No one thinks role playing games are funnier than people who regularly play them. We know we’re dorks, geeks, and nerds. It’s fine. We’ll quote the Dead Alewives D&D sketch at you and move on with our lives. But it also means that no one knows how little RPGs resemble the fears of right-wing hardcore religious loons than we do. There’s a reason that a fan-made movie based on an anti-RPG tract was initially sponsored with a thousand-dollar lottery win and from there crowdsourced. We’ve been laughing at the tract in print since the ‘80s; why not laugh at a movie version?
If you are somehow unaware of “Dark Dungeons” and Jack Chick, well. You’re lucky. Jack Chick was a . . . cartoonist? And right-wing hardcore religious loon. He was anti-Muslim, anti-Catholic, anti-feminist, King James Version-only, and so forth. “Dark Dungeons,” which is out of print but available on his website and can be ordered in lots of ten thousand, is the story of Debbie, who plays the cleric Elfstar in a game run by Ms. Frost. Unfortunately, her friend, Marcie, was the thief Black Leaf, but Black Leaf has died.
In the movie, Debbie (Alyssa Kay) and Marcie (Anastasia Higham), have just moved from Aberdeen to an unnamed college that is Totally Not the University of Washington. In orientation, they’re told they might consider finding a student organization to join, but Mike (Trevor Cushman) warns them against joining the RPGers. They wanted to kick them off campus, but they’re just too cool! And what with one thing and another, things play out much the same way as they do in the tract.
The movie’s only forty minutes, but since the tract is only 22 pages, well. Obviously this means that not a lot of the dialogue is lifted word-for-word from the tract, because there isn’t a lot of dialogue to be lifted, but easily ninety percent of the tract’s dialogue has been lifted and most of what hasn’t is because the girls are now college students. However, you don’t have to be deep into your gaming lore to spot several references to other gaming lore. Magic missile. Gazebos. Xykon.
Frankly, this short also serves to me as proof that you can do a lot with relatively little without needing to rely on AI. I can see which bits cost the most money, but there are other bits that I could pretty much stage with stuff around my house. The deep, secret lair is hung with those tapestries you can buy cheap at any given Ren faire or SCA event. There are seven credited characters, and even though I’ve never been on campus at UW, it was clearly filmed mostly on campus at UW. I won’t say these are the best actresses ever, but they honestly aren’t bad.
The best part is that Jack Chick himself, who was still alive at the time, approved this. They presumably presented him with their script, and he said, “Yes, this is a faithful portrayal of my vision.” And like, I’m not saying I expected Jack Chick to be familiar with Order of the Stick or other gaming references I myself caught. But he also didn’t catch the clear lesbian subtext; Ms. Frost has become Mistress Frost quite a lot of the time and at one point genuinely has a riding crop. And that’s after the part where Debbie and Marcy speculate about what fun they can have sitting alone in their dorm room together on a Saturday night.
I have long felt that the only proper way to stage a parody or satire is to have the cast not come across as aware that they’re in something funny. Oh, you can have the occasional breaking of the fourth wall, as in Top Secret! By and large, though, these are real people in a real world, so far as they’re concerned, and they need to take it seriously. And my goodness are these characters taking everything seriously. Even when delivering lines like “Wait, Marcy, didn’t you learn Arabic? You needed it to convert the Muslims who didn’t realize they were actually worshiping the Moon God,” a line Margaret Dumont would’ve had a hard time delivering with a straight face.
Next month, I need to figure something out, because I looked at the book that’s on the list and it’s out of print and copies are running like five hundred pounds shipped from the UK. I’ll get back to you all.