We were hoping for some gaudy Satanic Panic nonsense, and instead we get The Paper Chase with a nerdy Tom Hanks in the middle of a very boring psychotic break. Meant to warn against role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, it’s mostly a really dull, rote drama, with nary a demon to be found.
Starring Tom Hanks, Chris Makepeace, Wendy Crewson, David Wysocki, and Murray Hamilton. Written by Tom Lazarus from a novel by Rona Jaffe. Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern.
Welcome to the Mary Versus the Movies newsletter! Personally, I usually played a half-elf wizard.
This week: 9/5/2024
MARY VS THE MOVIES EPISODE 157 – MAZES AND MONSTERS (1982)
We were hoping for some gaudy Satanic Panic nonsense, and instead we get The Paper Chase with a nerdy Tom Hanks in the middle of a very boring psychotic break. Meant to warn against role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, it’s mostly a really dull, rote drama, with nary a demon to be found.
My first exposure to the idea of Dungeons & Dragons was through the same-titled Saturday morning cartoon show, which, if you don’t remember, features a group of kids who get on an amusement park ride that deposits them in a magical world, where the Dungeon Master assigns them new identities (ranger, magician, etc.) and guides them against monsters like Tiamat and the evil Venger. Later, I would find the Dragonlance books, around the same time I discovered Lord of the Rings, The Prydain Chronicles, and the stories of King Arthur and medieval Irish literature, so I was pretty well-steeped in high fantasy (and its knock-offs) as a kid. It would never occur to me that pretending to be a knight or a wizard would somehow imperil me. Later in college I would sometimes join up with friends and play different types of role-playing games: D&D, Shadowrun, and later MMORPGs like EverQuest.
Of course, the 1980s, when I was a child, was also the age of the Satanic Panic, when every rock album, board game, cartoon, and candy wrapper was under scrutiny for demonic influences. I don’t know if it came down to a lack of interest on my parents part, or just common sense, but I was never subjected to any spiritual examinations about my books or music. Later, I did of course find out about all that nonsense, once I was old enough to see how silly it was*, and finding out that people thought goofy roll-playing games would open up a door to real-life demon possession was incredibly funny to me.
All of which is to say that I was really disappointed by Mazes and Monsters—here was a chance for a gaudy story of young nerds innocently playing a game that leads to them summoning Satan himself and imperiling their souls, and the most it could manage was Tom Hanks losing touch with reality in a way that really, truly rang hollow. It’s bad enough that we otherwise have three perfectly normal college students who have no real issues other than being WASPs or incredibly rich New Yorkers—Christ Makepiece’s Jay-Jay is at least somewhat of a character, but the other two are pretty bland sketches. But Hanks’ Robbie is a mostly dull character who suddenly snaps when the group decides to live-action-role-play their game in a cavern near their college. Granted, he’s dealing with the trauma of a brother who ran away from home when he was a kid. But the peril of Dungeons & Dragons is entirely made up to be “this could harm people who already have trauma”, and based on a heavily-sensationalized story that had almost nothing to do with role-playing games.
Worst of all, it’s pretty boring. And the copy on Tubi looks terrible.
*Actually, my main exposure to the Satanic Panic as a kid was surrounding the McMartin Pre-school story, and as a kid who was in daycare for as long as I could remember, I was terrified that one day the people at the YMCA would suddenly turn around and poison our lemonade and make us perform human sacrifices, but that day never came. Also, man, just because something is on 20/20, doesn’t mean a kid should watch it. “News” is a very fungible idea.
Starring Tom Hanks, Chris Makepeace, Wendy Crewson, David Wysocki, and Murray Hamilton. Written by Tom Lazarus from a novel by Rona Jaffe. Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern.
HOLLWOOD AVALON – WAH WAH (2005)
Special guest Sarah Sahim joins us to discuss Richard E. Grant’s autobiographical film Wah Wah, about the dissolution of his parents marriage and his father’s alcoholism, agains the backdrop of the end of British colonial rule in Swaziland. What does this have to do with King Arthur? Well, as a goodbye gift to the visiting Princess Margaret, the British colonial community puts on a production of Camelot with a black Lancelot. A frustrating and frequently incurious film all around that squanders any opportunity to really grapple with the meaning of the end of an empire.
On the surface, it falls outside our usual scope for the show—most of the film has nothing to do with the production of Camelot. But there is a coherent strand here, one briefly acknowledged by the film but never followed up on. Why perform Camelot? Set some time in the early 1970s, it’s not that surprising, it was a very popular musical, but here they’re performing it for Princess Margaret as part of the celebration of her visit to an African country that has recently broken away from the British Empire and become independent, where the white population is mostly looking at emigrating away from Africa and back to Britain. Performing a musical about the death of King Arthur, the ruin of his kingdom baked into its utopian vision, and furthermore performing it not only for a member of the royal family, but during the dissolution of the empire, is ripe with irony—and yet, that’s never really commented on except in the most facile way. It’s frustrating—there are all sorts of interesting parallels to be drawn between Grant’s story and Camelot (his mother’s unfaithfulness paralleling Guenevere’s; his father’s downfall that of Arthur’s; the end of Camelot and the end of the Empire), but it’s never dealt with at all.
We’re grateful to Sarah for bringing this movie to our attention—sometimes a movie that’s frustrating is actually just as enlightening as something competent. The cracks expose ideas, and we grapple with them and nail down exactly how a story can work and when it doesn’t.
Starring Gabriel Byrne, Nicholas Hoult, Emily Watson, and Miranda Richardson. Written and directed by Richard E. Grant.
What else are we up to this week?
Mary: A few weeks ago we caught Star Wars at the Ambler Theater, and were surprised to find out they were showing Empire Strikes Back over Labor Day weekend. So we made our way to a Sunday matinee. I haven’t seen that on a big screen since the “special edition” was released back in the late 1990s—I’m not entirely sure it’s been shown on the big screen since then, in fact. Now, I’m not a fan of the special editions—Star Wars feels clunky with that Jabba scene added in (not to mention the Han-Shot-First controversy), and the less said about Return of the Jedi the better. However, as this is the one of the original trilogy that feels the least-altered, I was looking forward to seeing it.
Watching this now as an adult, a few things struck me. First, while the first film is very much a boy’s adventure and pastiche of influences (Buck Rogers, Kurosawa, Dune, etc.), this feels much more comfortable being a classic science fiction film. Visually, it’s full of strange worlds (ice planet; swamp planet; cloud city; worm stomach), with some beautiful matte paintings that really pop on a big screen. The Force is left strange and mystical, a Hollywood garbling of Gnosticism and Buddhism, much more magical than midichlorian. And most importantly, this really is more built around Harrison Ford, giving us a bit of a preview of what he would do a year later (and much better) as Indiana Jones.
I often wonder if middle films make sense on their own. Star Wars of course works as a complete story by itself, and Return is the end of a trilogy, meaning Empire ends up sitting somewhat awkwardly, as you need at least some familiarity with the world. Or do you? Maybe we’re too burdened down with explanations and backstories—one of the strengths of the original 1977 film is that we’re dropped into Episode IV—no one explains what the empire is, what Darth Vader’s role is. So maybe it doesn’t matter that we start Empire on an ice planet. We never knew who Yoda was before this movie, we don’t need to know what happened between Han Solo and Princess Leia between the end of the first movie and now.
I don’t know if they’ll show Return of the Jedi, but if they do, I’ll go see it. It’s the first movie I remember seeing in a theater, and even if it’s been mutilated as a “special edition”, it would feel weird not to go.
Dennis:
Dennis’s signature in one of his D&D manuals
Pizza: I had Hawaiian flatbread at Tannery Run in Ambler (maybe before watching Saturday Night Fever? I forget) anyway it was good. Spam and pineapple on pizza triangles stretched over a piece of wood like belt. Yum! Tannery Run has some kind of dragon theme, there are dragon drawings in spots around the bar and I think they play DnD or Magic The Gathering on Thursdays. I’ll give it 4 out of 5. I also like the Breakfast at Timothy’s stout.
NEXT EPISODE: We fulfil the squandered promise of Mazes and Monsters when we watch Heavy Metal.
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