THE DUNGEONMASTER
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| Rated PG-13
| | Copyright 1985 Empire Pictures
| | Reviewed by Andrew Borntreger on 'a long time ago'
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- Paul - Nerd extreme, I'm surprised he has a girlfriend. Pretty tough when dressed in blue though, have to hand that to him.
- Gwen - Paul's girlfriend who is jealous of his computer.
- Cal - Paul's super desktop computer with nearly sixty-four kilobytes of memory. It can do anything! Interact with an ATM, scan equipment for problems, even shoot laser beams.
- Mestema - Richard Moll! Yes, it's "Bull" from "Night Court" as the budget version of Satan!
- The Midgets - Phil and Sal Fondacaro! Evil worshipers (I guess?) of the stone giant.
- A Stone Giant, Zombies, and other weird things - Adversaries that Paul must defeat to free Gwen.
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Here we have an example of Charles Band getting creative, honestly this is not a good thing. Granted, only one segment of the film (with the hard rockers) was directly his fault, since each part was written by a different person. It is much like one of those writing assignments you had in English, where someone begins the story and each following person adds a paragraph. Remember the guy who always had Hulk Hogan bust in and start beating whatever characters four other people had fleshed out? Well imagine some whacko scientist cloned him, sent all the clones to screenwriting school, and then actually produced the movie they wrote together (each adding a paragraph of course). Yes, it's that bad.
As this absurd plot would have it, Satan has been listlessly plodding through the centuries in search of a worthy opponent. Bypassing some promising types like Christ, Joan of Arc, and Teddy Roosevelt he finds Paul. What in the hell is Satan thinking? So what if Paul can meld with his computer, it's a computer. Not a holy sword, nor a magical tome, not even a blessed elixir. I'd be damned if anything which manipulates ones and zeros would be my choice of weapons versus the Devil.
Despite not understanding the "magic" of computers, the fallen angel turns Cal into a bracer that Paul then wears on his arm, matching the rest of his blue suit. Handsomely equipped he is sent to face the terrors of the aforementioned annoying screenwriting guild and I refuse to describe everything they came up with. Suffice to say that he usually conquers each challenge by tapping a few buttons on Cal and shooting blue beams at it, then he does a glittering dissolve back to the staging area. Get used to the dissolves, there are lots of them.
Finally Paul is sick and tired of this (join the party bud), he challenges the hulking Dungeonmaster to unarmed combat. Winner takes all, loser is tossed into a river of lava, whatever. Why Satan is vanquished by taking a dip in molten rock is beyond (maybe I mean below) me, but then again so is this film. |
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| Things I Learned From This Movie: | |
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- The Prince of Evil is completely mystified by computers. (Which clears Bill Gates of some serious allegations.)
- Midgets are kleptomaniacs and are able to outrun a full grown man who is in top physical condition.
- Dead bodies do no make comfortable beds.
- Hard rock groupies should trim their fingernails more often.
- Satan likes to make puns - bad, evil puns...
- Cops hate jelly doughnuts.
- Satan needs to invest in a thesaurus.
- Laser weapons have recoil, lot's of it.
- Deities do not have very much practice at hand to hand combat.
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- 5 mins - I don't know what this has to do with the movie, but I like it.
- 15 mins - What in the heck is going on?
- 34 mins - Why did Einstein go to Hell? How is this fair?
- 38 mins - They probably have herpes or something like that, you are dealing with Satan here.
- 41 mins - What about the dead body? These cops should call the station or an ambulance right? Anyone with me here?
- 47 mins - Paul ran just over one mile in five minutes, through city streets.
- 53 mins - Thermonuclear or geothermal? I'm confused, but this is not any drastic change from the last fifty-two minutes.
- 56 mins - Now when exactly was Satan a "lad?" In an alley? What?
- Ending Credits - I feel like someone (a very large someone) has been sitting on my head.
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| | Audio clips in wav format | SOUNDS | Starving actors speak out | |
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| File | Dialog |  | dungeonmaster1.wav
| Gwen: "Why did this happen to me? How did I fall for a guy whose first love is a machine?"
| | dungeonmaster2.wav
| Mestema: "In a future reality I shall destroy you!"
Paul: "I reject your reality and I substitute my own."
| | dungeonmaster3.wav
| Paul: "You know what you are? You're the lowest of the low. You use people for your own entertainment, your own little whims and fancies."
| | dungeonmaster4.wav
| Cal: "Warning, thermonuclear activity."
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| Click for a larger image | IMAGES | Scenes from the movie | |
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| | Watch a scene | VIDEO | MPEG video files | |
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 | dungeonmaster1.mpg
- 2.9m
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| Paul encounters the stone giant and overcomes it the same way he does most of his challenges. Nothing clever or interesting, he just taps a few buttons and shoots rays at it.
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| | Leave a comment | EXTRAS | Buy the movie | |
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| The Dungeonmaster
Reply #9. Posted on November 25, 2006, 04:09:49 PM by dave bumsh uk
My review of 'Ragewar' ('The Dungeonmaster') pretty much follows everyone else's: Yes it's a piece of crap, but viewing it at the age of 13 (I'm pretty sure it came out in England before the U.S.A., as did 'Swordkill' ('Ghost Warrior') and 'The Alchemist') I thought it was an undiscovered classic, up there with the Hollywood greats: inescapable proof that teenagers are twats.
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| The Dungeonmaster
Reply #10. Posted on July 09, 2002, 05:13:49 PM by K HOLLIDAY
FOR PEOPLE LOOKING FOR THIS TITLE IN THE U.K. IT WAS RENAMED RAGEWAR .IF SOME ONE COULD TELL ME WY JUST OUT OF INTREST.
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| The Dungeonmaster
Reply #11. Posted on November 25, 2006, 04:09:49 PM by Dungeon Master
Fools. I will destroy you all. As long as you're not armed with bad one-liners and wrist lasers.
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| The Dungeonmaster
Reply #12. Posted on November 25, 2006, 04:09:49 PM by dave bumsh uk
KEVIN - The film was called 'Ragewar' in the UK 'coz that was the film's original title, and it was actually released in the UK before being re-named and slightly re-cut for the US market. The US version is missing the pre-credit dream sequence that the EIV version contains, and I think a couple of Mestema's lines have also been left out when he first appears near the start of the film. However, the US 'Dungeonmaster' also has a longer version of Mestema's 'cat torturing' speech. I can only think that this speech was largely cut out of the UK version 'coz they think British kids are more likely to go out and torture our feline friends, having been encouraged by Mestema to do so... For more info on old Empire Pictures from the 1980's (Ragewar, Crawlspace, Troll, From Beyond etc.) visit: http://mysite.freeserve.com/empirepictures |
| The Dungeonmaster
Reply #13. Posted on January 28, 2003, 06:32:15 AM by chico
Ragewar...ahh the memories. I taped this movie from sattelite about 15 yrs ago, watched it and thought it was nuts. Two days later my mate borrows it and proceeds to lose it. Twat! Anywho the movie is utter ched , but i like it!
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Reply #14. Posted on November 25, 2006, 04:09:49 PM by tyron
What just happened? To get that movie out of my memory I'm gonna Get drunk, AND smoke pot, AND snort crack, AND watch girl-on-girl porn. If that doesn't work I'll take some pills and hit my head with a bat.
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| The Dungeonmaster
Reply #15. Posted on November 25, 2006, 04:09:03 PM by Felicity
When I saw the listing in TV Guide (remember when TV Guide used to list what was on TV for the whole night?) I thought I was in for a treat--it was made in the mid-1980s and was about a computer programmer and sword-and-sorcery fantasy and an evil wizard played by Richard Moll.
Somehow it managed to be terrible in spite of all this.
When a B-movie can’t even be enjoyable with all that going for it, what hope is there?
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Re: The Dungeonmaster
Reply #16. Posted on August 24, 2007, 11:36:09 AM by radioman970
I have nothing to add just that this looks like some Buck Rogers fun. Hopefully a DVD of it is in the future. I want to see it!
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