Category: NERDING DAY

As with True Greatness, some laserdiscs are thrust upon us, like by a sinister uncle say (the hole part). I’m not saying that happened to me and now I compulsively relive the trauma through this column, I’m just saying “open uncomfortably wide, because here comes another l.i.t.e.r. of Laserdiscs In The Enchanted Rain!”

Today I’ll be walking you through 1982’s Mazes and Monsters…

…sorry, RONA JAFFE’S Mazes and Monsters. In case you’re wondering why she got the “Madea’s” treatment, it’s because Jaffe was a prolific – if middling – novelist from the late ’50s until the early 2000s. I’m guessing her top billing here was part of a contractual obligation, like the one insisting everyone call her “The Rona” and swearing it would never come back to bite her on the ass.

Both the novel and film concern a game of “Mazes & Monsters” gone awry. How awry? They’re sending rescue dudes with scuba tanks and hardhats down holes in the very Earth, that’s how! What IS this horrid game, that could have resulted in such a dire, subterranean, and unspecified tragedy? I’ll let Kronkite Fedora explain.

Ohhhh, it’s Dungeons & Dragons, got it! So this is like a Satanic Panic thing?

That description is so unlike what Dungeons & Dragons actually entails that it caused me to briefly wonder if I had actually stumbled upon a movie about the dangers of Chutes & Ladders L.A.R.P.ing. But no, yes, he means Dungeons & Dragons, even though we will never see a die rolled in the whole film. The only thing Mazes & Monsters as depicted has in common with real Dungeons & Dragons is the concept of Critical Failure.

That “three minutes” takes roughly ninety to transpire, which is a pretty good metaphor for how time dilates as one tests their Constitution against what is essentially some alarmist, ableist bullshit that misrepresents core aspects of both mental illness and – much more importantly – the finer points of TTRPGs. Let’s meet our PCs!

I honestly could not intentionally assemble a set of more forgettable names. Obviously ONE really stands out, but that’s just because David Wallace happens to be the name of a second-string character in The Office. That said, making “Chris” play someone called “Jay Jay” feels like a bit of an overcorrection, like naming your first kid John and your second kid N’hoj.

The credits transport us to Manhattan six months prior, where a yellow cab is busy discharging one Mr. Brockway at his mother’s luxury penthouse apartments. Mr. Brockway is a notorious dipshit. Even the doorman knows this, and gleefully pounces on an opportunity to dunk on the hapless bumblefuck, trusting in the lad’s cowardice to mitigate any risk of reprisal.

Just stellar doormanning. Notice how he reached in to undo the boy’s seatbelt, but made him open his own door? That way Mr. Brockway knows the doorman would be just as comfortable punching him in the crotch as he is ignoring his eponymous function. Once his humiliation is complete, the movie heads upstairs to meet with Brockway’s mother, as so many of us have.

Brockway’s Mom is also, predictably, as dumb as the bag of hair on her head. Rather than showing any concern that her adult son rode home from the airport wearing a WWI German pickelhaube, she makes a glib reference to him being smarter than Stephen Hawking (he’s not though) and pathetically short (he is).

Jay Jay flees to his bedroom, but has returned to the nest only to find it encrusted in Mama Bird’s blindingly white shit.

He’s naturally upset, since without the white backdrop he’d look like any normal, cool young guy in a pickelhaube. That’s all Jay Jay “Robert” Brockway wants, you see…the acceptance of his peers – maybe even a small group of friends. Is that too much to ask? Just to feel normal, for once?

“Yes,” thinks Brockway, “it’s my Mom’s fault I’m such a misfit. My crazy, weirdo Mom. Without her in the picture, I’d blend right into the crowd just like anybody else…boy, would that be swell.” Then he removes his antique war helmet and unpacks the minah bird he’s trained to speak in paradox.

And, after a beat, again it comes – the cry the beast makes unbidden a dozen times a day like a tolling bell, like the Raven proclaiming “nevermore:”

“That’s so weird,” Jay Jay tells Julia, “I didn’t even teach it to say that.” The bird would shoot itself if it had the means. But we the audience leave that place of darkest dark inside whitest white, to meet the next of our Mazes & Monsters crew, Kate Finch. She’s complaining to her bio-Mom about her stepmom, to whom she refers as “Chlorine.”

It turns out that’s because her name’s Noreen, but I like to think the nickname also came about because she’s always either cleaning the pool or filling the house with noxious gas. God, suffocating on noxious gas sounds so good right now! Anyway, after some real irresponsible mixed messages to her daughter…

…Mom turns the spotlight back onto Kate herself, who we learn has a deep interest in writing.

And of course by “deep interest,” I mean that she struggles with the basics of the very concept itself, like how she can write anything other than a journal entry or autobiography without opening herself up to potential fraud charges.

The parade of Wise Moms saying Obviously True Shit doesn’t stop there, either! Across town, another mother lectures her son on the basics of how cooked we are frfr, which was already pretty apparent forty years ago.

This was probably an allusion to the famed 1974 satire Blazing Saddles, and considering we’re all cowboys now her point is well taken. By me, that is, not her impertinent son. That douche is too busy being handsome, built, clearly in his mid-20’s, a God among men who could achieve anything he wanted if only he mustered the ambition…the stereotypical D&D player.

His father points out that he’s gifted with computers, and should focus on developing that skillset instead of playing silly games, since computers and games are totally separate fields that will never overlap.

Yeah! How can he expect to get good at coding and logic if he spends all his time designing loot tables and sequentially nested encounter ideas? Do you think the nerds at MIT play Dungeons & Dragons? They’re all too busy fuckin’! Incidentally, here’s the official MIT school song modified to work as a D&D drinking song hosted on MIT’s own site.

WHOA, talk about burying the lede! In case you’re not an old-school CRACKEDhead and your “guy who loves Spidey”-sense didn’t just go off, between characters named Daniel and Kate we now have fully half of the CRACKED After Hours team represented in this movie. They fit the right molds, too – Daniel is a burgeoning computer nerd and Kate is a sarcastic malcontent.

Although in this timeline, Robert “Jay Jay” Brockway has clearly slotted himself into the Soren Bowie position – white, privileged, affluent, elite. He’s also upped his hat game substantially, considering the only headwear the real Robert Brockway ever wore into the CRACKED offices was the bloody detached pelvic bowl of J.F. Sargent.

At whatever college all these miscreants end up, we learn that Kate, Jay Jay and Daniel are already friends, and that Movie Daniel’s dick game is apparently Epic Level.

This, of course, also comports with what After Hours star Daniel O’Brien would tell the CRACKED team he was doing when he’d disappear for long stretches at a time in the middle of shoots and come back smelling of vomit and heroin. Regardless, the 1982 movie Mazes & Monsters is obviously not an intentional reference to our 2010 webseries, so I’ll stop riding that bit as soon as we determine who the Michael of the movie is. I guess by process of elimination it would be whoever they introduce next…

Hm, father won’t keep subsidizing my lifestyle if I insist on whipping my dick out at every cop we pass? Sounds like Michael! Let’s meet this daring freedom fighter!

Okay, so on the one hand I get to be played by Tom Hanks, which is neat considering my abiding love of his work in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Great Buck Howard, and nothing else. On the other, his/my parents seem to be right on the edge of an acrimonious divorce, not helped by the fact that his Mom is forever getting drunk and falling into her On The Waterfront Marlon Brando character.

After most of Apocalypse Now and just a scene or two of The Island of Dr. Moreau, Mom falls asleep and Michael/Robbie/Hanks is deposited at school, where his identities quickly collapse into one in order to make this column easier to read going forward. Let’s call him “MiRoHan.”

MiRoHan soon finds myself (see how unconfusing this is?) in the dining hall, where Jay Jay has literally staked out his own flier seeking a fourth player for their Mazes & Monsters campaign. But don’t worry, he’s dressed like Snoopy flying a dog house so people will know he’s not crazy!

Then to drive the point home, he unhinges his jaw and exhales a shimmering platinum brick of insanity.

See, how can Jay Jay Brockway be insane when he just puked literally all of the insanity on Earth out right in front of you?! There it is, right there in the subtitles, and not inside him!

It’s at this point that Jay Jay explains that they recently lost a player when Mazes & Monsters broke the person’s brain and they had a psychotic episode. MiRoHan in turn shares that he had to transfer to this school because he got too deeply involved in Mazes & Monsters at his last school and had a psychotic episode, sometimes referred to as a “brain-break.” BUT WHO COULD SAY NO TO THOSE PUPPY DOG EYES?????

Hence, the die is cast, which in this case would be an especially apt metaphor if they ever rolled dice in this movie. MiRoHan actually demurs at first, but gives in after meeting Kate and Daniel a few weeks later at Jay Jay’s place.

As his talking bird elucidates, Jay Jay is throwing a dorm party in honor of Brigitte Bardot’s birthday while dressed in a tuxedo and hardhat. This is because absolutely no real 1980s teenagers were consulted at any point while crafting his character.

As a stalwart Rider of MiRoHan, though, the new guy is mostly here for the potential hookups. He quickly seeks out Kate and lays the charm on as thick as he’s able.

NOW WHO’S THE BROCKWAY, YOU PIECE OF ABSOLUTE SHIT? Yet, like most women who are the only females in their TTRPG campaign group, Kate can do no better than a young Tom Hanks. Her best bet is to pawn MiRoHan off on Daniel, and navigate the conversation back to the safer waters of the game that recently drove her close friend insane.

That subtitle’s a little off; she actually says “I want you to meet Daniel” and pulls him over. Daniel’s level nine.

The sound of “shop talk” quickly summons everyone’s favorite construction worker, and before he can extricate himself, MiRoHan has begrudgingly agreed to a few friendly sessions of Mazes & Monsters with his new pals…as long as things don’t “go too far.” Daniel assures him that it never goes too far – it’s just a game, not blasphemy! He’ll maintain full agency and autonomy at all times. LATER…

This is nitpicky, but I do want to point out that the grammatically-incorrect “what” in the subtitle above is not a mistranscription. Your perilous fates are in the hands of a god who doesn’t know when to deploy “what” vs. “that,” just sayin’. While we’re bashing Mazes & Monsters on sheer accuracy, let us also pause to meditate on the totally useless playmap featuring a fully-revealed layout with nine rooms that don’t connect to each other and candles in the way.

At least someone bothered to crack open the Player’s Guide for believable classes. OR DID THEY? NO, THEY DID NOT.

Now, one of the very precious and wonderful things about Dungeons & Dragons is that, as a game of collaborative imagination, you can absolutely make up your own classes from scratch. People do it all the time. That said, no one has ever played as a Frenetic of Glossamir unless they were doing so as a snide reference to this film. If you can prove me wrong, I’ll owe you a Freelik anywhere above the waist.

MiRoHan shows off his own M&M chops, which you can tell are formidable by the film’s score, Tom’s staid demeanor, and the fact that he’s the only one not dressed and acting like a complete asshole. Daniel, as Maze Controller, resumes the story with a tale of fighting monsters so generic they’re basically called that.

The movie then harshly cuts away, as if ordered by the President to scrupulously remove anything resembling actual Dungeons & Dragons gameplay lest Satan’s power leap from the screen and turn the nation’s children woke. In fact, we will only glimpse one more scene of Mazes & Monsters itself before the game devolves entirely into the lowest form of roleplay…actually going outside and playing a role.

But before we get to Jay Jay pretending he invented L.A.R.P.ing, let’s quickly get to know these kids who teeter so precariously upon the damnable edge of Satan’s Meat Grinder, i.e. forming an improv troupe.

MiRohan does end up dating Kate, and they enjoy wholesome activities together like…

🌭slow jogs in the park.

🌭brisk walks later in the day in the same park under an umbrella while it’s not raining and no one else is using an umbrella.

Trust thus established, MiRoHan gets comfortable enough to share his core trauma with Kate – that his older brother Hall ran away to New York City one night, never to be seen again. Compounding his guilt is the fact that he aided in Hall’s escape, never expecting it would mean he’d sever himself from the family so completely – or worse, perhaps fall victim to some bad end in the Big City of Mazes and Monsters.

Hanks, by the way, already acts circles around the rest of the cast, who mostly give off big P.S.A. vibes. This means the moments where the script calls for him to be shattered are surprisingly impactful, and the moments where the Producers make him say stuff like “I have acquired many spells and charms” or run at a fan screaming his brother’s name even funnier.

As for Jay Jay and Daniel, they decide to sit around and tell each other about what they want out of life and what their obstacles are, which is super handy for a screenwriter. In case the hats didn’t make it clear enough, Jay Jay wants attention, which he admits openly as he pretends to paint an already-painted “miniature” that is in fact a paper doll.

Daniel gets laid too much, which is a different kind of struggle.

It’s the sort of struggle that makes your friends with real problems (or even Jay Jay Brockway’s) look at their own lives and despair. After Daniel ditches, Jay Jay does just that, then shares an alarming, actionable suicide plan with his pet bird, who does nothing and tells no one. “Take me with you,” its hollow eyes seem to scream.

Unable to differentiate healthy attention from white-hot grief, the young man brainstorms more and more elaborate self-deletions until he chances upon the perfect venue for his death…the town’s local cave system. He even goes so far as to imagine the headline the local paper will print after his body is found. That’ll teach his mom to redecorate her own apartment!

Of course, the bitterest irony is that we know what the real headline would be: “LOST! Bizarre Hat Collection, Last Seen With Son, Reward For Capture.”

But don’t worry! The Producers who made this movie because they are nominally so concerned about the mental health of young people didn’t find the suicidal ideation thread interesting enough to return to. It is, in fact, the Tom Hanks character who succumbs to the evil of TTRPGs and goes nuts, not Jay Jay. Jay Jay just idly tells his pet bird he wants to kill himself in the local caves, then conspires to get his friends to L.A.R.P. there. To do so, Freelik seems to intentionally take a dive at their next Mazes & Monsters play session.

Once again without involving pen, paper, dice or a saving throw, the matter has been settled. It’s like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Book where the story is linear and you just read it from front to back! Has anyone done that? Regardless, Freelik the Frenetic of Glossamir is impaled and dies.

Whoa whoa WHOA. It’s “GLOSSamir” pal, get it right! We didn’t secede from the Generacs of Countronia to be condescended to! But, alas, all the freneticism Jay Jay can muster won’t undo what’s been done, or even prevent his friends from ripping on him mercilessly, surely exacerbating his already troubling self-loathing issues.

Hanks, already reflexively protecting his image as a “Hollywood Nice Guy,” not only defends Jay Jay verbally, but also opens up a glowing rift in his chest cavity and sucks all the mental illness from Brockway into himself as a grand sacrifice. This also transfers unto him the function and title of Main Character For The Rest Of The Movie. As Jay Jay pitches his plan to move their Mazes & Monsters game to Pequod Caverns (the suicide part now completely forgotten), the spectre of madness descends on MiRoHan like a coke fiend jonesing for a fix of the substance they habitually abuse – drugs, probably.

After stealing costume pieces from the school’s Theatre Department, the four friends meet up at night to trespass in the caverns. This time Jay Jay is the Maze Controller, and he’s updated Daniel’s generic monsters with something a little more…voracious.

Come on man, you’re making D&D players look like assholes! Name something a fantasy name that’s not just an adjective with weird emphasis on it.

Ugh. That sucks, but okay. In the future, please use needless apostrophes in place of needless hyphens, and try not to make your Big Bad’s name sound like two cavemen introducing themselves.

Jay Jay scampers off, his game narration then echoing through the entire cavern from a hidden source. This would make for an extremely impactful way to deliver his last words if he were going to kill himself, which again, he isn’t because that aspect of his character will never be followed up on. If anything, this would seem to be the movie saying “playing Dungeons & Dragons CURES mental illness,” but I digress. Maybe he just needed to vent to his bird.

After a few minutes of what can only be described as “faffing about,” the crew run into the first – AND ONLY – physical game element Jay Jay has prepared for them. Thankfully, Daniel passes a reflex save with flying colors!

The Maze Controller laboriously tries to connect the skeleton trap to a larger narrative, but in that way where you can tell that the person writing the script refused to look at any real Dungeons & Dragons materials. Why would they? That shit’s Satanic! Better to just blindly warn people that if they start a game, they’ll most likely end up dressed as elves at midnight in stolen costumes, trespassing at a tourist spot, tricked by an until-recently-suicidal boy genius into looking for his lost stash of weed.

As I mentioned, that skeleton with a flashlight taped into its mouth was the full extent of Jay Jay’s practical effects prep, so the rest of the night proceeds with him simply telling the players “what they see.” This is sometimes called “Theatre of the Mind” in the D&D world.

It’s a perfectly fine way to play, and one of the big benefits is you don’t even have to break onto state land to do it! The downside, of course, is that Theatre of the Mind is only as effective as the imagination of the PCs involved. In this case, MiRoHan is having a sudden delusional break, so he does see SOMETHING, but he’s being written by a filthy casual, so that something is less a Gorvil and more a generic Lizardfolk cosplay or Power Rangers henchman.

Not that that’s not scary! Believe me, if my senses reported a dragon-man approaching, I’d probably flip out too. I’m just saying that from a monster design perspective, it’s aggressively “Generac.” By the time the rest of MiRoHan’s party find him screaming inconsolably at a bare patch of dirt, the Gorvil has been slain.

Rather than showing immediate concern, the pals figure he’s just “really getting into the game.” That makes sense! What doesn’t as much is how they presumably play for several more hours without anyone noticing Tom Hanks’ haunted rictus of extreme distress, like the thousand-yard stare of a shellshocked fighter pilot.

Like really, you think that’s just roleplay? Who do you think your friend MiRoHan is, Tom Hanks? Kate does finally notice something is amiss when they drop him off at home that night and he blesses them in-character. Daniel does not.

Indeed, MiRoHan’s break from reality is instant and profound, almost as if Mazes & Monsters was hardly the problem. He seems to immediately begin living a second life, in an alternate reality where a power called The Great Hall visits him in dreams and gives him instructions for how he must repent and reshape himself.

Some of the requirements are pretty strict.

Don’t worry Tom Hanks, you’re still allowed to stroke it! If you don’t believe me, reach out and I can send you a flipbook I made using stills from Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, and some hardcore pornos. Despite his protestations, MiRoHan does as the voice commands and breaks things off with Kate.

Isolated from the group, his delusions are left to fester and grow, and the Mazes & Monsters gang begin to see him only when they meet at the caves to play.

MiRoHan’s taken to acting like Pardieu even in class, which Kate finds pretty troubling and perhaps a reason to intercede or else alert his parents or the school. Daniel does not.

In fact, rather than honor her concerns, Daniel breaks into the caves to cheat at the game, then makes a move on her after she follows him in and gets lost. It’s a deepcute!

And, since there’s nothing more attractive than a cheater who’s cornered you in a cave only he knows the way out of, it totally works!

Oh yeah, that’s happening to me all the time. Same reason Charlize Theron won’t star in the erotic thriller I wrote for us. Come on Charlize, it’s only eight pages of loose bullet points! Plus I promise I won’t compare myself to any Star Trek characters when we kiss.

Well, not Star Trek: The Original Series. My weiner kind of looks like Odo when he’s celebrating the return of his shapeshifting abilities in Deep Space 9 and there’s precious little I can do about that.

Assuming you do read this far into the article, Charlize Theron, let me just say to you what I said to the plastic surgeon when I first whipped it out:

Then the plastic surgeon said “there’s precious little I can do about that,” which is how I first learned the phrase!

But wouldn’t you know it? I’ve riffed so long it’s Halloween now, and Jay Jay is hosting yet another blowout, his life apparently well worth living. The Mazes & Monsters party members are there, some canoodling and others staring blankly across the crowd at a Frankenstein’s monster like they’re about to knife a Gorvil.

In fact, this is NOT the climactic moment Pardieu becomes a danger to himself and others, but the first time you watch the movie it really feels like in a bolder writer’s hands he’d block up the dorm door and set the room on fire. Instead, a simple blessing and MiRoHan is gone, his robe stuffed with Fun Size Snickers for the long journey ahead.

Once he’s been missing a week or so, MiRoHan’s friends spring into action, by which I mean they break into his room and try to decipher his writings. The more sensible option would be to escalate the situation to a parent or authority, but at this point they’re scared they’ll get blamed for repeatedly trespassing and damaging the caverns. You know, those things they did.

Daniel sees a map marked “The Two Towers” and quickly connects it to Lord of the Rings, the author of which he says as “Tol-key-in.” Jay Jay, presented with the same information, quickly connects it to himself and his own situation, like he does with all information.

Oh, it’s ALLLLLLLL about Jay Jay, isn’t it?! Jay Jay Brockway, the fucking drama queen genius suicide boy!! WHERE’S YOUR CUTE HAT NOW, FUCKER?! After clearing any remaining evidence out of the caves, Jay Jay slaps on a very cute hat indeed and they all go down to the police station to finally make a proper Missing Persons report.

Ooh, very sly, shifty-eyed tween in the tweed bucket hat! I’m crossing YOU off the list of suspects with a pen. Just kidding…the cops actually take the case surprisingly seriously, sending a full-on trench-coated detective to put the screws to each of the kids in an attempt to sniff out a lead. This takes the form of a quick-fire montage of tense interrogation scenes written by someone who took exactly as much interest in researching police procedure as they did in Dungeons & Dragons.

It’s amazing stuff, really.

Hey, interrogation subjects: when pressed, just say an unrelated thing! Or, if all else fails, have your bird outsmart the guy for ya.

Try as they might to obfuscate the issue, Detective Whatever slowly but surely uncovers some of the truth of the situation, if not MiRoHan’s whereabouts.

Finally, he hits upon Mazes & Monsters, and knows immediately the game is to blame for MiRoHan’s mental health crisis. Daniel does not.

Or…does he?

Having roundly humiliated these college kids for worrying about their missing friend, the Detective is ready to reveal his findings:

You know, because if someone reports a friend missing, and THEY don’t know where he is, you’re basically out of luck. You crack THEM, but if they weren’t holding out on you then the person’s really missing, and let’s be honest…missing = dead 1000% of the time. At least, that’s this guy’s completely unfounded attitude. But that’s the miracle of roleplay…thanks to their practiced imaginations, the M&M players are able to conceive of possibilities a cop could never wrap their head around!

The Soul of Hope thus revivified, the team’s resident genius swiftly determines an action plan. In case you forgot, he’s the one in the coooooooooooooooool hat.

Of course! That’s how! Bless your flaps! Now we just need a random cavalcade of associated words to reveal the rest of the solution!

That bird is a better detective than the real cop. Which is handy, because the rest of these lackwits couldn’t locate a Missing Person with a Locate Person spell. Let’s review:

🌭 His brother Hall disappeared to NYC.

🌭 He drew a secret map of the Two Towers.

Hmm…

Hmmmmmm…

Fucking HMMMMMM…

Boy, that’s a real head-scratcher, or at least can be made to be one if you need to stretch to the next commercial break!

It’s really not. While MiRoHan’s friends essentially try to solve a Where’s Waldo? book by staring at the sun through a powerful telescope, he’s out in the mean streets of Manhattan levelling Pardieu the fuck up.

Gorvil down, bitch! I’m not sure it’s really “magic” if the primary spell component is a big knife to the gut, but I’m just glad our boy can finally reach Level Ten and unlock a brief moment of lucidity. He spends that Inspiration Point to make a phone call to Kate and ask for help, but literally all she can focus on is the fact that they can’t crack this wild Great Hall/Two Towers puzzle.

Bitch he’s in New York go get your friend! Utterly let down by his support system, MiRoHan wanders into the disused bowels of the subway, mistaking them for a Mazes & Monsters dungeon. This has an effect on him similar to that of cheese on Monterey Jack.

In a completely universe-breaking feat of traversal, Daniel, Kate and Jay Jay then drive their little red convertible from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Brooklyn Bridge in the same amount of time it’s going to take Hanks to have a brief dialog scene with a vagrant.

I don’t know what it means, nor can I fathom why the filmmakers felt the need to call such attention to the fact that they are specifically DRIVING, not flying, and are specifically IN SAN FRANCISCO and need to be in NEW YORK CITY later that same day. Which they achieve! None of these plot points was load-bearing. That said, Tom Hanks’ scene with the guy playing the unhoused man is quietly moving, and probably the best bit in the movie.

For more of those vibes, see the far superior Terry Gilliam film The Fisher King. No, don’t! Stay and see how this train-wreck wraps up instead! Simply put, all the major players convene at the Two Towers – as in, the World Trade Center.

Not-so-simply put…

They “quickly” deduce that by “going to be with the Great Hall,” MiRoHan means “jump off the World Trade Center” as atonement for what happened to his brother. I’m not sure how this “uses their game playing skills,” considering the game they liked to play was basically just spelunking in character.

To make up for their abject failure to solve any kind of simple riddle in an expedient fashion, the team recover some lost time by serendipitously picking the right tower and immediately finding an open parking spot right in front of the main entrance. This is by far the least realistic thing in the entire movie, including the cross-country warp travel.

At this point, the film takes on the disjointed pacing of a motorist unsure if they’re about to pass their exit or not. It truly feels like they came up short in the cut, so to fill in the gap they play out the world’s most tedious chase sequence. As the score struggles to figure out how much danger it’s supposed to be indicating, a laborious game of cat-and-mouse ensues…first they head to the Observation Deck but don’t see MiRoHan, who has just now wandered into the lobby.

Daniel suggests they hit the lobby again, but by the time they’re down there MiRoHan has just stumbled up the stairs to the Mezzanine and they spot him heading to another set of elevators. Just as they get to him, the doors shut, natch.

Then, I shit you not, we are treated to a real-time elevator ride presented as a chase sequence, complete with a progress bar to keep “ratcheting up the tension.”

Will they get there in time? WILL MiRoHan be okay?! Never before have I so breathlessly awaited the turning on of a light shaped like the word “OBSERVATORY!” They do reach him in time, and Jay Jay attempts to talk him off the ledge in terms any Mazes & Monsters maven would understand. Unfortunately, “Pardieu’s” game-logic is strong.

This would have been a really funny moment for Tom Hanks to stab these three kids in the gut and leave them for dead on top of the World Trade Center, but tragically all he does is come to his senses.

Jay Jay gets what he always really wanted – validation of his own importance within the group – and Tom Hanks rehearses his Captain Phillips breakdown for the camera. All is well.

Savvy readers may note that this is not only not how Dungeons & Dragons works, but also not how mental health works, or New York City traffic, or indeed anything. By and large, this story bore no resemblance to anything. Congrats on completing the adventure! Please assign your own 1900HOTDOG character two new skill proficiencies and another glaring personality defect.

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PATREON ADDENDUM

But wait, there’s unfortunately more! The fear-mongering Dungeons & Dragons movie may be disingenuous and stupid, but you can’t say it doesn’t have follow-through…

Three months later, the M&M crew visit MiRoHan at home, having apparently had no contact with him or heard any news about his mental health in the interim. Or at least, they all seem to readily believe his Mom when she says “Oh, he’s fine,” then stares into the middle distance and cries a single tear. This is the same lady who was drunk and raving about her failed marriage at the top of the film…wonder what ever came of that? I’m going to guess a life of quiet desperation.

Totally expecting him to be fine, Daniel, Kate and Jay Jay are naturally surprised to find their pal STILL HAVING JUST COMMITTED A RANDOM MURDER IN NYC DID WE FORGET ABOUT THAT?! Also, he still thinks he’s Pardieu. Dude doesn’t even get to reroll his character!

MiRoHan explains the emphatically dumb lore he invented about his backyard while Kate gives boilerplate narration about the made-up dangers of board games.

They also spend the rest of the day buying into and supporting his delusions by playing along with them, which I don’t think is the healthiest way to address the group’s problems. That, of course, would be to just hold hands and keep walking straight into the lake. It’s enchanted!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Haraka, who is like Tom Hanks, but taller and made of solid steel and powered by nuclear fission. So I guess just a taller Tom Hanks?