The Dungeonmaster

This is a weird film to review because of one reason: this movie was not meant to be a big-budget extravaganza. It was not meant to compete with the Indiana Joneses and the Stars Wars of the world. It is a low-budget cheese-o-rama. The biggest actor in it is Bull from Night Court. The man responsible for this movie is noted B-movie schlockmeister Charles Band. This thing has a ceiling, and I'd be a jerk if I set my expectations too high for a movie associated with Charles Band. The premise is thus: a guy who has glasses that act like those new Apple VR glasses (but in 1984, and they just look like frames from LensCrafters) and a computer he can talk to like JARVIS from Iron Man gets sucked into an alternate dimension by a demonic wizard and must complete seven trials to free his girlfriend and go back to their own world. Why did the wizard do this? He was bored. Seriously, that's it. Dude hadn't had a challenge in a few millennia, decided to kidnap some programmer nerd with a talking armband. Because of the seven trials concept, the movie is basically cut into seven chunks, minus the wrap-around. It makes the movie feel very much like Tron, where each set piece felt like a level in a game. Here, it's mostly given a D&D flavoring. The thing is, Tron still told a narrative throughout the stages; Flynn's quest to get back home, Tron fighting in the rebellion against the MCP, and so on. The Dungeonmaster is literally nothing but a nerd beating puzzle rooms. There is no story of any kind. No character arcs. It's like the original Super Mario Bros. game. Sorry, nerd, but your girlfriend is in another puzzle room. Now, I could get on board with this as a campy, low-budget, corny movie to riff on and enjoy the silliness, like Ice Bandits or The Last Dragon. The biggest hurdle this movie has and can't overcome is the SEVENTY-THREE MINUTE RUN TIME. Few scenes are given any room to breathe and explore their concept. The first trial is a room where the hero and the girlfriend are in a room full of frozen sculptures. There's Jack The Ripper and Louis The XVI and Albert Einstein and a werewolf. What is the thematic thread here between these people? Don't have time to find out, gotta find the ice crystal and smash it, which is in plain sight the entire time. And while the villain tells the hero he can use his bracelet to "call his machines for help", almost every use of is firing a laser. The only segment that gets any time to develop is one called "Slasher", where the hero must catch up to his girlfriend and prevent a serial killer from getting her. Obviously, this is an attempt to cash in on the slasher movie craze of the time. Problem is, you know what this segment doesn't have? ANY SLASHER ELEMENTS AT ALL. No murders, no cool special effects, no stalking, nothing. It feels like this movie has somewhere else it would rather be, and is running through the bullet points to get it over with. Add in the fact that the editing is woefully amateur, and the leads have no chemistry whatsoever (and the hero has all the leading man charm of your local UPS driver), and you get a movie that is at best ho-hum. My wife and I had fun making fun of it at first, but by the end of it, when it was recycling its own formula for the sixth time, there was nothing to make fun of. This movie needed 20 more minutes so it expand the sketches it had into full ideas. It wouldn't make it a 5/5, but it could be a solid 7/10 with extra time. This cliff-notes version of a movie, though, just isn't enough.