Dark Dungeons: The Movie Dir. L. Gabriel Gonda

[Rallsfilm; 2014]

Styles: parody
Others: Mazes and Monsters, The Wild Hunt, Dark and Stormy Night

Parodies present a great degree of difficulty for filmmakers. Moving beyond the inherent issue of subjectivity in comedies, there’s also the problem of tone. If the film is too close to the source it is parodying, then it’s merely an echo of that original thing, a retread that may be note perfect but simply elicits a “why did they bother?” reaction. Of course, if the parody strays too far from the source then it becomes muddled and again the reason for it becomes hard to discern. These questions of parodic success or failure aren’t the first things that popped into my head while watching Dark Dungeons, a short film based on an infamous 22-page religious pamphlet about the satanic properties of role playing games. Lines of dialogue and entire scenes are taken verbatim from the original screed then made more ridiculous by the performers’ interpretations. By taking on the material at mostly face value, Dark Dungeons is a clever approach at underlining the hysteria once lobbed at the relatively harmless pastime. And while its one-joke premise sags, even during an abbreviated 40 minute running time, there are enough personal touches to make it enjoyable.

The film concerns Debbie and Marcie (Alyssa Kay and Anastasia Higham), born again Christians excited to continue their ministry as college freshmen. While still learning about their new surroundings, they are warned to stay away from the bad crowd — the RPGers. Once the pair of ingénues learns about the glamorous world of role playing games, they (obviously) end up getting seduced by the siren song of creating characters, rolling dice, and moving small pewter figures around a miniature cardboard castle. Led by Mistress Frost (Tracy Hyland), the RPG sessions are all just a front to corrupt the souls of the innocent and invoke a demonic force to conquer the world. Will Debbie and Marcie grow far too attached to their characters, Elfstar and Black Leaf? What, if anything, can compel them to return to Christianity’s fold?

Spoofs have a bit of critic-proof armor around them. Anything that is bad or exaggerated can simply be chalked up to being part of the joke. That arch distance the filmmakers have from the subject matter is clear from the beginning. Much of the dialogue and plot is directly taken from Jack Chick’s Christian pamphlet (which you can read in its entirety here). And it’s presented without too many other jokes or winks — but the winking nature of the whole endeavor remains. The attitude that permeates the whole film is “Can you believe this?”, despite the fact that there isn’t a whole lot of winking or mugging to drive home the idiotic points that Chick made many years ago. The dialogue (even the lines not written by a close-minded hatemonger) is intentionally stiff and melodramatic, with the cast playing their thin caricatures of characters as wide as the screen allows. When its one-joke premise of the hilarious misconceptions of people, all by playing it fairly “straight,” begins to sag, the story takes a batshit turn (again from the pamphlet) that makes it funny again for a few more minutes. By keeping the story contained to mostly the pamphlet (with very little backstory added), director L. Gabriel Gonda and writer JR Ralls wisely choose to end the film before it gets far too convoluted and its punchline becomes a beaten horse. Much of the dialogue, shots, production design, and acting is from the same family to many DTV family Christian films — which is to say cheap and uninspired. The only place where the film missteps from its misanthropic religious roots is by having Frost and her cult worshipers summon Cthulhu from his depths. That’s far too nerdy and inside a reference to ever make it into a Christian film, instead it should have been a poorly rendered CGI version of basically Tim Curry from Legend.

Dark Dungeons is a fairly inspired approach to reveal the hideous ignorance of previous decades. By using a movement’s own words against it, along with borrowing much of its aesthetic, the filmmakers are able to laugh at the hysteria without being too heavy handed. There isn’t much to the film itself, it wants to mock the stupidity of the era and of Chick’s type of thinking, so there isn’t room for nuance, or depth, or even a running time longer than an hour. The film does what it set out to do mostly well, and it’s hard to imagine what could be added to strengthen it without doing a disservice to its central conceit. Unfortunately it turns out that conceit may be only slightly less hollow than the subject matter it is mocking.

Dark Dungeons is available for download from the filmmakers’ website.

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