I went into 1982's Mazes and Monsters thinking I had a surefire winner for Big Awful Friday. For years I've been hearing how it's a huge teen-scare movie feeding on the era's Dungeons & Dragons panic, a movement that started after the East Coast was destroyed by a horde of those dweebs everyone makes fun of armed with vorpal kitchen knives and bedsheet cloaks.

I don't know where it got that reputation -- jealous jocks, no doubt -- but I went away disillusioned, my faith in baseless conjecture and rumor-mongery shaken to its core.

It's not beer, beer-fueled sex, or even a shared love of knowledge that brings four troubled college students together, it's Mazes and Monsters, a tabletop roleplaying game. It's all good until maze controller Chris Makepeace takes their sessions live into the local caverns, where Tom Hanks starts to lose his grip on what's real and what's pretend.

Mazes and Monsters does feature regular lectures from adults about the evils of having fun with your friends. They make a strong case: when you're all growed up, you too will be able to berate your children into a joyless existence. This goes double if you're a scowling police lieutenant -- then it's pretty much your job to tell kids they're morons, and if they disagree, you get to put them in a locked room with rapists.

But the longer the movie went on, the more I sensed it was actually pro-RPG. Hard to tell when director Steven Hilliard Stern captures neither the thrill of sitting around a table for six hours straight nor the social bonding that takes place as you and your party eat bags of mini-Twix until you're ready to barf all over your d20s.

What we're treated to instead is a slow, shallow story, lots of daft hats, dorky melodrama, and pleading in the darkness, and a confused world where people drink wine from 1987 yet their wall calendars say 1983. The only rational explanation is the entire movie is one long orc-filled fever dream, but that's one rabbit hole I'm not willing to go down.

If they weren't too busy raking in their made-for-TV riches, Stern and writer Tom Lazarus might have shown the same wisdom and not signed on for a movie about a subject they knew nothing about. If they don't understand the game, how are they supposed to show its significance to their characters?

It's easy enough to conclude the lesson of Mazes and Monsters is "Don't use your imagination, because you're too stupid and crazy to know that monster you just stabbed is really a harmless street hoodlum."

The real lesson is to care about what you're doing, or all you'll do is junk.

◗ Contact Ed Robertson at edwrobertson@gmail.com