This is the role-playing game of late night, cheesy, low-budget movies. The Director is the Game Master, writing the scripts for the game scenarios, and players assume the roles of characters in these bad films, striving to escape the clutches of invading Martians, mutant radioactive lobsters attacking Tokyo, or machete-wielding madmen in the bayou.

Each actor has the Basic Abilities of Build, Dexterity, Brains, Looks, and Fame. Fairly standard rpg abilities, really, with little explanation needed, methinks. (Fame will be addressed below, however.) For each stat, players role 4d10. Most PC actors will therefore have stats in the low twenties, but the minor actors (the NPCs) only have 10's assigned to their abilities.

Unlike other scores, a PCs Fame stat will increase after each session. Fame indicates your character's luck, but also their influence over the game itself. More famous PCs will have access to more movie props during each game, more special combat abilities, and will react more favorably to scary or dangerous movie situations. Fame points also increase Survival Points, which are used as hit points.

Each PC then has twenty rolls on a 1d10 for Talents. (Yes, that’s twenty rolls.) Talents are the actor's skills, and are divided into "Combat Talents" and "Other Talents". A player can put each roll into separate Talents, or add several rolls to the same Talent, as they wish. (So a player may start with up to twenty skills, but with low scores, or just a few skills with high scores.) Using your Talents requires a percentage roll, and rolling less than your skill score equals sweet success! Your scores may be higher than 100, although rolling "00" is a failure no matter how high your Talent score is. However, having a score higher than 100 is still beneficial, in case there are negative modifiers to your skill score before your roll is made.

Late Show Combat Talents include the standard fare, such as Unarmed, Knife, Pistol, and Rifle, but in true bad movie style, it also includes such intriguing choices as Spear, Power Tools, Artillery, and Strategic Weapons. (That's ballistic missiles, for those of you unlearned in modern warfare terminology.)

The Other Talents include anything else you'd need, like Acrobatics, Biology, Bluffing, Electronics, Medicine, Sign Language, and Teaching. Some less common ones include Animal Husbandry, Time Sense, Nuclear Physics, Spaceships, and Mental Mapping. The list is quite extensive, really. As one might expect in a role playing game based on low-budget movies, even Screaming is a talent. (Any other actors hearing the PC will be able to arrive at the screamer's side before the shrieking actor gets attacked. It's the "damsel in distress" gimmick.)

Once your actor is statted and skilled, you need some movie props to take onto the set. Unfortunately, you don't have much choice as to what's available to you during your movie. For new actors with low Fame scores, you may choose (or be given by the Director) such oddball items as $2 in loose change, a pet hamster, or a beach umbrella. A little more Fame, perhaps after a few game sessions, will get you such handy items as a motorcycle, 35 mm camera, or scuba gear. The kings and queens of late night B-movie stardom will have access to 12-guage shotguns, silver bullets, yachts, and laboratories filled with cool equipment.

The last thing you need to know about are your SPs, or Survival Points. Getting clobbered by a weapon or pounded on by the Creature from the Goopy Swamp will damage you, reducing your SPs. Adding your Build and Fame scores gives you your beginning SPs, so naturally as actors become more famous, they're harder to kill off in their next movie.

Whacking someone with a club does a base of 10 SP of damage, and a samurai sword slashes for 20 SP. While an experienced actor can survive getting hit with a slug from a Colt .45 pistol (20 points), few players can expect their PCs to stand up to the missile launcher's 54,000 points of damage. ["Game over, man! Game over!"]

The good news, though, is that after every minute of combat, players will automatically rejuvenate 1d10 SP. So, assuming they can stay alive for a few rounds of combat, they'll heal up a bit afterwards. Plus, every hour of game time restores another SP to injured PCs.

These healing SPs are needed, because one of the tenets of this game is the underlying law of bad moviedom: the protagonists will unfailingly Act Appropriately Stupid. It's understood that players will have their characters undertake ridiculously asinine actions to further the plot and add humor and drama to the game. For instance, your lone actor comes home late at night to find his front door hanging open, the lights not working, and bloody footprints leading down to the basement. Instead of getting the hell out of there and calling the cops, you'll of course cautiously (and without arming yourself) walk through the dark, down to the cellar, calling out forty times, "Hey, is anybody down there?" Try to act surprised when the chainsaw-wielding psycho attacks you; that's your job!

Acting Appropriately Stupid during key scenes in the game will garner you Fame points (assuming you survive), and add to the silliness of the adventure. After all, this ain't Shakespeare, it's the Late Show.

Most of the remainder of this rpg rulebook is for the Director, and includes way more information than I'd expected I'd get when I acquired my long-sought copy of It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show. There are pages and pages of pre-made monsters and villains to toss at your intrepid actors, from aliens to possessed bulldozers to ghosts to woolly mammoths to humongous radioactive reptiles that stomp across Asian countries. Even the famous nasties are included, from Dracula to mummies to Frankenstein's Monster. Still more pages are devoted to NPCs, like gypsy fortune tellers, town drunks, cheerleaders and private eyes. Finally, two feature presentations are given, adventures to get your B-list actors' careers going: The Invasion of the Undead Scuba Diving Zombies and the Kung Fu Theater reject The Iron Fist of Shao-Lin Versus the Dragon Ninja.

As if that weren't enough, the last few pages of the book have detailed generic maps of estate grounds, European castles, haunted mansions, small houses, and city streets, all ready to be populated in a jiffy by the GM… PLUS a PC sheet! Dudes, that's a lot of value for a $14.95 retail list price rules booklet.

The GOOD
The core PC generation system is simple and the game mechanics are fast and adaptable, and those of you who read my other reviews know those are always a plus to me. Man, there's a lot packed into this rulebook! The fact that easily half of the 128 pages of the soft cover book are really "extras" [such as the extensive NPC outlines, thorough adventure scenarios, and many lists to make the GM's life easier] accentuates the brevity and malleable nature of the rules.

The NEUTRAL
Like all rpg's with a specific gimmick, I don't know how frequently one would want to play It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show. For a silly night of cornball gaming in your own version of Plan 9 From Outer Space, this fits the bill wonderfully, as it was intended. But while there's nothing at all to keep a GM from using the system for a more serious game, the intent was to play late night movie mayhem, and I don't know how many times most roleplayers will want to star in another remake of The Blob.

The EVIL
There's nothing inherently wrong with this game, so I've got nothing to post in my Evil section this time around. The cover and interior art is cartoony, but it fits with the theme of the book, which is to not take itself seriously. It's a superb little bundle of work from Stellar Games. As I mention above, the farcical nature of the game may not appeal to hard core roleplayers on an extended basis, but it'd sure be fun on special occasions. (I'm currently thinking of a good Halloween game session, involving werewolves, disembodied hands, and a hyper mad scientist.)