Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s

 

Exorcising Demons

Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural 
Paranoia In The 1980s
Edited by Kier-La Janisse and Paul Corupe
Fab Press/Spectacular Optical
ISBN: 9781903254868

Just a very brief shout out now to a book edited by one of my favourite movie people, Kier-La Janisse... Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s. This one took me out of my comfort zone a little because it’s not exclusively about movies but, I saw it on the Fab Press stall at Bank Holiday FrightFest a couple of years ago and, it being one of the very few books I didn’t already own on the stall and, to boot, a tome I’d been keeping a look out for since it’s first US edition on Kier-La’s Spectacular Optical publishing arm, I thought I’d finally pick it up and give it a go. 

The book is a collection of various essays by a variety of authors, such as Alison Nastasi and the redoubtable Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, on various aspects of the absolute alarm caused by parents and other authority figures who believed the ‘youth of today’ were being attacked/corrupted/coerced/recruited by various devil worshipping organisations/unofficial groups during the 1980s. 

Now, I have to say, 90% of the contents of the book was completely unknown to me and this tome covers a variety of manifestations such as child molestation rings/enthusiastic money grabbing preachers and many other ‘authority figures gone wrong’, sometimes by first hand witnesses of the people and organisations in question. Although there certainly is some overlap with UK slants on the phenomenon, such as the worry, even in this country, about the game Dungeons And Dragons... once again proving that whenever anyone is given a creative outlet which any one group of individuals doesn’t understand, there’s going to be a huge push back by some of the more ignorant of them, as they seem to have a habit of empowering those gullible enough to throw in with their lot. 

So, yeah, I think you get the idea... if you were into heavy metal music, gaming, horror movies and various other stuff... you were going to be targeted as a devil extolling, malevolent presence in somebody’s life. 

The book is full of stuff I’d never heard of such as the Procter And Gamble logo being a manifestation of 666, religious comics, White Metal (or Christian Metal) music, teenage murder, paedophilia rings and so on. Those interested in film will also find some good things to contemplate here... such as an article on horror movies utilising ‘devil worship via computers’ such as Evilspeak and a nice chapter on Joe Dante’s The ‘Burbs. There’s also stuff about the Dungeons And Dragons missing person case that inspired the novel and subsequent movie of Mazes And Monsters (which I reviewed here) so, there were some elements familiar to me in the book. But, of course, it’s precisely because a lot of the things covered is stuff I’m not so well acquainted with, that makes it a valuable addition to my book shelves... err... book piles (like I could ever get enough shelves installed). There’s one very interesting chapter, for example, about devil cult books published by Playboy magazine as an imprint, which were deliberately marketed to susceptible female readers while the books actually seemed to favour wanting to show control over women. It’s fascinating stuff, to be sure.

And I’m going to get out of this review now while the getting’s good, I think. So I’ll just leave you with the thought that Satanic Panic - Pop Cultural Paranoia In The 1980s is, if nothing else (and I’m sure it probably is a lot more to many readers), an entertaining and educational read, throwing light onto subjects which, due to the country I live in more than anything else, were certainly unknown to me in a lot of cases. Definitely worth a read for the inquisitive minded at the very least and, with people like Heller-Nicholas on some of the chapters, you know it’s going to be well researched and written, for sure. 

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.

Dungeons And Dragons - Honour Among Thieves

Gelatinous Expectations

Dungeons And Dragons -
Honour Among Thieves
Directed by John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein
United States/Canada/United Kingdom
/Iceland/Ireland/Australia  
2023 Paramount
UK cinema release print

Warning: Minor sequence spoilers.

I wasn’t going to bother with Dungeons And Dragons - Honour Among Thieves, initially. Primarily because I used to love the game when I was a kid and didn’t see how a movie could do that kind of experience justice (yeah... still can’t actually). I remember my dad getting this game somewhere between the early to late 1970s and I used to love reading the various descriptions and images... pretty much none of which I can now remember except the one creature that always intrigued me... the gelatinous cube which slowly digests you if you get caught inside it. So I’m really glad, actually, that the gelatinous cube has made it into this movie incarnation... that’s a big plus in its favour. But, that being said, I’d have to say that I don’t have a clue about all the many obvious in-jokes in the film although, I did notice a vaguely familiar band of adventurers in a cameo during a sequence at the end, where everyone is trying to get through a giant maze.

However, the trailer to the film is really fun (although some of the line deliveries and dialogue are, I think, from different takes than used in the final cut of the movie) and, honestly, I haven’t seen a bad word about the film in any review... even from those from people who are not RPGers (which is the camp I would consider myself in now... it’s probably been nearly four decades since I played). So I thought I’d give it a go and, the first thing which surprised me about the film is that it’s... drum roll... based on a property from Hasbro! Seriously? When did this happen? I remember the set we used to have (and probably still have somewhere) was branded up as TSR Games. Did they sell it?

Anyway, this is going to be a very short review I think because, I can tell you right away that I’m not as enthusiastic about the film as all the other people I‘ve seen talking about it. It is, however, a fairly entertaining romp of an adventure, to be sure. Chris Pine and Michelle Rodriguez play thieves Edgin and Holga (my favourite class of D&D character... the one I always used to pick to play) who escape from their prison at the start of the movie and go on a quest to try and regain Edgin’s daughter (Chloe Coleman) from the clutches of traitorous former partner Forge (played by Hugh Grant). To do this they have to go on a quest for a legendary artefact and band together with a few other characters played by Justice Smith, Sophia Lillis and, in what amounts to a very good extended cameo section, Regé-Jean Page.

And all of the actors I just mentioned in this are absolutely wonderful performers and they all have great chemistry. So I’m not quite sure why my personal reception of the movie was somewhat diminished because I can tell you for sure that the movie is certainly pacey, has plenty of fantasy action and has a lot of humour with a script that walks a delicate tightrope between peril and humour with ease. And, to boot, the dialogue isn’t bad either... I suspect I would like this a heck of a lot more if I watched it a second time, now that my head has processed the entire experience. Some movie just hit me like that and I get so much more out of them on subsequent rewatches (such as The Mummy Returns, La La Land and Knives Out, for example).

The highlight sequence, for me, asides from the appearance of the gelatinous cube, would be the sequence with all five heroes in a cave being chased by what has become, the fattest, roly poly dragon I’ve ever seen in a movie. This sequence is a real testament to how easily the film can play with your expectations, throw up a ludicrous concept... because that huge, fat dragon sure looks silly not being able to fly, falling over and rolling around almost crushing our heroes... and still present it as a credible and quite threatening enemy to the other characters. There’s also a great sequence where our heroes are using an incantation to wake one of the dead to ask an alloted five questions and that becomes an extended sequence of wasted, ‘I didn’t mean that as one of the questions’ moments and continued digging up of dead bodies, until the characters finally get the information they want.

So, yeah, I didn’t quite gell with the movie but I certainly don’t have a bad thing to say about it either. For me, Dungeons And Dragons - Honour Among Thieves was an okay time at the cinema with a movie which entertained but didn’t bowl me over completely. As someone who hasn’t played in almost forty years, I still found it quite accessible and I don’t think you have to be a hardcore RPGer to enjoy the movie. I would certainly recommend it to experienced players who are going to have a lot richer experience than I did, due to understanding a lot more of the references and jokes but, yeah, I think a lot of people will find this one entertaining and have a good time with it.