You may know The Hunger Games as a young adult dystopian novel series by Suzanne Collins, later turned into films starring Burt Bacharach and Dick van Dyke.
As superb as those works were/are, they did lead to spinoff novels. One of the worst was The Hangover Games written by Susan Colin, a rip-off merchant with a hate-filled, personal vendetta against the young adult fiction genre.
Join us, then, today as we review this 2015 work as it “celebrates” its 10th anniversary. FOR SHAME!
Exploration of Headaches and Lethargy in The Hangover Games: Part 1
“I can feel Pitta Bread press his dough into my temple and he asks, ‘So now that you’ve got me, what are you going to do with me?’ I turn into him. ‘Put you somewhere you can’t get hungover.”
This is a strange book. We’re not sure what Susan Colin was thinking, but she basically took the plot of the first Hunger Games and made everyone drink heavily and be hungover.
Also, main character Pernod Advocaat (essentially Katniss Everdeen) befriends a giant walking Pitta Bread (again, essentially Peeta Mellark—love interest from the proper book) as they do battle to kill rampaging bottles of alcohol in a dystopian city setting of 2030.
Pernod Advocaat lives in a working class environment and volunteers as Tequila Slammer, the fantasy world’s way of partaking in The Hangover Games. She’s then forced to go on a binge drinking marathon against 50 other contestants, with the last person alive winning and being allowed to not be dead.
During the event, everyone must have one drink every hour until they pass out or get into a drunken fight.
Once contestants wake up hungover, they must find a local café, have a greasy fry up breakfast, and attempt not to vomit. If they hurl, they’re automatically disqualified from the event—the village from whence they came will also be forever shamed by the citizen’s inability to withstand a hangover.
As Colins writes, in one of her more pithy moments:
“Drinking things is much easier than making them.”
Oh yes, and The Hangover Games are broadcast LIVE to the watching world as a voyeuristic, weirdo, dystopian future thing.
Colins also wrote 3,451 pages of this garbage, so it takes around two full years to read the work. The irony here being it’s such a laborious read it’ll drive most readers into bouts of drunkenness.
The Film Adaptation of The Hangover Games
An ultra-low budget B movie film adaptation was commissioned in 2020 and launched in 2021. It was filmed in 10 days in Bolton of Greater Manchester, although the setting of the novel is in New York City. Colins explained:
“It’s a dystopian novel, the idea is, like, that, like, everything is, like, a bit run down and, like, the future ain’t so good. I decided to have a look around and, like, find somewhere that’d represent a crap version of New York. Like, Bolton in Greater Manchester fit the bill. I visited and got cholera by just standing in the train station!”
The cast and crew were encouraged to method act and direct, consequently leading to the film’s production being extremely drunken and overrunning by some five days. Colins (whom penned the screenplay adaptation) stated:
“Everyone was so hungover! It was mental and, like, ironic.”
It was launched to streaming services and currently holds a 1/10 rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes.
In 2023, Colins was busy writing a planned 10,000 word Part 2 sequel to her novel. But she was jailed in 2024 for ram raiding a gift store as she wanted to “stock up” on balloons and personalised cards for “several months ahead”.
After pleading insanity during her court case, she was placed in a psychiatric ward with a 350 year sentence. She later issued a press release via her publisher in January 2025:
“Mark my words, like, when those 350 years are up I’ll be, like, out and ready to write that sequel! Until then, I’ve got toilets to, like, scrub.”
