Hanks Stars in A-maze-ingly Bad Movie
This review originally ran in The Battalion, Texas A&M’s student newspaper.
Put down that 12-sided die! Don’t you know it could kill you?
Tom Hanks stars in “Mazes and Monsters,” a 1982 made-for-television movie about a group of college friends who are sucked into the obsessive world of fantasy role-playing games.
Based on a novel by Rona Jaffe, “Mazes and Monsters” touches on the controversy that surrounded the popular game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) in the early 1980s.
Fuel onto a raging fire, “Mazes and Monsters” tells the story of four young students who become obsessed with their nocturnal sessions of Mazes and Monsters, a D&D inspired board game.
In one of his first roles, Hanks plays Robbie, a troubled young man coping with his brother’s mysterious disappearance. Seeking to reconcile his repressed emotions while playing the game, Robbie finds himself slipping into his make-believe character. After suffering relationship problems with his girlfriend, Robbie completely looses himself into his role as a dragon-slaying holy man.
Every second of watching a confused Hanks wandering around New York searching for the Two Towers (i.e. the Twin Towers), conversing with homeless people about dragons and stabbing muggers with his enchanted penknife is hilarious.
And the best part, being an ’80s movie, “Mazes and Monsters” has its own theme song.
Judith Lander performs “Friends in this World,” a touching pop ballad that reminds audiences that even though people can sometimes go crazy and lose touch with reality, they will always have friends to watch over them, or in the case of Robbie, have friends that will encourage increased craziness by refusing to acknowledge Robbie’s problem with separating fantasy from reality.
Don your cloaks of invisibility and cast your dice of dexterity, fans of fantasy need to watch “Mazes and Monsters,” the ultimate anti-imagination propaganda. The “Reefer Madness” of Dungeons and Dragons, “Mazes and Monsters” is a hilariously bad take on fantasy geeks gone wild.
i thought this movie was the most insipid “public service announcement movie” since “reefer madness”. it is truly an amazingly bad film.