Mazes and Monsters

For a time, Mazes and Monsters was renowned as a mythical relic. But let’s acknowledge that its renown was based exclusively on exaggerated external factors and contexts. It seems tremendously enticing in that Hollywood’s most beloved star, Tom Hanks, had his first role in a TV movie that demonised Dungeons & Dragons, which was allegedly a component of the “Satanic panic” or rather the fear of conservative societies that fantasy would foster Satan worship among the nation’s youth. In the new millennium, this legend grew thanks to the internet as a dumping ground for useless trivia, which was fundamentally influenced by the fact that it was not easy to get access to the film, as it was released only on VHS. After watching Mazes and Monsters, however, the whole bubble bursts completely and the most that one can take away from it is the knowledge that Tom Hanks has always run with his hands held strangely away from his body like Forrest Gump – in other words, the legend is just another completely useless and disproportionately exaggerated curiosity, just as the film itself is. Mazes and Monsters remains a mediocre television melodrama about an unstable young man for whom playing a game becomes a trigger for his personal psychological problems, but in which there is no demonisation of role-playing games. It’s possible that the film’s creation was motivated by the producers’ attempt to ride the moral panic of the time. However, if that was actually the case, then the most surprising thing is that they didn’t in any way exploit or thematise it. We hopefully sense exploitation tendencies at the beginning, as all of the players in the film’s paraphrase of D&D come from wealthy families in which traditional maternal roles have broken down in various ways. However, this foreshadowing remains only a pipe dream of the diggers of film trash. In fact, the rest of the film doesn’t offer any witch hunts or even any significant conflicts. We simply spend 100 minutes watching the uninteresting characters of four college kids who play role-playing games finding out that one of them has a problem, and the others trying to help him in a confusing but ultimately relatively successful way. With the renewed interest in D&D thanks to the popularity of Stranger Things, the legend of Mazes and Monsters rose from the ashes, which eventually led to the film’s release through VoD and an enthusiast Blu-ray edition. As is the case with most such legends, however, this will only lead to the revelation that the allegedly magnificent Holy Grail is nothing more than an ordinary trinket wrapped up in a fantastic story worthy of a proper game master. (21.11.2022)