Studio: CBS TV
Director: Steven H. Stern
Writer: Tom Lazarus
Producer: Tom McDermott, Richard A. Briggs
Stars: Tom Hanks, Wendy Crewson, David Wallace, Chris Makepeace, Lloyd Bochner, Peter Donat, Anne Francis, Murray Hamilton, Vera Miles, Louise Sorel, Susan Strasberg
Review Score:
Summary:
A troubled college student experiences a life-threatening break from reality after playing a popular fantasy role-playing game.
Review:
Every decade, dimwitted mothers and fathers who are too up in their own asses to ever believe bad parenting could be one possibility, pick a piece of pop culture they can blame as a culprit for corrupting impressionable youths.
Spurred on by Fredric Wertham’s book of bunk “Seduction of the Innocent,” a Senate subcommittee on juvenile delinquency infamously associated comic books with crime in the 1950s. Wertham’s recklessness resulted in all kinds of clueless conjecture, from claiming Batman and Robin’s hidden homosexuality was turning kids gay to warning that EC Comics’ output was a more dangerous threat than Adolf Hitler.
Fortunately, level heads prevailed and Congress concluded such ridiculous fears were unsubstantiated. Nah, only kidding. The truth is politicians merely move on to manufacture new scapegoats out of whatever current entertainment trend they don’t understand. It’s less work to carelessly accuse a video game like “Call of Duty” or “Grand Theft Auto” of inspiring America’s latest school shooting than it is to do something meaningful about gun reform. Why lift a finger when you can just point one?
Time and again, hindsight proves irrational outrage to be unfounded. Not that this stopped the 1980s from inventing an insidious cabal that extended from music to movies to books and beyond. Through heavy metal lyrics, horror, or even when you weren’t looking during daycare, Satanists were secretly grooming your children to become demon-worshipping witches.
TSR’s venerable pen-and-paper RPG ‘Dungeons and Dragons’ took an extended turn in these crosshairs. “60 Minutes” didn’t fan conspiratorial flames until its notorious 1985 piece where talking heads contended D&D could be connected to numerous deaths and also taught children how to summon real monsters. The panic was previously seeded years earlier with the sad case of Michigan State University student James Dallas Egbert III.
Not yet 17 in August 1979, Egbert reportedly struggled with depression, drug addiction, sexual identity, and other emotional issues that require more than two hands to count. After leaving behind a suicide note, the teen descended into his school’s subterranean steam tunnels and disappeared.
Upon learning of Egbert’s interest in D&D, a private investigator speculated Egbert may have been participating in a live-action fantasy game and became consumed by a delusion. Press picked up on the sensationalism and the story snowballed to suggest players were killing themselves in reality to reflect the fictional deaths of their alter egos. This turned out to be nothing close to the truth. Egbert resurfaced several weeks later, although he did die by suicide the following year.
Facts being inconvenient, successful author Rona Jaffe further catapulted the ‘D&D danger’ theory with a 1981 novel, supposedly rushed from conception to completion in just a few days. ‘Mazes and Monsters’ reframed the false assumptions surrounding Egbert’s disappearance into a cautionary narrative about how fantasy games could fracture a fragile teen’s psyche. Never mind that Jaffe, like the private investigator, had no direct experience with ‘Dungeons and Dragons.’ The public didn’t want proof. They wanted puff that propagated wild ideas.
One year later in December 1982, CBS continued feeding the fear of D&D by adapting ‘Mazes and Monsters’ into a made-for-TV movie. As with the book it’s based on, the film concerns itself less with accuracy and more with idealizing what worried moms and dads want to believe about uncontrollable children whose behavior can’t be comprehended by an older generation.
To get a proper sense of how jarringly goofy this MOW malarkey is, take a moment to look up the song “Friends in This World” composed by Hagood Hardy, preferably with words sung by Judith Lander. Listen for one verse. Sounds like music written for an ABC Afterschool Special about dealing with your grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, right? “Mazes and Monsters” opens with this out-of-place tune playing under unmotivated B-roll of taxicabs driving around New York City. If you turned on the TV during this part of the broadcast, you’d think you were watching some sappy soap opera starring Bea Arthur and Mary Tyler Moore.
Gradually we get to meet these friends in this movie’s skewed world. Smothered by a celebrity socialite mother, Jay Jay is a bit of a boy genius who wrestles with loneliness and legacy. Daniel’s parents crush his artistic dreams with professional pressures to pursue more practical paths. Kate comes from a divorced household. Robbie, hammily played by Tom Hanks in an overdramatized role that competes with “The Man with One Red Shoe” for his early career’s reddest pimple, deals with an alcoholic mother and stern father who constantly bicker. Together, these four college kids cover every corner of the problematic parents/troubled teen trope chart.
Jay Jay, Daniel, Kate, and Robbie get together for regular games of ‘Mazes and Monsters’ spilling over with gibberish that could only come from a writer cursorily familiar with how such games actually go. “I am Glacia the fighter. I have great strength and courage and I have won the mighty Talking Sword of Lothia.” “In reaching the ninth level I have acquired many charms and spells, the greatest of which is The Graven Eye of Timur.” Ok, whatever.
Out of boredom, loneliness, or insufficient scriptwriting, Jay Jay considers killing himself in some dangerous local caverns. His despondency lasts for all of 10 seconds as he instead decides to make the caves a backdrop for a live-action edition of the group’s game. During this game, complete with cosplay borrowed from their school’s theater department, Tom Hanks loses his mind when he hallucinates an encounter with a wonky reptilian creature straight off a “Doctor Who” stage circa 1965.
Robbie’s break from reality doesn’t end when the game does. His side romance with Kate, which comes together in one brief scene, develops during an equally quick montage, then hits a rough patch when Kate reasonably asks Robbie to slow down, ends entirely as Robbie reckons he has to mirror his priest avatar’s piety. Robbie also has an older brother who ran away from home years ago and hasn’t been seen since. Robbie blames himself because he gave his brother relocation money, which is the only other explanation offered for why Robbie falls fully into his sudden and bizarre fantasy.
Robbie eventually disappears. Presumed lost in the caverns, a police officer gets involved in the investigation. Outfitted in a typical tan trench coat, the gruff gumshoe grills Robbie’s friends with condescending questions like, “is Robbie a doper? Downers? Drink?” Trying to talk the talk, the square cop adds, “Mazes and Monsters is a ‘far out’ game: swords, poison, spells, battles, maiming, killing.” He even implies another player possibly killed Robbie as a consequence of the game’s outcome.
“Mazes and Monsters” overloads on as much half-cocked nonsense as the spurious yellow journalism that birthed it. Without context explaining why it exists in the first place, it’s an exceptionally marginal TV movie that features no other outstanding reason to remember it.
Under a lens looking at it as kooky kitsch however, “Mazes and Monsters” earns bonus points for its camp value as a pseudo-historical artifact from when mothers spilled their marbles over a totally harmless fantasy game. The movie is chock full of retro charm. Genre film fans get to see the late “Predator” and “Harry and the Hendersons” creature performer Kevin Peter Hall as the latex-laden beast that Hanks slays. Chris Wiggins, aka Jack Marshak from “Friday the 13th: The Series,” drops in as a dirty hobo in a Times Square sewer. Actor and director Clark Johnson of “Homicide: Life on the Street” and “The Wire” turns up in an even beefier bit part. In addition to Tom Hanks being Tom Hanks, you get “Psycho’s” Vera Miles playing his boozy mother and a few more classic Hollywood actors as other single-scene parents. Then there is the throwback tour of early ‘80s New York, including a lengthy look inside the former World Trade Center during the film’s crazy climax.
The tragic true story and shameful witch-hunt that sparked “Mazes and Monsters” should neither be ignored nor forgotten. Yet when you break from reality like a gamer escaping doldrums through D&D, and indulge in the film simply as “I can’t believe they made this” entertainment, it’s a simpler matter to see the movie’s weirdo appeal. Anyone with one ounce of intellect to match a single smidge of taste would have rightfully assigned a failing grade in 1982. From a relaxed perspective four decades later, “Mazes and Monsters” has more fun to offer as an oddball curiosity.
Review Score: 60
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