The Dunegeonmaster, also known, hilariously enough, as Ragewar. I have to admit I had really high hopes for this clearly awful movie, what with it's esoteric poster of a heinous man looming large over a red grid with a miniature brawny man wearing cricket pads and shooting lasers from his wrist-guards. The poster had that awesome, excessive art style that has graced a plethora of '70s, '80s, early '90s movies and even early Nintendo games. I thought to myself, "well played, Netflix, I'm intrigued." And, though it sat on my queue for a few weeks, I always glanced over it in my browsing, the heinous man's cackling face watching me as I swept it aside for something else.
76 minutes of my life were thus ended upon the playing of this movie. 76 minutes I'd pay to have back. To be doing anything else, like showing up at my sophomore year Homecoming only to find that the girl I was head over heels for, Katie O'Donnell, had brought some cocksucker to the event instead of me...or, you know, sticking needles in my eyes.
To get the particulars out of the way, the movie tells the story (if you want to call it that) of a brawny computer geek, obsessed with his computer girlfriend instead of his real-life girlfriend. Despite this, brawny geek asks his real-life girlfriend to marry him. Real-life girlfriend doesn't give him an answer but still inexplicably considers his offer while aiming some crazy jealousy at computer girlfriend. Brawny geek and real-life girlfriend go to bed one night and soon find themselves transported to a sort of fantastical plane, where a pseudo-European pornstar conducts a lengthy gauntlet of challenges in order for brawny man to save real-life girlfriend.
For one thing, the movie looks like it's shot on a low-grade camcorder that the director borrowed from his mom. Wait, I take that back. There were multiple directors that steered this shit-ship, so maybe they all borrowed their mom's camcorders respectively. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why multiple directors were even -necessary- as the style remained completely the same for each sequence, that style being "absolute shit."
The plot is so laughable and convoluted that you can actually see the actors themselves become confused and tired as the film progresses. Oh, and that pseudo-European pornstar wizard that I mentioned before? That's Richard Moll. Yeah, the bald guy from Night Court. Total icing on the cake. I feel the film was conceived in a very hazy and vague manner, something like all the directors sitting around a table at a bar and saying in unison, "wouldn't it be funny if..." or "wouldn't it be crazy if..." They even have the audacity (or stupidity) to try and throw in a moral to the story. Since the dialogue is so hackneyed and robotic, it's far too difficult to even paraphrase it, but it was something along the lines of abusing power out of boredom. You know, because having pointless, shoddy fantasy fight sequences is a cure for boredom.
And yet I think the most unforgivable aspect of The Dungeonmaster is the wrist-guard that brawny man uses throughout the film. All the props, costumes and set pieces look like garbage, the barren landscapes, the caves, the dungeons, the zombies, that SHITTY HEAVY METAL BAND "WASP" - but nothing stands quite as tall as this wrist-guard, which is a mix of a Texas Instruments calculator and that electronic sequencing game, Simon.
This wrist-guard is the blatantly convenient plot device to be measured against all other movie plot devices. It has to be the most esoteric swiss-army knife man has ever conceived. If brawny man finds himself needing to shoot lasers at enemies, no problem. If he needs to shoot lasers in multiple directions at once, no problem. If he needs a laser-generated bar to pull himself up from certain death, no problem. If he needs very small, specific lasers that unlock handcuffs, no problem. If he needs to run a background check on a criminal, no problem. If he needs to plan the trajectory of ricocheting rocks off cave walls to hit a single target, no problem. If he needs to deflect samurai swords, no problem.
Jesus, this movie isn't even worth existing. It should negative exist. This isn't even just a "bad" bad movie, it's like taking the art form of movies on a cheap date, to IHOP or something because The Dungeonmaster is too cheap to splurge on Denny's, and still expect to get the goods. Also, I cannot condone any film that supports stealing from frozen Albert Einsteins.
