Great Adventure Game Movie: Cloak & Dagger

This wonderful family movie references all sorts of vintage adventure games and hex wargames--Top Secret, most obviously, but there are also scenes that feature snippets of Traveller, the original AD&D Monster Manual, the Players Handbook, Blitzkreig and others. It's centered around a game store.

Henry Thomas, of E.T. fame, plays a boy who has recently lost his mother. His father (Dabney Coleman) is a good man, but doesn't understand his son's attachment to games and fantasy, thinking them a stand-in for the boy's sadness. In turn, the boy has an imaginary friend, the super spy Jack Flack (also played by Coleman) who is an answer to what he perceives as his father's distance.

The boy witnesses a real murder involving the theft of government secrets (disguised as a Cloak & Dagger videogame cartridge). Of course no one believes it, except (sort of) for his young female partner in crime (Christina Nigra). But that doesn't stop the bad guys from coming after him.

Here's a clip from the middle of the film:

Michael Murphy plays a lazily slouchy no-good, as always.

Beware the three-fingered woman.

The kids communicate on early 80's walkie-talkies. And the film makes brilliant Hitchcockian use of the Santa Fe canals.

The film is surprising, suspenseful, frightening (though appropriate for children), funny and ultimately quite moving. The ending made me cry thirty years ago, as well as now. Though this time I had to hide it from my kids.

But enough of that sentimentality (as Jack Flack might say). The other guys lost because they weren't good enough. Pick up your weapon and get moving...

Great OD&D Movie: The Vikings

There are many great OD&D movies. But in my experience, the more explicit you make them--such as the two execrable Dungeons & Dragons films--the worse they are. So, among the best are the historical films.

Okay, I admit that I'm biased. I gave Vikings a prominent place in my own game.

This 1958 movie features Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. Though I would take issue with the scary and (in my view) somewhat exaggerated Orson Wells introductory narrative (see one of my early blog posts on things Viking here), the movie is wonderful.

See below for a great scene featuring a longboat and fjords:

There's this cliche that 40's and 50's films were black and white in terms of evil vs. good characters. 60's, 70's and more contemporary films are more nuanced, or whatever. That's actually sort of the opposite of the truth.

In the Vikings most of the characters are morally mixed, to say the least, except perhaps for Janet Leigh and her priest, maybe, and of course, the current English king, who's a jerkopotamus to the core. So, the Vikings (represented most forcefully by Kirk Douglas) are literal rapists and murderers, but they also have a certain sense of honor and honesty, unlike, say, the scheming British. And even Douglas does the right thing by the women he loves at the point of death, perhaps sacrificing himself to his sworn enemy.

That's great drama. It's also (I hope) life.