Chris Makepeace has returned from his first year of college to discover, as so many have in the same situation, his mother has completely changed his room.  But she didn’t make it into a craft or workout room.  No, it is still technically his room, except it has been overhauled in a motif of entirely pure white and with white-with-blue-grid lines wallpaper, not just on the walls but also on the floor.

That grid design on the walls (and again, the floor—really?!) brought to my mind graph paper, which was a popular visual style when telefilm Mazes and Monsters was originally aired in 1982.  And graph paper immediately brings to my mind the game Dungeons & Dragons, of which the titular RPG here is an obvious reference.

Makepeace is one of four friends who play the game together at the fictitious liberal institution Grant College.  There’s also Wendy Crewson’s aspiring writer, David Wysocki’s put-upon whatever who is trying to avoid a career in computer science, and Tom Hanks—yep, the Tom Hanks—as…well, I don’t know really.

But I do know all four of these barely-defined characters are from obviously moneyed families and they seem to have the kinds of first-world problems people from such upbringings have.  Think of them as Ordinary People problems.  Consider Makepeace, with a genius I.Q. which has led to him being a college sophomore at only the age of 16.  And yet, he is constantly bitter and sarcastic, complete with a mynah bird he has taught to say such things as “Poor Jay Jay”, meaning he has a self-pity service animal.  He also seems to be wearing a different hat in every scene until the shtick is abandoned after the first act so, really, he brings a great deal of scorn upon himself.

At least Hanks’s character has a genuine issue to deal with, and that is the disappearance and likely death of his brother, Hall.  Myself, I suspect the guy left, and no longer wanted to associate with, parents who stuck him with the bizarre moniker of “Hall”.

At first, everything is great for the role-playing foursome.  And Hanks is making time with Crewson, until a dream tells him his Mazes & Monsters character, a holy man, must purify himself through chastity.  Since the disturbed Hanks was already falling under the delusion he was his character from the game, he ends their relationship.  And here I thought those who played such games weren’t practicing abstinence by choice.

The trigger for Hanks’s rapid mental health decline is Makepeace’s decision to make the game real, by playing it in a nearby cave system.  Hanks becomes hysterical when his fertile imagination convinces him he is being confronted by a real monster.  I found it odd the most terrifying thing his brain could conjure is a guy in a bad monster suit.  Later, Hanks will shiv a guy who tries to mug him in an alley, imagining this threat as being that same monster again.  Then Hanks calls Crewson collect to say he may have killed a man.  That’s why one was careful back in the day when getting phoned and asked by the operator if you would accept the charges, as those charges could be manslaughter.

This film was based on a book of the same title by Rona Jaffe which, in itself, was loosely based on an exaggerated version of the real-life tragedy of James Dallas Egbert III.  This poor kid would eventually commit suicide, but his initial disappearance which inspired the book wasn’t even what killed him. It also definitely wasn’t due to any obsession with D&D.  Instead, like so many other things of the time, his story was reshaped so as to help fuel a panic over the game at the time, a hysteria which swelled in parallel with the Satanic Panic which was going strong.  The two crazes fed each other, clawed-hand-in-clawed-hand.

It is also obvious nobody involved in the production knew anything about role playing games.  Admittedly I also have little interest in them, aside from the multi-sided die and idea of mapping environments on graph paper. Still, even I immediately recognized many elements of the game here ring false.  When Hanks meets Crewson, she is amazed he is a “level nine”, and my bullshit detector went off at the sound of that.  Then there’s the game’s “maze controller”, which is clearly meant to be a Dungeonmaster.  And there’s this doozy of a line: “That was really stupid, jumping into the pit without using your sonar first.” Just from that line, I then assumed the characters in the game explore a medieval world while traveling in ye olde submarine, complete with yon computre based sounde navigation and ranging devices.

I don’t understand why they couldn’t find anybody who really played such games to add some verisimilitude to the proceedings.  Or, maybe somebody did, and they pranked the producers like how Megan Jasper did The New York Times, leading that newspaper to cluelessly print such deliriously fake Gen X slang as “swingin’ on the flippity-flop” as if it was truly the vernacular of the world of grunge.

With a script this terrible, I’m not sure what any actor could do with the material.  Still, the performances range from unremarkable to bad.  Crewson might fare the best if only because it is interesting to see a woman in a group that would likely be exclusively male in most cases.  Still it is a lousy role, with her more or less the den mother of the group.  Makepeace seems to be mocking the material at all times–I know I would have been, too.  Wysocki is very bland and that, in combination with his general appearance, had me thinking he would have been good as Freddie, if they had made a live-action Scooby Doo at the time.  As for Hanks, God bless him, he seems to be giving this his all in spite of having nothing to work with.  Also, it is irritating that all but Makepeace look too old to be these characters.  Hanks had even just finished two seasons of Bosom Buddies before this, so audiences at the time already had a mental picture of him being in his post-college years.

And there are much older actors in this as well.  Some of the famous faces inexplicably cast include Anne Francis, Vera Miles and Murray Hamilton.  A surreal moment has the former mayor of Amity sarcastically saying “Mazes & Monsters is a far-out game” in a manner suggesting the man was old even when “far-out” was contemporary slang. Francis has a thankless bit as Wysocki’s mother, who caps a tirade directed towards her son with an obligatory declaration of love that scans like those hastily spoken disclaimers in pharmaceutical ads.  Miles has one of the strangest bits in the film.  At the conclusion, Hanks is clearly still delusional, and Miles delivers an exposition dump to his three friends, a psychological analysis that feels similar to an equally unnecessary scene at the end of the movie she’s best known for, and that would be Psycho.

The correct word to describe Mazes and Monsters (make that Rona Jaffe’s Mazes and Monsters, bitches) is “hysterical”, both for the level at which the dialogue and performances are pitched, and for how unintentionally hilarious it is.  It is a very bad movie, but still an enjoyable one for those in the proper mindset.  Even the last bit is jaw-droppingly inane, as it is revealed this will be the basis for the novel Crewson will write, the ending of which we hear in her voiceover.  I won’t transcribe that here, but let’s just say it is unlikely her work will be the To Kill a Mockingbird of her generation.  But it could still be better than anything written by Rona Jaffe.

Dir: Steven Hillard Stern

Starring Tom Hanks, Wendy Crewson, Chris Makepeace

Watched on Plumeria Pictures blu-ray (all region)