Some kids don't like the real world. This is a valid thought process, especially for a nerdy youth in the 1980's when the real world was pretty shitty. In order to cope with the limitations of reality, a lot of nerds retreated into fantasy worlds. Some of those fantasy worlds involved breaking things and hurting puppies, but for "normal" nerds, their fantasy world was full of ogres, dragons, thieves and rogues. Yes, I am in fact giving a slow introduction to the fantastical and legendary role playing game,
Dungeons & Dragons. Since some people in the 1980's still believed in God, those weirdo fanatics decided that
D&D was harmful to kids and would lead to the warlock witchery corruption of their white youth. To capitalize on this conspiracy, several straight to video fantasy/horror films were made at the time using the fear of table top gaming and computer game corruption.
Tom Hanks was even in one. This genre is full of enjoyable cinematic turds. Unfortunately, turns out, 1983's
SKULLDUGGERY is not one of them.
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| GRAPHIC PHOTO: D&D in play! |
The general plot of this film involves a group of English theater nerds from different age ranges that regularly meet for a table top medieval style game, similar to
D&D, but that comes equipped with a giant castle on the board and larger than usual gaming pieces. Clearly the script writing work of some asshole that has no idea what people really do when they play
D&D. One of the players, a guy named
Adam, comes from a long line since medieval times of cursed people. When a warlock or whatever "curses" his far off ancestors in the opening bit, he basically murders them. I'm not sure how this lends to a long family curse of the people capable of boning and continuing this blood line are magic murdered, but whatever. Fantasy. Anyways, so during the course of the first twenty minutes,
Adam and presumably his girlfriend, a fellow and attractive gamer (lies) starts complaining of being so wrapped up in the game, that she hallucinates that she's playing ALL the time. Like, when they walk down the street and see some kids in knight costumes playing with wooden swords, she imagines she sees knights fighting with swords! Freaky shit!
More stuff happens introducing character backgrounds and the theater they are a part of, ALL BORING.
Adam starts having visions related to the warlock and some creepy puppet jester that was in the theater. Then he starts killing people, seemingly possessed by either the warlock or the jester puppet. I'm not sure and at this point, I didn't care. The movie doesn't explain much related to this whole "curse" thing and I'm not sure why we're supposed to fear the possibility of role playing possessing us to murder since all we have to do is not be the descendent of a line of English people cursed by a warlock. Seems easy enough. Also, the characters are so dry and boring and the kills suffer from theatrical music, but no b-movie gore. This movie clearly attempted to be good, as in
Masterpiece Theater episode good. Just one of it's many downfalls. I'm sure there were more, but I turned it off.
