Mazes and Monsters (1982)

James Dallas Egbert III was a troubled genius.  He was attending Michigan State University at the age of 16, taking computer science classes.  He suffered from depression and drug addiction as well as the pressure of being so young in an adult world.  He may also have been hiding his sexuality from his friends and family as it was 1979, long before many homosexual men felt it safe to be out.  On August 15 of that year he disappeared from his dorm, leaving behind a suicide note.  He was reportedly seen in Wisconsin, and his family ultimately hired a private detective to find him.  Egbert attempted suicide a second time after relocating to New Orleans and was eventually tracked down working on an oilfield in Morgan, Louisiana.  He was returned to his parents and started attending Wright University.  However, on August 16, 1980 his final suicide attempt was successful. 

Egbert was a troubled individual who needed professional psychiatric help and guidance.  It's a tragic story about a boy forced to live in an adult world and face pressures in life he wasn't ready for.  However, all the press focused on, largely because of William Dear, the detective his family hired, was the game Dungeons and Dragons.  Egbert was a dedicated player, and he and others were rumored to sometimes do live action roleplay in the steam tunnels under Michigan State.  It was the catalyst for the game to be connected with the burgeoning "Satanic Panic" of the time, treating a simple tabletop adventure game as some sort of gateway to the occult.  It was this angle that Rona Jaffe based her novel Mazes and Monsters on, which was adapted as a television movie for CBS in 1982.

Daniel (David Wysocki), Kate (Wendy Crewson) and Jay Jay (Chris Makepeace) all come from different backgrounds, but they share a love for the game Mazes and Monsters.  They are needing a fourth person to continue playing as their next semester at a New York university begins, and they are fortunate to meet Robbie Wheeler (Tom Hanks), a young man who has had trouble with spending too much time gaming and not enough on his studies.  He has a number of issues, including an alcoholic mother and a brother who ran away at an early age.  Still, he fits in with the group and begins a romance with Kate. 

As the semester progresses Jay Jay decides to up the ante and begin playing the game in a more realistic setting, being a series of caverns near the university that are off-limits.  At first it adds some additional thrills.  However, Robbie starts seeing the monsters in the game for real and begins to believe that he is being sent on a quest to find "The Great Hall".  In doing so he leaves the university.  While Lt. John Martini (Murray Hamilton) tries to find Robbie his friends leave anonymous information that may help, but eventually track him down to New York City, where he is drifting between fantasy and reality.

I saw this movie when it came on television and remember little about it other than it was a bit dull and not the movie it had promised to be.  Even though I had seen it the only reason I knew this was Tom Hanks's debut was because it frequently shows up in trivia.  I had always remembered him in Bosom Buddies, not in this.  There is a reason he didn't make a leap from Mazes and Monsters to the big screen.  He is okay, but he's not great.  His acting skills show up more as Robbie begins to lose touch with reality, but for the most part the other three outshine him. 

As for the character of Robbie, I had forgotten enough of the movie that I thought it was Jay Jay that was going to be the one to go off.  Like Egbert he's 16, faces a lot of home pressures and has suicidal tendencies.  It is almost as if Jaffe had written the character and then realized it was getting too close to the real case, and close enough that she was possibly going to get sued by Egbert's parents.  The novel was pure exploitation and CBS was quick to cash in on it.  It served to prolong the prejudice against Dungeons and Dragons and its players, as in reality the game had little to nothing to do with Egbert's death.  

This is a made-for-television movie from the early 1980s so, of course, there is going to be little in the way of sex and violence.  There are a few amusing sequences that take place in New York, including Robbie taking on gang members that he thinks are monsters and consulting with a homeless man he thinks is a wizard.  It's also a bit bittersweet that a good part of the finale takes place in the World Trade Center.  It's not a great movie by any stretch, even by made-for-television standards, although it has some interesting monster designs for Robbie's visions and manages be a pretty decent drama for the first third before the whole movie seems to grind to a halt until Robbie turns up the Big Apple.  

The main enjoyment one will get out of it is laughing at how serious it takes the subject matter.  The games, even before going into the tunnels, are played in dark rooms with lit candles with an occult feel, with the one running the campaign announcing, "I am the Maze Controller!" and each person explaining their characters in loving detail.  It plays out with such earnestness that one has to wonder if Jaffe, or anyone involved in the production, even knew what a real roleplaying campaign was.  I would like to say that this was a passing thing, but even a decade later police, because of the exploitative nature of Dear's and Jaffe's novels, were treating roleplayers as if they were sacrificing babies in underpasses to be closer to Satan.  While we may get a good chuckle out of this today it's important to remember how similar to medieval which hunts this brief period in the early '80s was. 

Mazes and Monsters (1982)

Time: 101 minutes

Starring: Tom Hanks, Wendy Crewson, David Wysocki, Chris Makepeace

Director: Steven Hilliard Stern