{"id":395,"date":"2014-08-20T18:03:10","date_gmt":"2014-08-20T18:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/review-dark-dungeons-the-movie\/"},"modified":"2023-02-26T18:30:58","modified_gmt":"2023-02-26T18:30:58","slug":"review-dark-dungeons-the-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/review-dark-dungeons-the-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Dark Dungeons: The Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>I feel like I need to start with some disclosures. I first played Dungeons & Dragons<\/a> in something like fourth grade and have been a gamer ever since. Hell, I even started a game company.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also been fascinated by Jack Chick<\/a> for at least 20 years. I have a binder full of Chick comics I\u2019ve collected over the years. I’d like to own the whole collection, but I can\u2019t bring myself to order them. Giving Chick Publications money (much less my address) seems\u2026icky. I\u2019ve watched the God’s Cartoonist<\/a> documentary read Daniel Raeburn\u2019s excellent IMP issue<\/a> about Jack Chick. I\u2019ve written articles<\/a> about him.<\/p>\n

I’ve even used Chick as inspiration for RPGs. I wrote an adventure that uses the afterlife as imagined by Jack Chick as a starting point (Waxman\u2019s Warriors<\/a>). And have you ever thought that \u201cThe Death Cookie\u201d is a weird name for a gaming website? That\u2019s because we got it from a Chick tract. The short version is that Leighton and I used to do dramatic readings from the Chick website. We\u2019ve got special voices for recurring characters and everything.<\/p>\n

In other words, I am the precise target audience for a Dark Dungeons<\/a> movie, and that\u2019s important. This is not a movie for a general audience. If you\u2019ve played role-playing games or read Jack Chick\u2019s work, you probably won\u2019t hate it and might even get a few laughs out of it. To really appreciate this movie, though, you need at least some familiarity with both (the more the better). If you\u2019ve never played D&D and have no idea who Jack Chick is, you\u2019ll probably find Dark Dungeons utterly baffling.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A Reasonably Faithful Adaptation<\/h1>\n

The movie makes a few changes, like making Marcie and Debbie college students rather than high school kids and giving one of the other players (Nitro) a minor role, but mostly sticks to the plot of the tract<\/a>. It\u2019s important to understand that Dark Dungeons is not, technically, a parody. Jack Chick gave producer JR Ralls the rights to make the film and he upheld his end of the bargain by making a faithful adaptation. Except for a few Easter eggs, everything in the movie that seems like comedy–the stylized \u201c50s educational film\u201d dialog; the delusional conspiracy theories; the willful ignorance about \u201cRPGers\u201d and \u201cRPGing\u201d; even the barely-repressed lesbian subtext–are all there in the original tract. Of course, any attempt to faithfully adapt Chick\u2019s work is going to seem like parody, and I think the filmmakers knew that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Other than expanding the events of the comic panels out into full scenes and adding some framing and padding, the main addition to the plot concerns the activities of the cult who only appear as shadowy figures in the tract. This provides a sort of secret history for the tract, where we find out that the cult is orchestrating everything (even Marcie\u2019s suicide) in order to summon a certain tentacley fellow<\/a> whose inclusion was, if I\u2019m not mistaken, one of the stretch goals of the Kickstarter campaign. The other major addition is a nod to Mazes & Monsters<\/a> in which Debbie goes down into the steam tunnels to fight the monsters that she\u2019s inadvertently released by playing D&D instead of accepting Christ.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The DVD<\/h1>\n

When I first opened my copy of the DVD, I was a little disappointed to see that the movie\u2019s run time is only 40 minutes, but after watching it (twice), I don’t think that stretching it to feature length would have added anything. The script is perfect. The acting, directing and other aspects of production fall somewhere in between slickly-produced amateur movie and low-budget indie flick. With the possible exception of the creature effects (which have their own charm for an 80s horror fan like me), nothing about the movie\u2019s production is bad. It\u2019s just obviously done on a limited budget.<\/span><\/p>\n

The DVD extras are less impressive. In addition to the commentaries (which I haven\u2019t watched yet), there are two features. The first is \u201cHow to Make a Movie for $1000 (But Not Really).” In it, Ralls shares his extensive expertise (from making one movie) at length over high-speed clips of the filming. The second is<\/span> \u201cA Lifelong Dream: The Making of Dark Dungeons.” It features interviews, behind the scenes stuff, and a few random bits that don\u2019t seem to serve any real purpose. There\u2019s some interesting stuff there, but it\u2019s badly organized and there are a lot of pointless clips. I lost interest quickly. I think they just copied the \u201cmaybe use for behind the scenes extra\u201d folder directly to the DVD without a bit of curating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Final Verdict<\/h1>\n

As I said at the beginning, this movie was made for a very specific audience, and for that audience it\u2019s very close to perfect. If you\u2019ve ever uttered the words \u201cI don\u2019t want to be Elfstar any more. I want to be Debbie!,\u201d preferably at a table covered with rulebooks and funny dice, this movie is required viewing. The farther removed you are from that demographic, the less likely you’ll enjoy, or even understand, Dark Dungeons.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I feel like I need to start with some disclosures. I first played Dungeons & Dragons in something like fourth grade and have been a gamer ever since. Hell, I even started a game company. I\u2019ve also been fascinated by Jack Chick for at least 20 years. I have a binder full of Chick comics…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":393,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[150,301,371,584,1118,1482,1613,1972,1994,2352,2353,2354,2355],"class_list":["post-395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-waxmans-warriors","tag-movies","tag-jack-chick","tag-jesus","tag-dd","tag-cthulhu","tag-mazes-monsters","tag-the-imp","tag-kickstarter","tag-gods-cartoonist","tag-the-death-cookie","tag-tom-hanks","tag-jr-ralls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=395"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1137,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/395\/revisions\/1137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deathcookie.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}