Mazes and Monsters (1982)

(In French, On Cable TV, October 2022) In today’s instalment of “Is this a real movie or a fake one?” I propose to you Mazes and Monsters: a film adapted from a moral-panic book of the early 1980s in which Dungeons and Dragons players are associated with schizophrenia and violent crime, featuring a young Tom Hanks as an unbalanced college student who loses the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, who kills a few people and who ends up going to the top of the World Trade Centre to get to the end of his delusions. Real or fake? REAL. But it’s not clear whether this made-for-TV movie goes all-in on the D&D hysteria, as it also features three players who remain well-balanced throughout, and some impressively tone-deaf descriptions of what D&D is about (“The point of the game is to amass a fortune without being killed”). Still, you can recognize the way new and innocuous phenomena are played up as scary threats for kids (a script we’ve seen endlessly re-used for the past four decades). Hanks is rather cute to watch here in his screen debut, as a gangly young man whose comic persona was still left undefined. But the film itself is unmitigated nonsense that defies comprehension—the low-budget is one thing, but the over-the-top condemnation of LARPing is really something else. Mazes and Monsters is now best enjoyed as “What were they thinking?” viewing material for your own D&D playing group.