This update has been a long time coming, and not just in the sense of being much tardier than I imagined possible. I’ve been planning on doing an update on this topic one of these days since sometime around 2007!
Black Roses (1988), in which heavy metal is sending you to Hell…
The Gate (1986), in which heavy metal might still send you to Hell, but it can also send demons there if you play it backwards…
Mazes and Monsters (1982), in which fantasy role playing games may not send you to Hell exactly, but they’re sure to drive you insane…
and…
Night of the Demons (1988), in which you can’t even celebrate frigging Halloween without worrying about a one-way trip to the netherworld!
#1 by B. Wood on October 19, 2014 - 9:33 pm
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Reading your Mazes & Monsters review, it sound’s like the movie isn’t even all that good at it’s finger pointing. It’s supposed to portray gaming in a negative light, but it sounds like it fails horribly at that. Indeed considering the depiction of the families and the leads histories make it clear they’d have horrible issues doing anything from putting on a musical to playing football. I mean Jay Jay’s parents parenting would leave anyone with issues. First warning sign, they named him Jay Jay.
And Robbie is clearly traumatized from his brothers dissapperence. That is clearly the root source of his problems far more than his playing M&M (Who clearly weren’t sponsers of this program).
Finally I would like to point out a few things about Roleplaying games.
1-They pretty much require you to have friends. Or at least people you can stand for a few hours each week.
2-Unlike certain other past times there is less chance of having a ball thrown at you, being attacked by someone crashing into with all their body weight behind it, and being accidently shot because someone can’t tell you have two legs instead of four and are orange rather than brown.
#2 by blake on October 19, 2014 - 10:19 pm
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The bit about Fundamentalist Christians criticizing Halloween reminded me of my first years here in Brazil. I used to teach English at a school called Wizard. The books for the course aimed at the 3-10 age range featured a mascot named Little Wiz (which is amusing in itself). In 2005, said character had to be removed from the books because of threats by the Adventist Church. Apparently the school had some sort of discount for members of that church, who threatened to start pulling their kids from the school if Little Wiz wasn’t flushed out of the books.
#3 by El Santo on October 20, 2014 - 10:04 am
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Very much so, yeah. I kind of suspect that may be why the movie makes Robbie’s transformation so abrupt and ill-motivated. Otherwise, it would really be impossible to defend the premise that playing the game per se had anything to do with it.
#4 by RogerBW on October 20, 2014 - 10:39 am
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Rona Jaffe had never met an RPG player, of course: she based the novel on the (wildly inaccurate) media reports of James Dallas Egbert’s disappearance and later suicide, and then invented things that seemed suitably Bad to fill in the gaps. Established writer, writing about a subject and in a style that he/she’s not familiar with: we’ve seen this sort of thing before, and it never works well. (Yes, I was a role-playing gamer when this sort of stuff came out – I still am – but we never had as many fundie loons in the UK so it didn’t get much traction.)
#5 by The Rev. on October 20, 2014 - 6:27 pm
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I have never seen The Gate, despite being a child of the ’80s. (Never saw The Monster Squad, either, come to think of it.) I did see the sequel, though, and recall a sequence where everything the kids wished for turned into literal piles of shit. It was very apt. I also haven’t seen M&M and have never felt I was missing anything, which seems to be borne out here.
Black Roses I have on VHS somewhere, having bought it for super-cheap in college. I’ve only watched it once; I remember one sequence featuring some horrendous puppetry and a ridiculous death, and that is about it. Night of the Demons I saw in high school; I also remember very little about it, save the ending, which featured perhaps the most insanely out-of-nowhere death I’ve ever seen.
#6 by ronald on October 20, 2014 - 7:35 pm
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Off-topic, have you (El Santo) ever chanced to expound on nero fumetti (“black comics”), in which characters like Diabolik and others robbed from everybody and kept it for themselves, killed not only criminals but also occasional innocent bystanders (much like, y’know, the readers), and were nonetheless embraced by the reading public? ‘Cause I don’t get that. The “kill the criminals that the law can’t touch” approach is one thing, but “kill whoever’s in your way and let God sort it out” seems like it would be a harder sell. Yet even a *book* on the topic of nero fumetti contained no answer to this apparent conundrum. Is it something you just have to be European to understand? Any thoughts? Thanks for your time. 🙂
#7 by El Santo on October 21, 2014 - 9:05 am
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No, but it is a subject I mean to take up one of these days. I should probably make it quick, too, since you never can tell how long Netflix Instant is going to keep a given movie available for streaming…
#8 by ronald on October 21, 2014 - 8:02 pm
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Really, when you think about it (“So don’t think about it.”), the fumetti characters were “heroic serial killers” long before such a big deal was made about Dexter Morgan. And even then, Dexter (I’m pretty sure) never killed bystanders; this was, of course, because he did almost all of his killing in his private killing room, but still.
And when you go back further, The Spider (Richard Wentworth) was a “heroic mass murderer” whose body count (and mental instability) left Dexter in the dust. And even *he* supposedly managed to never kill innocents.
Even Superman and Batman used to kill criminals now and then, during their very early years, but never innocents.
#9 by supersonic man on October 22, 2014 - 1:50 am
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My impression of Diabolik was that his lawlessness seemed to be in some way tied to fatalism and cynicism about nonfunctioning government. He’s a hero for citizens of a failed state, maybe.
#10 by El Santo on October 22, 2014 - 2:27 pm
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My thinking is very much along the same lines. Italy had a stretch of about 60 years during which Mussolini’s dictatorship was the best government it could manage. If ever there were a place where you’d expect to find mass-culture fantasies of nihilistic outlawry, Italy in the mid-20th century would fit the bill.
#11 by ronald on October 23, 2014 - 2:09 pm
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Even if he might kill the citizens too?
Upon reflection, though, that kind of also describes V for Vendetta, doesn’t it? Also a European creation (okay, I’m sure some people will tell me that the UK doesn’t qualify as part of Europe, but it’s close enough (no pun intended)). Hm.
Maybe it just really is something that a United Statesian might be ill-equipped to understand. American pop culture has no shortage of vigilantes, of course — there was that 1970s wave of Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and so on (which Italian filmmakers in turn went on to, uh, “imitate”), for example — but like I said, the issue of shrugging off civilian deaths is rarer. As far as I can tell, anyway.
“Well, you are gonna lose a few.” Tom Servo re a scene in “Mitchell”
#12 by blake on October 20, 2014 - 10:54 pm
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Unidentified Diving Object
I can only hope that means that El Santo will be taking on The Atomic Submarine
#13 by ronald on October 21, 2014 - 3:07 am
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“Halloween was evil, said the Christian supremacist lunatic fringe, and nobody was going to tell them different. There was a Jack Chick tract and everything!”
Did anyone else ever notice that the three kids in the aforementioned tract wore the same Halloween costumes (ghost, witch, devil) that Huey, Dewey, and Louie did in 1952’s “Trick or Treat”? What are the odds, huh?