Mazes and Monsters: I watched it so you don't have to

This was that one time that Tom Hanks made a movie about how playing tabletop role playing games will naturally lead to live action role playing which leads to losing your mind and soul to the devil, worshiping false gods, and being an enormous disappointment to your parents who are themselves struggling with their own marriage because of your role playing. Yeah you remember that one. It was right after his hit show Bosom Buddies launched him into super stardom, but before anyone was actually paying attention to him. I watched this movie so you won't have to. You're welcome.

This made for TV movie came out in 1982, during the height of one of those generational misunderstandings that happen. Parents see their kids doing things they don't understand and/or don't like that their kids do. "I never did that sort of thing when I was a teen. They must not have learned it from me. The media is to blame!" Rap music hadn't taken hold yet and heavy metal was still young, so Dungeons and Dragons wound up in the cross-hairs of the misguided parental fears of youthful change. Day time talk shows were filled with people from middle america willing to tell the world that when they played Dungeons and Dragons they hadn't realized it was really a way to worship the devil until the devil was upon them.

The story follows a group of college kids who are returning to school. All of whom have unhappy lives at home, as shown in the various opening scenes where these deeply troubled youths come from broken homes or homes where there parents are trying to be supportive of their child whom they are openly and deeply disappointed in. Then of course Mr Hanks comes in to play Robbie Wheeling. We first see him being driven to school by his parents. Both of whom are lecturing Robbie on his addiction to Mazes and Monsters. Apparently Robbie had been kicked out of numerous schools because he played Mazes and Monsters so much. Robbie is of course dismissive of his parents stern lecturing. He promises he will stay away from the games and stick to studying, but with Mr Hanks stellar performance we can clearly see his heart is not in the promise he is making to his parents.

Upon arriving at school Robbie meets a pretty girl at party who peer pressures him into playing Mazes and Monsters with her group when she finds out he has a high level character that everyone in the group is thoroughly impressed with. Robbie relents despite his parents warnings, because the girl has boobs and who is Robbie to argue with that.

They begin to game and everything is great. Robbie is gaming more than ever, spending time with his new girlfriend, things are going so great for Robbie he decides to take the next step: ask his girlfriend to move into his dorm room with him. This scene plays out when Robbie has her close her eyes shows her into his dorm room and reveals that he had purchased a double bed. *GASP* It's all so sudden she is overwhelmed and turns him down. Thanks for Mr Hanks' stellar acting, we see this rejection crack Robbie's already delicate psyche

Shortly thereafter during a live action version of Mazes and Monsters, Robbie loses his grip on reality and believes he is his character and goes insane. I can't even force myself to bother with the details of this. The over the top detective character who knows the dangers of games like Mazes and Monsters, the awkward scenes where Robbie wakes up from terrifying dreams of lizard men, his girlfriend moving on to another man to show she never truly cared for Robbie in the first place, the way the other role players try to hide that they were involved with gaming and hanging out with Robbie after he disappears, are all over the top examples of the jacked up morality that went into the writing of this movie; which also do a fine job of making it nearly impossible to force yourself to watch the movie in its entirety.

It's hard to even get angry about this movie, or the misguided writers of the TV movie, or the original book for that matter (because it was clearly so good the first time it was written down someone decided it needed to be transferred to a visual media). The whole thing comes off the same way it does when someones grandparent try to explain their new computer to you, or a 5 year old explains how their plastic telephone works to call the various muppets; like someone who doesn't really have any idea what they are talking about but is positive they have a firm grasp on the entire situation.

This is what Christian's in 1982 actually believed:

If you're looking for an after-school special to watch the next time you're too drunk to find daytime television or need to remind yourself just how far Mr Hanks has come in his career, then this movie is for you. I'd also like to say that if you were alive in America in 1982 this movie is somehow partly your fault. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Finding Fiction Again: Why I got into this writing bullshit in the first place

Captivating an audience with words I chose to form a story I had made, from life, fiction, or some place between the two, has always been what got me into the idea of writing in the first place. I wanted to find readers that would love my stories so much that they would compel me to write more for their entertainment. Freshman year in high school my brain was poisoned with beautiful nostalgia for the dying of the analog age of writing. I felt everything had to be written out by hand before it was typed. Senior year in high school hearing Allen Ginsberg's poem America shifted my focus away from fiction to poetry. I got a quicker return on poetry and readers were easier to find; which was ideal for an over caffeinated year round cabin fever sufferer who couldn't write quick enough for stories. I used to try to get everything written down by hand first.This was perfect for poetry. Short lines jotted onto a small piece of paper by hand. Plenty of room to work out a line if it needed to be fixed.

This was not perfect for fiction. It created  problems when I would work out a story in my head then try to write everything out by hand. I'd be 2/3's of the way through a story, come up with an idea that I liked that I wanted to add, but it would inevitably require some thread from earlier in the story for it to make sense. The idea of trying to hand write the stuff back onto the page would feel too daunting. I'd shoehorn ideas into the stories to get them finished, then after typing the story I'd be too put off of the disjointed mess I ended up with that editing felt too much like work to be any fun. The stories would inevitably be put away in some forgotten folder on my PC to be ignored for the rest of my life.

I have always felt that anyone who says that they don't write for anyone other than themselves is just too timid to take criticism. Of course I used to fight and defend my work to anyone that offered criticism. In my mind it was just a great way to discuss writing structure and the passage of the writer's voice from the head to the page or spoken aloud. My hindsight sees it more from other people's perspectives; which is that I was the asshole that didn't believe in other people's criticisms. I suppose never letting your work see the light of day is a similar effort to avoid confronting the problems you know are present in the piece.

It's been years since I've tried to tell a compelling story in more than a few stanzas. I feel out of practice with it, but I figure that is probably a good way to get back into it. I can relearn the ways to tell stories in more than a page an a half. I don't have any plan so far, but I am not clinging to the nostalgia for an analog age my brain never really fit into in the first place.

I'm not sure what the next step is for me to get back into the fiction that drew me to writing in the first place. It's like trying to go back to a neighborhood you lived in as a kid but haven't been to in 20 years so none of it seems quite right the way you remember it. I suppose that's the best place to be when writing fiction, not completely sure how it will turn out so making it up is really the only option I'll have.

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Terror etc..

When I was growing up, there were always rumors about videos that were kept behind the counter at video stores. Not that sassy ones with the naked ladies, but the secret ones that the video store wasn't supposed to have. Tapes made by random people with too much time on their hands and too much video and audio recording equipment at their disposal. Embarrassingly produced corporate promotion videos that were never supposed to see the light of day. Test footage or final cuts of movies that were killed before the studio ever released them. These were the stuff of urban legend, but everyone knew someone who knew about the tapes and if you found the right kind of video store you could find those tapes. 

Then came Hollywood Video and Blockbuster Video and the mom and pop rental places started to go under because they couldn't keep up the way the big stores could. The videos all disappeared from view for a while, but then the internet showed up and brought us the analog quality digital conversions of the videos that used to only be available if you knew that day that one video clerk was working and you told him your friend's older brother sent you.

The other day I found an article on Wikipedia about what was practically a unicorn in the world of duplicated VHS tapes, a movie called: Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2. 

"I wanna lay you out on the floor and plow into you like a caboose, but a gentle caboose baby a gentle caboose." -Black Guy in movie

I remember hearing about this movie growing up a lover of zombie movies and VHS tapes, but never actually saw it. It was one of those things I chalked up to missed opportunities of my youth (like having a birthday party where all the invitations were custom made slap bracelets, or gotten a school picture with lasers in the background, or an over-sized pair of light up shoes). Of course when I thought that the internet wasn't the mass storage space for every pieces of media ever created accessible to those who look. Thanks to the ever diligent elves of the internets, someone got this movie on youtube.  

Our Feature Presentation in SHOCKING 2-D

What I love about this movie:

Anytime you watch George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead, it is interesting to see how zombies as a movie trope have evolved since this movie. The Romero zombies aren't completely lost to the brain rot. They smash the headlights of the guy's car, they know how to use weapons, they seem more interested in killing their victims, and eating them seems to be an after thought.

This is not George Romero's movie though. This is what happens when nerdy film students from Jersey get together for a film project that they are pulling out of their ass at the last minute. It is a re-dubbed version of Romero's movie. It is filled with strange clips spliced into the feature of some found footage with the narrator telling some schlocky joke over the footage. There are also times when there is a phone ringing in the background that no one seems to answer until the narrator yells at someone and there is a jump cut in the narration. The jokes are over the top slapstick, crude, and incredibly dated as reflected by the frequent use of 90s slang and insults.

I can't remember the last time I laughed this much at a movie. The plot is rewritten so that the zombies aren't undead, but rather overworked and under paid wage slaves who have lost it and decided to fight against the "normals", aka people who don't have to work long hours for shitty pay. It's like they had an idea for a zombie movie, but had a budget of less than $100. 

Movies and found footage like this always feel like I'm watching the secret video-diary of someone who didn't really expect the world to be paying such close attention. It's endearingly heart-felt art in that way, but without that filter in the creative process of tailoring the work to an audience to make it be anything other than honest. Albeit in this case, the creator's honest art is a re-dubbed version of someone else's work filled with corn-ball jokes and poop humor.