the July of 2012, with some major changes. When the Disney company, who originally distributed the show re-cut, edited, and re-dubbed some of the scenes from The New Fantastic Four. They turned them into self-referential and irreverent comical shorts as part of their Disney XD's Marvel Mash-Up shorts for their "Marvel Universe on Disney XD" block of programming. 

House (ハウス) is a 1977 Japanese cult horror comedy film. A group of girls travel into the countryside, to a house that is possessed with supernatural powers. The house attempts to devour the girls in increasingly bizarre and surreal ways. Beyond that it's hard to describe the magnificent madness that is House. There are moments that hark back to the era of silent movie slapstick comedies, the special effects are just weird, the acting is terrible, and the whole thing is utter nonsense. But those are all the things that make House such a great film. As it merrily skips along as a camp Japanese teen comedy, and suddenly switches to disturbing horror, and back again.

The film straddles the line between horror comedy and experimental arthouse film. With the screen filled with stunning visuals, it plays out like a bad LSD trip. With a floating disembodied head that has a bum biting fetish, a carnivorous piano, vicious killer bedding, and the blood gushing cartoon cat. The whole thing leaves you wondering what the hell you have just watched.

Critically panned (which often makes for great cult film), director Nobuhiko Obayashi went on to direct the live-action version of The Girl Who Leapt Through time in 1983, and the dark erotic cult film Sada (1998), based on the story of Sada Abe who  erotically asphyxiating her lover, Kichizo Ishida in 1936. Sada  then went on to cut off his penis and testicles and carrying them around with her in her handbag. Obayashi's film of the story is another must see of Japanese cult cinema.