Maze of monsters

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Movie
German title Maze of monsters
Original title Mazes and Monsters
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1982
length 95 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Steven Hilliard star
script Tom Lazarus
production Richard Briggs
music Hagood Hardy
camera Laszlo George
cut Bill Parker
occupation

Labyrinth of the Monsters (Original title: Mazes and Monsters ), a film by Steven Hilliard Stern, is a 1982 film adaptation of a novel by Rona Jaffe .

action

Robbie Wheeling and his friends play the Fantasy - RPG Mazes and Monsters . Friends include Jay Jay, dominated by his mother, and Kate Finch, who has had many unhappy relationships. Robbie's mother is rich but an alcoholic. Daniel's parents prevent the fulfillment of his lifelong dream of becoming a video game developer.

Robbie and Kate start a relationship. Jay Jay wants to commit suicide in a cave, but changes his mind. He thinks the cave is an ideal place to do the role play as live action role playing and after some difficulty can get the group excited about his idea.

Even at the first game in the cave, the somewhat scared Robbie begins to mix game and reality. Through the atmosphere created by Jay Jay, he begins to believe the monsters made up for the adventure are real.

Over time, Robbie identifies more and more with his character, the churchman Pardu . He adopted an increasingly celibate lifestyle, which also resulted in the termination of his relationship with Kate.

Then Robbie begins to have visions. Thanks to a mixture of reality and vision, these lead him to New York. Since Robbie sets out without telling anyone about it, you miss him at home. Soon it is feared that he would have had an accident in the cave. But his friends can understand the mixture of reality and fiction from his notes and follow Robbie to New York.

You will eventually reach him on the roof of the World Trade Center . Robbie wants to jump from there in order to reach the goal of his visions "in flight". The friends can convince him not to jump by referring to the rules of the role-playing game: They point out to Robbie that he does not have enough “points” to fly.

In the end, Robbie can no longer draw the line between reality and fiction. In the garden of Robbie's parents' spacious property, his friends visit him, but realize that there is no improvement in sight. In his joy of seeing each other again, Robbie still thinks his friends are characters from the game. He can persuade her to tackle one last “adventure” together with him in the vicinity of the house.

Reviews

"[...] A very respectable psychological horror film that skillfully juggles with the set pieces of the genre."

- Lexicon of international film

background

Mazes and Monsters ( maze = labyrinth, maze), the original title of the film, is a reference to the pen and paper role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons , which was developed from the mid-1970s and had a major influence on the role-playing genre. The film is based on a novel by the American author Rona Jaffe , published in 1981 . Jaffe processed reports about the alleged dangers of role-playing games. In particular the case of James Dallas Egbert, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 18, led to a wave of negative, often lurid press reports on role-playing games. The highly gifted student, who suffers from depression and consumes drugs, occupied himself with role-playing games in his free time. In 1979, he retired to the underground utility tunnels below Michigan State University , where he attempted suicide. Newspaper reports then claimed that Dallas Egbert regularly played Dungeons & Dragons in the corridors under the university and was ultimately unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. Although the reports ultimately turned out to be false reports, the thesis of the loss of reality through role-playing games was repeatedly taken up in the press and by youth protection activists in the following years .

Labyrinth of the Monsters is one of the first films starring the later famous actor Tom Hanks , who was 26 years old at the time of filming.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Labyrinth of the Monsters . Zweiausendeins GmbH & Co. KG. Retrieved July 8, 2019.
  2. ^ Paul Cardwell, Jr .: The Attacks on Role-Playing Games , Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 18, No. 2, Winter 1994, 157–165 ( Memento from October 18, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ How fantasy fun was turned into a "killer game" . Article by Tom Hillenbrand on Spiegel online, August 12, 2009.