With a new Dungeons & Dragons movie bringing geeky fantasies to the big screen, Eliza Janssen looks back at a 1982 cautionary tale which laughably exaggerates the dangers of role-playing games. It’s called Mazes and Monsters, and you won’t believe where Tom Hanks’ character winds up at the climax of the film.
Mazes and Monsters
If you’re only familiar with role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons from the new blockbuster Honour Among Thieves, here’s a quick rundown of what it’s really about: “demonology, witchcraft, voodoo, murder, rape, blasphemy, suicide, assassination, insanity, sex perversion, homosexuality, prostitution, satanic type rituals, gambling, barbarism, cannibalism, sadism, desecration, demon summoning, necromantics, divination and other teachings.”
Oh hold up, that’s actually just an overblown description from the hilariously named anti-occult advocacy group B.A.D.D.—”Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons”. At the height of the Satanic Panic in the late 70s and early 80s, the nerdy tabletop social hobby was lambasted as yet another way for vulnerable young people to consign their souls to hell. If any of those pearl-clutching campaigners are still around today, I really wonder what they have to say about an all-ages, big-budget studio adaptation of D&D screening in theatres around the world.
One of the pet cautionary tales for B.A.D.D. members and D&D haters everywhere was the 1979 disappearance of a university student named James Dallas Egbert III. It was rumoured that Egbert and fellow students would live-action role-play Dungeons & Dragons sessions in the steam maintenance tunnels below their campus: perhaps he got lost in the fantasy and never came back out of the endless underground system.
The private investigator who first amplified this salacious reason for Egbert’s disappearance would later retract the gossip in a full-length memoir, revealing that Egbert had actually tragically taken his own life years after he was alleged to have disappeared into a hallucinatory trance in the tunnels. But it was too late: the story was a perfect blend of occult fear-mongering and the kind of parents-worst-nightmare paranoia that audiences were used to seeing in tacky afterschool specials.
Which neatly brings us to Mazes and Monsters, a…tacky afterschool special TV movie starring a 26-year-old Tom Hanks in his first lead role. Long before the current Chris Pine blockbuster or even the terrible 2000s trilogy of D&D movies, this 1982 made-for-TV PSA veiled as a boring campus drama tried and failed to bring the fantasy—and danger—of Dungeons & Dragons to the screen.
We open in media res, with cops and reporters eulogising another young life ruined by “a fantasy world of invented terrors”. “It’s kind of a psychodrama, you might say”, one detective begs us to take seriously: “where people deal with these troubles by acting them out….with possibly the loss of life in the process”. Already we’re bogged down by the assumption that escapist fantasy storytelling, much like violent video games or black metal music, urges impressionable geeks on to destructive ends. It certainly couldn’t be latent mental health issues or the repressive helicopter parenting we see all of our main characters dealing with, nuh uh.
Through laboured first act exposition, we find out that all four of our heroic “Mazes and Monsters” addicts are deeply burdened by their parent’s expectations: the oldies leadenly argue with each other and their kids, spouting lines like “you have a special gift for computers/writing, make us proud!”, “I hate it when you drink!/I drink to get through the day!!”. Which is weird, because these kinds of feature-length Very Special Episode-type TV movies should be appealing primarily to parental anxiety. If Mazes and Monsters was really a convincing plea to Mom and Dad to confiscate their kiddo’s nerdy board games, its hilariously misguided, fuddy-duddy approach could be better forgiven: but it seems to be reaching for a younger audience, making it only more useless and impossible to take seriously.
When fragile new kid Robbie (Hanks) gets peer-pressured into playing Mazes and Monsters with other college kids, it’s treated like the first seductive puff of a gateway drug. “Please just play one campaign with us”, the group’s token female player Kate (Wendy Crewson) begs—“if you don’t like it you can always quit”. Like a dungeon master half-heartedly ripping off Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Mazes and Monsters quickly has Robbie, Kate and two other college buddies take their fantasy fixation too far, traversing into nearby forbidden caves to bring their embarrassing LARPing to another level.
The movie is too nervous to actually depict the game as a fun and socially rewarding activity, so instead we get poorly-lit close-ups of these dull characters verbalising exactly why tabletop RPGs are such a spiritual threat. “The most frightening monsters are the ones that exist in our minds”, Kate says unprompted. She asks Most Boring Guy Daniel (David Wallace) what personal problems he’s trying to work out in the caverns, and Daniel replies in monotone, “trying to be me and not my father.” One minute Kate and Robbie are “going together”, jogging romantically across campus together as an abysmal easy listening ballad wails in the background: the next, he’s broken up with her, as his mystical cleric character Pardieu is unfortunately celibate. It’s that tired cliche of the D&D-obsessed virgin, but played straight as a sorrowful social problem, and it is hysterical.
It’s hard to tell whether Hanks is actually a diamond in the rough here: most of the acting is pretty terrible, so perhaps the fresh-faced star’s depiction of a downward spiral into schizophrenia is only a highlight in hindsight. Whatever the case, Hanks is totally let down by the film’s half-assed inclusion of high-fantasy dream sequences and practical effects. In one nightmare, he’s forced to jog on the spot in a foggy dreamscape that looks much like the music video for Total Eclipse of the Heart. Later, stumbling around New York City as debauched jazz trumpet blares in the background, he stabs a mugger to death and imagines the attacker as a flimsy reptilian beastie. Spielberg and Zemeckis never asked so much of him.
Whether you’re a D&D player or not, you’ll laugh as hard as I did to hear the voice of Woody from Toy Story shrieking in a cave before calmly telling his mates, “it is alright now…I have slain the Gorevill”. And the film’s climax will only make your jaw drop further. With Robbie missing and presumed dead by the fuzz, his friends consult clues in the handmade maps he’s been illustrating. Irritating Jay-Jay (Chris Makepeace) slaps his forehead when he realises where Robbie’s manic quest might lead: “It’s not Tolkien…the Two Towers, the Twin Towers! The World Trade Center!”
Yep. The mind-altering corruption of tabletop role-playing has led Hanks and his friends to the top of the World Trade Center, where he’s convinced his spells will protect him from splattering when he “flies” off the top deck. The gang plays into his fantasy and implores him to step away from the ledge. Then that vom-worthy Carpenters-reject of a theme song rises up on the soundtrack again: “a friend you can turn toooo…”. The schmaltzy scene is probably the second-worst thing that’s ever happened at that building.
If your D&D gang isn’t up to a few hours of inventive, bond-nourishing gameplay, I highly recommend checking out Mazes and Monsters for a laugh instead. It’s got Hanks doing some of the likeable fish-out-of-water mannerisms he’d perfect six years later in Big: plenty of worried adults describing the D&D analogue as a “far-out game” full of “swords, battles, spells and killing”: and it totally fails to understand why this sort of escapism is so enduringly popular.
Take a misrepresented, tragic 1970s true crime case as inspiration, bottle it up with plenty of misplaced “won’t somebody please think of the children!!” anxiety, and you wind up with a Reefer Madness-esque project that made me laugh a lot more than Honour Amongst Thieves did. Not for the right reasons, but still.
