Mazes And Monsters

Only When I LARP

Mazes And Monsters
USA 1982
Directed by Steven Hilliard Stern
Plumeria Pictures Blu Ray Zone A/B/C

Before I get to any negative stuff about this movie in the following review, which I suspect will mostly take the form of my personal recollected history of the title in question, I’d like to genuinely thank the newish UK label Plumeria Pictures for putting this one out. It’s like visiting a very old friend I’d not seen in a long while... only to find that friend had aged rather badly and gone a little senile in the intervening years. However, I have a lot of fondness in my heart for this movie, despite how much it seems to creak nowadays and I certainly didn’t think I’d ever see a home video version of the film, especially in a high quality Blu Ray presentation.

Okay, so Mazes And Monsters is a TV movie based on a novel by Rona Jaffe, itself inspired by a real life, long running suicide case which I won’t go into here, read the liner notes on the accompanying booklet to the Blu Ray if you want to know more. Plumeria pictures Blu Ray is a 40th anniversary edition, the film originally aired at the end of December 1982 in the US but, I’m pretty sure we didn’t see it on our TV stations in the UK until at least the following year. I remember I saw it more than once because our family had just bought our first video cassette recorder and so, as I was trying out this new and, frankly, miraculous (as it seemed then) technology, I was always on the look out for interesting films to record (in fact, owning a VCR started me on my path to loving the films of The Marx Brothers, looking for something to test it on).

I’d seen it in the listings and figured this film was obviously something to do with the playing of the game Dungeons And Dragons (really, what about the subtly copyright evading title made me imagine that?) and that was something I loved doing when I was a kid... looking through my dad’s D n’ D manuals from the early 1970s. So I watched it and, at that time, I thought it was great. I loved the actors playing the gamers... Wendy Crewson, David Wysocki, Chris Makepeace... and especially liked the performance of the fourth player in the film, one who I raved to my friends about when I sat them down one by one to watch my VCR recording... a young Tom Hanks in his first starring role. That actor’s going to go real far, I told them, one year before I got to say “Ha! Told you so!” when Splash was released into cinemas. Although, watching the film now... I don’t know why I felt that strongly about him at the time, in all honesty.

Okay, so the film tells the story of a gamer, Hanks, who goes off the rails and starts believing he is the character he plays in Dungeon’s And... urm... Mazes And Monsters, going on a quest to find The Two Towers (an obvious Tolkien reference for the time) which turns out to translate to going to the top of the World Trade Centre (aka The Twin Towers) and throwing himself off the roof. Can his friends find him and stop him in time or will he become a splash of red on the New York side walk? Well, without giving too many spoilers, there’s a third option which plays out which, is actually a quite negative and poignant takeaway from the film/novel... which kind of saves the movie, somewhat, with a definite ‘not in Hollywoodland’ ending.

That’s as much as I’m saying about the film but I will say that, back in 1983, I loved this movie so much (before recording over it to make way for Work Is A Four Letter Word... another movie I’ve lost to time) that I even managed to find a second hand copy of Rona Jaffe’s paperback novel, with a wildly innapropriate photographic cover of a blonde model, if memory serves (pictured above)... and looking straight out of the Mills And Boon school of cover design. And it was a fantastic book which I also have no memory of now, save for one scene which sticks in my mind in which two of the characters are listening to Miklos Roza’s score for Spellbound in their car and talking about film music being the ‘classical music of tomorrow’. For reasons obvious to regular readers of this blog, that statement struck a cord with me as it helped legitimise, in my mind, my own love of film scores.

Watching it now, the film is dated and, honestly, nothing remarkable. It seems it had a very short turnaround time and that would excuse it a bit, I guess. Bearing in mind it aired in 1982, for example... one of the characters has a poster of Blade Runner in his college dormitory room, which itself didn’t get released until that same year. Yeah, it’s clunky and schmaltzy by today's standards but, back then it was an absolute classic.

The quality of the thing, though, both technically and in execution, leaves a lot to be desired. Plumeria Pictures, who I suddenly have a lot of time for (and will be keeping an eye out for their future releases, which are sadly few and far between), have done their absolute best to bring a beautiful transfer of the film into our homes. Alas, the quality of the thing looks just as bad as my old home video recording back in 1983... something less than sharp and with occasional visual stutters like the film has been broken and been repaired, just slightly wrongly. Plumeria obviously did their best with this though and must have realised the problems with their source material because... and I quote from the back of the box... it’s ‘restored from the best available source’. Unfortunately, not even a small company treating this picture like a labour of love can change the fact that I got up from my seat once to brush a fly off my television, only to realise it was actually a recording of a fly crawling on the camera lens at one point. There was also at least one moment in the movie when I was fearing that one of the actors might be damaged by the bits of sound equipment suddenly hanging down into shot.

One thing which I did feel was a bit over the top in terms of Plumeria was the marketing of the film, in terms of its rather attractive cover art. This comprises a slip case (which is a limited edition part of the deal so, if you want one, hurry up and order from their site at https://plumeriapics.co.uk/ already... it may be gone by the time this review sees the light of day) featuring five Dungeons And Dragons dice in a pool of blood and a passing quote from the movie talking about the more sensationalist and exploitative elements of the game. It’s a nice thing, actually but, it has to be said, in no way evokes the spirit of the film residing within its slipcase.

But that’s that. I’ve been reunited with an old friend and, even if I was somewhat disappointed with the movie now, I shall be forever greatful for Plumeria stepping in and allowing me (and hopefully many young fans... I hope this sells well for them) the chance to own a film I never thought would see the light of day ever again. I’m not going to recommend Mazes And Monsters as such because, yeah, it is a bit of a clunker of a movie when viewed through a contemporary lens but, I’m sure an audience such as myself exists for this movie and I sincerely hope they make thier money back on this one. As for me... well... goodbye old friend.