In their ongoing quest to bring most of Charles Band’s Empire Films from the ’80s to Blu-ray, Scream Factory is releasing another double feature containing two of the studio’s better efforts: 1984’s The Dungeonmaster (aka Ragewar) and Eliminators from 1986.
Though omnipresent in the horror genre since Dead of Night in 1945 (or even Waxworks in 1924 if you’re willing to count it), the anthology film has rarely extended into the realm of sci-fi or fantasy—Heavy Metal aside, of course. One of the rare exceptions is The Dungeonmaster, an anthology that assembles the all-star team of Empire Pictures in the mid-’80s: Charles Band, John Carl Buechler, Dave Allen, Ted Nicolaou, Pater Manoogian and several others.
Originally intended as a single story that was expanded by necessity into an anthology, The Dungeonmaster follows computer programmer Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Byron, star of Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn), inventor of a personal computer he calls X-CaliBR8. He is snatched from Earth and brought to another realm by an evil sorcerer (Richard Moll) looking for a worthy opponent and forced to undergo a number of trials, with the winner of the competition being awarded the hand of Paul’s girlfriend, Gwen (Leslie Wing).
That’s the setup for the different stories told within The Dungeonmaster, which finds Paul traveling to a hellish underworld, fighting stop-motion monsters (courtesy of—who else?—animator Dave Allen) and, perhaps most famously, going to a W.A.S.P. concert. As in almost any anthology, the stories vary in quality but rarely in ambition—this is a movie made with a lot of imagination and a lot of heart. Where some might argue that even the title suggests the filmmakers were attempting to cynically cash in on the Dungeons & Dragons craze of the early ’80s, I see little fault. That is what they were trying to do, but not cynically so. They made a movie that blends fantasy, science fiction and horror and even throws in some metal music and naked ladies for good measure—it is a film made for 13-year-old geeks everywhere, practically ripped from the pages of Heavy Metal magazine.
There are times when the movie does feel quite literally cobbled together and is limited by its budget (though back in those days, even low-budget movies like this one still had some money to work with), but there’s too much goofy charm to The Dungeonmaster to dismiss it outright. As both a fan and a student of Empire Pictures, the lineup of filmmakers assembled for the project is too good a proposition to resist; besides a segment directed by Band himself, these are the directors who would go on to make some of the best and most memorable films in both the Empire and Full Moon libraries. That alone makes The Dungeonmaster worth a look based on curiosity; that the movie is a lot of fun is just icing.
With 1986’s Eliminators, the second offering on Scream Factory’s double feature Blu-ray, Empire wasn’t trying to create just another genre movie—they were trying to create every genre movie. The results are mixed. The kitchen sink approach to the screenplay by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo (who would go on to write The Rocketeer for Disney) is a lot of fun and very self-aware. They're not winking at the viewer or making fun of the tropes they're using in the movie, but they're definitely conscious of what they're doing. The only reason cavemen end up in Eliminators at any point, for example, is because the writers realized they had everything in their movie but cavemen, and decided to rectify that.
These elements of the movie work, the film coming to life as it embraces being an insane bouillabaisse of exploitation genres. By the time we're seeing a ninja fighting alongside a manborg, we've either given ourselves completely over to Eliminators or realized this movie is not made for us. The screenplay allows for all this stuff to co-exist with just enough rationalization that it almost feels organic—there's none of that obvious, "Hey, aren't ninjas awesome and isn't this awesome because we have a ninja in here?" mentality that sometimes mars the kinds of contemporary work so clearly influenced by movies like Eliminators.
Unfortunately, director Peter Manoogian—a good filmmaker and one I like—is too often stepping on the screenplay's toes so that what should be bouncy and crazy and insanely entertaining ends up too sluggish and only "pretty fun." The movie needs a good deal of editing; while it runs only 95 minutes, it should be about 80. There's too much dead space between the good stuff, which, in the grand tradition of most exploitation movies, is probably due in large part to budget restrictions. There are a lot of scenes of characters standing around talking to one another, which might have been okay if the performances were less uneven. Overall, Eliminators keeps shifting between lightweight B-movie fun and something too clunky across the board.
Even the action scenes don't come alive as much as we might hope. Maybe it's just Manoogian's inexperience coming through (though he had directed a segment in The Dungeonmaster, this is his first real feature). Or maybe it's just working with the special effects that hinders him somewhat. One of the fun things about the movie is that there are a whole lot of practical and optical effects, from Denise Crosby's tiny robot assistant (a kind of cyber-dog clearly inspired by R2-D2 called "S.P.O.T.") to the laser guns and force fields. And because this is an Empire film, there was enough money to work with to realize the effects in a way that looked cheap but is still satisfying, especially to those of us who like these kinds of movies.
Ultimately, it’s those people—the ones who like the types of movies Empire used to make—that will be best served by Scream Factory’s double feature of The Dungeonmaster and Eliminators. It’s not the kind of disc recommended for the uninitiated, but anyone with a penchant for low-budget ’80s genre movies should hopefully find a lot to enjoy here. Previously available on separate four-film compilation discs from Shout! Factory, both movies make their high-def debut with decent transfers and a nearly 30-minute interview with director Peter Manoogian, the man responsible for Eliminators and one segment in The Dungeonmaster.
Scream Factory has released a number of Empire pictures in the last year or two, several of them (like Cellar Dweller and Catacombs) double features. The pairing of The Dungeonmaster and Eliminators is among their best of the Empire releases to date, if only because the movies themselves are solid and of more consistent quality than some double bills of the past. I can’t promise the titles are for everyone, but for us ’80s kids who grew up renting and watching any and every sci-fi and fantasy film we could get our hands on, this disc is a dream come true.
The Dungeonmaster Score: 3.5/5
Eliminators Score: 3/5
Disc Score: 3.5/5
Patrick lives in Chicago, where he has been writing about film since 2004. A member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Online Film Critics Society, Patrick's writing also appears on About.com, DVDVerdict.com and fthismovie.net, the site he runs and hosts a weekly podcast.
He has been an obsessive fan of horror and genre films his entire life, watching, re-watching and studying everything from the Universal Monsters of the '30s and '40s to the modern explosion of indie horror. Some of his favorites include Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (1931), Dawn of the Dead (1978), John Carpenter's The Thing and The Funhouse. He is a lover of Tobe Hooper and his favorite Halloween film is part 4. He knows how you feel about that. He has a great wife and two cool kids, who he hopes to raise as horror nerds.
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