80's Panic Watch: Mazes and Monsters (1982)

Watched:  03/07/2025

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Steven Hillard Stern

For any younger readers hitting this site, you may be vaguely aware of the Satanic Panic of the 1970's-1990's.  But it was real and really annoying.  I was a kid living on the edge of the Bible Belt in the 1980's, but I think the wide-eyed and whispered warnings one would get about the dangers of playing the fairly recent phenomenon of Dungeons & Dragons were everywhere.  And I don't know how much of the made-for-TV movie, Mazes and Monsters (1982), was inspired by the urban legends and actual events, and how much someone named Barb relating the plot of this movie to their friend, Donna, inspired some of those urban legends.*

I know I run on about context in which movies appeared, but I think with this one, if you don't know the context of how D&D freaked people out in the 1980's, you may believe this is just a movie, and not an important cultural conversation, and therefore loses the punch of being a part of a national conversation drummed up by folks who need a strawman to combat.  In the 1970's a real kid had gone missing, and it was believed he'd freaked out from playing D&D and was lost in steam tunnels somewhere - not that he was suffering from mental illness and had left the state (which is what really happened).

Keep in mind, in the 1950's it was proposed - and believed for decades -that comics would make us all juvenile delinquents.  We do not always respond to things outside our experience in the best way.

The 1980's were a different time, where doing geek-things and admitting to it in public was a dicey proposition.  People were not as open about hobbies like D&D, consuming Star Trek, and comic book reading, as those things did carry a very real social stigma.  Plus, no one knew what you were talking about if you did bring it up.  SNL or other cultural touchstones usually mocked nerds (when that was a mean label) and that constructed their impressions of geek hobbies and those that pursued them.  Rather than fight those impressions, most folks just knew not to bring that stuff up in mixed company. It was very different from the "heavy metal music will make your kids evil/ kill themselves" that the metal-heads kind of embraced.**

The "comics are for geeks" stuff disappeared 25+ years ago, so it's hard to remember when Tony Stark has become a household name. Honestly, I'm still shocked that younger co-workers talk about their weekend D&D games in casual conversation, and maybe a little mad that they can.  Doing so in my youth would have led to lectures about how I was going to go crazy.

I won't get too much into the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons, or other tabletop RPG's here.  D&D requires that each player constructs a character using things like whether they're an elf or dwarf or other Tolkein rip-off, and then give them a job, like wizard or knight or whatever.  And then the idea is to basically improvise what your character would do in scenarios put forward by a storyteller - ie: dungeon master.  Dice are involved to see how hard you hit that troll or whatever.

The mix of "pretending to be someone who you are not" and "there are scary monsters in these imaginary worlds" was apparently so frightening to people whose entertainment was largely Hee-Haw and Reader's Digest's Laughter The Best Medicine, that they decided the thing to do was tell kids they would die and/ or be possessed by demons if they partook.  

So, that brings us to this deadly dull TV movie that has weirdly artistic aspirations, stars Tom @#$%ing Hanks and throws D&D under the bus for everyone not understanding schizophrenia in 1982.

Our cast is made up for four young adults at a nameless upstate New York college, only one of which seems to be the sort of person you'd say "oh, yeah, that dude plays D&D" just by looking at him.  A 16 year old played by Chris Makepeace (who was in a ton of stuff around this time) has rich parents who don't get him so he wears a novelty hat in every scene and thinks carrying a Myna bird around is a personality.  There's also Girl played by Wendy Crewson, who is in no way a 1980's nerd-girl and it's very confusing why she's doing this.  The third member is basically Fred Jones from Scooby-Doo. And then we have Tom Hanks, who seems to have experienced Monsters and Mazes-related issues at Tufts, but transfers to this college to get away from that so he immediately starts playing in the friends' campaign.

Each has a personal issue.  Hat/bird guy is having a hard time connecting with people despite his hats and bird.  Girl wants to be a writer but can't think of anything to write.  Fred's parents want him to be a wildly successful computer mogul, and he wants to make videogames (clearly a field in which there is and will never be any money).  And Tom Hanks' brother disappeared years ago, and, of course, he has an undiagnosed malady which is 100% schizophrenia, but we will never hear that word.  

In some version of this movie, they work individually through their issues.  But in the movie we get, they mention their issues at the start and then forget to mention their issues again, in favor of Tom Hanks unravelling.  

The movie is framed with the Mayor from Jaws as a hard-nosed cop looking into something having gone wrong, so we *know* that when these kids get out their dice and maps, they're just asking for trouble.  

And trouble does erupt when, instead of just playing the game every couple of days, they put on full costumes and head into a local cave system to play Mazes and Monsters.  Tom Hanks has a mental collapse whilst playing, hallucinating a monster - which is done with some nifty lighting and what's got to be a 7 foot monster costume on somebody.  Unfortunately, everyone thinks he's just *really* in character.  However, yadda yadda, he has snapped and now believes he's Purdu or whatever he's calling himself - a cleric, the most boring of the D&D classes.  

As part of his unravelling, Tom breaks off with Wendy, who he's been very into - believing he must now be celibate to be pure of heart.  I'd say "Goofy 1980's Tom Hanks is not landing Wendy Crewson as we see in this film" but Tom Hanks has been successfully married to Rita Wilson for decades, so I am wrong.  

Anyway, he flips out and goes to New York City where he runs around the subway thinking he's in the mines of Manhattan or something, while everyone is looking for him in the Star Trek-like cave system.  We catch up with the first scene with the detective judging the shit out of anyone for playing RPG's, and it's coded as "parents, this is worse than your kids stealing your quaaludes".  

They find Tom about to hurl himself off the roof of the World Trade Center believing he can fly - an absolute favorite hallucination for writers back in the 1980's - and they use their game logic to talk him down.  Tom gets help.

The film ends with the three remaining friends driving out to meet Tom at his parents' Hudson river-view farm, thinking he's just chilling before coming back to school.  But, there's the realization that Tom is fully gone bye-bye now and lives in his fantasy world 100% of the time despite wearing tiny tennis shorts.  Inexplicably, the three friends decide to end the movie by heading into the woods to play out one more adventure with Tom, the least helpful and most dangerous possible option.  It's framed as this weird bit of poetry, and the beautiful tragedy of playing Dungeons & Dragons, I guess.  

It is a bad film.  I'd seen it before and remembered it as being tedious at best, and that was the right take.  It's also full of 1980's-type meaningful dialog and characters, and seems to really think it's saying something.  What?  I don't know.  D&D is dangerous?  D&D is dangerous if you have schizophrenia, a largely pre-existing condition?  D&D is not dangerous, but under the right circumstances it is?  Poor little rich kids have troubles, too?  

I genuinely do not know.  If there's supposed to be a pro-D&D slant, as in "we all solved our issues through playing this game", but...  it doesn't do that.  It seems really into how this game will make you go loco.

It does want to be a coming of age film, and I guess that's sort of true.  But it fails on every level with the three other characters who do not fall into lifelong struggles with mental illness.

As a time capsule for how TV Movies of the Week tried to tackle social issues?  Yeah.  Maybe it's interesting.  

But as a time capsule of the actual state of the game, it's not particularly useful because I kinda doubt in 1982 anyone but hat/ bird guy of these three is playing D&D.  We're told Fred is so good looking he's fighting off women (we never see it).  Wendy Crewson is so clearly *not* a nerd girl, I don't even know what they're thinking.  There's a lack of beer on the table in age where 18-year-olds could buy.  And no one but the one cop has an opinion on this nerdery.  And, friends, people had opinions.

Anyway - yeah. I've seen worse, and Tom Hanks isn't bad.  None of them are bad, really.  It's just a bad movie with a plot that feels based on made up stories people told each other at dinner parties in the 1980's.

*worth reading the relationship between author Rona Jaffe's novel and the Satanic Panic of the time.  

** Personally, I took a page from this stance and was pretty open about "I like this stuff, and I won't hide it, but I am also not going to make it a problem.  But asking me about X-Men is going to cost you at least thirty minutes".  Much credit to the girls who were willing to go out with me for their patience.