The Dungeonmaster (1984)

When I was a kid, back around the year 1987 or 1988, there was an old-fashioned videocassette store called "Globe Video." It was situated on a sleazy gravel parking lot on the Marion, Indiana bypass, and it was one of those low-rent , down-at-the-heels little places with a counter and shelves lined with those big old-fashioned videocassette boxes, the often garish and provocative cover images promising cheap thrills and a few hours of escape, and all for just ninety-five cents.

The sections were divided into areas of personal interest: Action, Comedy, Drama, Romance, and Sci-fi/Horror. Back in the back, if you were eighteen, you could rent porn. (Ah, those carefree, halcyon days!)

One film that drew my attention was called "The Dungeonmaster," and featured a sort of gigantic wizard shooting a bolt of lightning or something at a fantasy warrior. Above them floated what looked to be a horned face. I only later realized the poster image of the horned face was that of heavy metal vocalist Blackie Lawless, of the then-popular band W.A.S.P. Knowing the film referred to the notorious fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, I was curious to see it. But, I didn't, at the time, get a chance.

It was a few years later that I rented it from another, far nicer videocassette shop. And now, many, many years later, I'm writing about the damned thing. And, after watching it again today, after so many years, what did I decide it to be?

A very wretched movie to be sure; yet, not without its entertaining aspects. In a light-headed and campy way, it's actually a lot of good, comic book-style fun.

The Dungeonmaster (1984) is an anthology film of several segments, tied together by the "story" of a man, Paul (Jeffrey Byron), who is whisked, via his neural interface with his archaic 1980s computer terminal, into Hell; or an alternate dimension; a place of cracked earth and jets of fire bursting up, presided over by the demon Mestema (played by Richard Moll of "Night Court" fame).

Mastema, you see, has kidnapped this computer geek's ravishingly hot girlfriend Gwen (Leslie Wing), and is keeping her chained to a huge stone, like something from the cover of a cheap sword and sorcery paperback. Comparisons to Persephone aside, Mastema challenges Paul to accept "seven trials" he has prepared; in reality, several very short vignettes directed by Charles Band, John Carl Beuchler, Rosemarie Turko, Peter Manoogian, Ted Nicolaou, Dave Allen, and Steven Ford.

The first segment, "Ice Cave," is directed by Turko, and has Paul (called by Mestema "X-CaliBr8," after the computer hooked into his brain) and Gwen in a frozen-over Madame Tussaud's, with wax effigies of Jack the Ripper and other nasties in suspended animation. An old saw from horror stories of the past, the effigies of these villains come to hideous life of course when Mestema decides to "heat things up."

This is followed by segments featuring stop-motions stone giants, rubber trolls in treasure-filled, zombie-haunted caverns, a "beast in a cave" (perhaps shades of H.P. Lovecraft?), a concert appearance by the, like, totally Eighties hair metal maestros W.A.S.P. (vocalist Blackie Lawless is prevented, via a blast from Paul's robotic laser forearm device, from dismembering Gwen), and a "slasher". After all of this, both Gwen and Paul materialize in a wrecking yard festooned with old planes whose wings have been removed.

There are of course the requisite midgets dressed in fantasy and sci-fi costumes (de riguer for this sort of film from this era), and there are hair metal goddesses, scantily-clad sword-and-sorcery babes, dumb, donut-eating cops who spill jelly down their chins. The 1980s obsession with narcissism and fitness is demonstrated, much as it was in similar low budget films from the era (such as the Toxic Avenger), by an aerobics class of women with beautiful bodies, dancing to the latest synth 80s pop music.

Paul himself is a yuppie with huge glasses, who likes to jog. He and Gwen have dinners of fine wine and swordfish; although, she refuses to marry him because she is jealous of the sentient computer he's hooked up to. Paul works for some L.A. computer firm; what we would, in this era, refer to as "Big Tech."

The ending of the film is as puzzling and non-sequitur as most of the rest of it. Mestema is defeated after Paul challenges him to a battle "mano y mano," throwing away his computerized laser armband and daring Mestema to fight him WITHOUT the use of any magic. He kills Mestema by throwing him into a bubbling lava-filled hole, and both he and Gwen materialize back in Paul's bedroom, and Gwen (who I think is clad in a pair of panties, purely by accident) agrees to marry him. They live the rest of their lives in sedate, Middle Class contentment in Reagan's America, most likely as aerobics instructors. The End.

"I reject your reality and substitute my own!"

The Dungeonmaster belongs to a few rare 1980s fantasy, horror, and sci-fi flicks (the most famous and big budgeted of which are films such as The Terminator and Tron), which played upon the growing societal fear of technology and how much we were, even then, growing to rely upon it. With the inevitable incoming of the "home computer," not even the wildest imaginings of the writers and directors of the era could have foreseen the rise of pocket-sized devices whose power and ability to connect the entire world and store vast, vast amounts of information would far outstrip the primitive and huge box-like affairs that only a few wealthy people at the time were privileged to own. The fear of a computerized world, a world of, perhaps, malignant technology, was underscored by the threat of thermonuclear annihilation across the sea, in the waiting missile silos of the Soviet Union.

Such fears were perhaps most popularly demonstrated in the movie The Terminator, but the same fear is present in even an obscure little film such as Evilspeak (1981), which features a bullied cadet at a military school raising demons and becoming "possessed" by his personal computer.

The anthology film Nightmares (1982), starring Emilio Estevez, likewise features a young man being sucked into a computerized world to his doom. At the same time, burgeoned the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s, which saw groups of concerned, mostly Right-leaning crusaders trying to root out a perceived underground of violent devil worship and Satanism by censoring heavy metal groups, protesting fantasy roleplaying games (such as Dungeons and Dragons, from which the term "Dungeonmaster" is taken), and boycotting occult-themed movies and television programs. The latter would grow immensely popular as the decade waned, but, apocryphal tales of "Satanic ritual abuse" were, sorely, lacking in a lot of genuine proof as to their reality. The Dungeonmaster, as well as a few of the other films mentioned, play on these then-current concerns, mixing contemporary anxiety over technology and dehumanization, with the idea of a an undercurrent of evil, a "Satanic force" that was as robotic and destructive and impersonal as a computer-launched, rocket driven thermonuclear warhead.

Finally, of course, there is the dream-like aspect to such films (which, in the case of The Dungeonmaster, partly is due to the edited-together nature of the individual segments, and the lack of a cohesive central vision) as this one, the very popular horror blockbuster A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and the more obscure Dreamscape (1984), which some have suggested served as the ultimate inspiration for Nightmare.

A Nightmare on Elm Street had an obvious, brilliant subtext, one that tapped into an undiscovered vein of terror lurking beneath the American psyche: for one: What if, people were asking themselves, the relative bland, optimistic affluence and social cohesion of the Reagan era was nothing more than a mirage? A dream? What if the "trickle down" actually wasn't "trickling down"? What if materialism was, in truth, a grave moral wrong, a sin? An "evil"? What if, behind the white picket fences and green lawns of Middle Class suburbia, there lurked something sinister, some hidden "sin" of the industrialized past, some blue collar monster popping, like Freddy, from the shadows of our collective Id, our collective "nightmare," holding a metal claw he crafted by his sweat and toil in a dirty machine shop. Films of the period as disparate as Blue Velvet (1986) and Neighbors (1981) were all asking a similar question in their own way.

The then-current "Satanic Panic," fears of nuclear war, and the rise of computer technology for personal use, all played into the anxiety of then current social shifting, and this fear is an undercurrent or sub-textual theme, we argue, inherent in many period films and television programs.

The Dungeonmaster actually begins with Paul dreaming, in a stark room, in a kind of concrete block house. In his dream, he is chasing a ravishingly beautiful woman that strips for him. He bends to kiss her when they finally meet, only to have her pulled away from him by post-nuclear mutant monsters, who come out of what could be a sealed metal door on a gas chamber. Or an atomic bunker.

To tell a tale, or a series of them, as an allegory of Reagan era anxiety was NOT, of course, what the film makers had in mind. They wanted to turn a quick buck making something that would appeal to adolescent youth and cult movie aficionados. They succeeded, insomuch as the film, as much as it is trash, is also a "video treasure." The Dungeonmaster is a cultural relic that can be appreciated for what it is: a look back in the rearview mirror, at a film exemplifying an era both puzzling and perfect.

Fin.