Mazes and Monsters

Good actors in search of a better screenplay adaption of a sensationalist novel? This was pretty awful. I _did_ love seeing old New York, and my towers. By the way, JayJay’s address doesn’t exist, and the route the kids take into the city to find Robby is a pastiche of random roads and bridges that make no sense.

By the end the movie seems to be a Rorschach Test, and it's developed in a way that I have no idea if that was the intention. Seeing all the different promotional material, I'm confident even the people in charge didn't really know if it's trying to pile on ("Four players in a dangerous game... Risking their hearts, their minds and their lives") or to counter the prevalent message that the game was dangerous in and of itself. [I also noticed there's a cut-down version of 74min, I don't know what's up with that but maybe it leans more one way]

All the elements of 80s' smear campaigns are there, for sure, but it also shows that the game was just fun for most people, [spoiler]while at the same time being an escapism option for people already dealing with real world problems. There's both characters that directly blame the game and then there's Robbie's mom acknowleging he already had problems and that the game and his friends weren't to blame.[/spoiler]

It's below average, but almost ok for a made-for-TV movie.

Are my sister and I the only ones who remember a scene missing from this DVD release? At the end, when the kids are talking with Robbie's parents, [spoiler] Robbie appears to act normal, and they think he's making progress. But after they go in, he calls them the innkeepers. [/spoiler] There has to be someone else out there that remembers this.

Watched this way back when it first aired - there wasn't really much on TV those days and most people did not yet have cable. So we watched bad made-for-tv movies. The best thing about that movie was the Myna Bird.

I've never played a pen & paper role-playing game in my life. Movies like “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” have definitely made me think that I should try it, but with movies like “Mazes and Monsters,” on the other hand, I quickly lose interest again. The production values are not bad at all for a TV movie, and you also get to see Tom Hanks in his first ever leading role. However, the story is also very dull, the characters (and actors) have no chemistry, and the dialogues are stupid. What's more, the whole direction the plot takes at the end no longer interested me at all. Therefore, I definitely don't recommend “Mazes and Monsters.”

A full-on smear campaign about the evils of Dungeons and Dragons, from the height of the parental outcry against the game. Funny and sad in the same context as Reefer Madness, it's akin to a long after-school special in the blunt, inelegant way it hammers away at its only point. An extremely young Tom Hanks, freshly released from his run on Bosom Buddies, cut his teeth on more serious material in this leading role. As the poor sap who nosedives into mental illness as a direct result of the game, his part is madly corny and he clearly had some growing pains to work through before becoming the dramatic juggernaut we'd all come to know a decade later.

Badly produced, terribly acted, smug and boring and predictable to the final reveal, it's a living stereotype, the very essence of a bad made-for-TV movie.

Lasted only 20 mins and then shut it off