Skullduggary



AKA: Warlock
AKA: Blood Puzzle

Several centuries ago an evil sorcerer made a deal with a noble. In exchange for giving the noble power, the sorcerer would get the noble’s soul. But, quite expectantly not wanting to give up his immortal soul, the noble tried his best to weasel out of the deal. Not liking to be double crossed, the sorcerer proceeds to get revenge by killing the noble with a poisoned apple. And now that he’s been thoroughly pissed off he doesn’t even want that one skuzzy mortal’s soul. Oh no. It’s not good enough anymore. So rather than take the now dead noble’s soul, the evil sorcerer curses the noble’s whole bloodline. He’s not going to just take THAT GUYS soul. Now he’s going to take the soul of his unborn child and all of that child’s subsequent offspring.



Some four centuries later, enter Adam, the apparent descendant of the unfortunate noble. Adam of course knows nothing about some silly curse. He’s just a lowly college student with a part-time job at a costume shop. The only thing different about Adam is that he just so happens to like to spend his evenings playing medieval role-playing games with friends. But this newest game is starting to feel a little too…real. While getting ready for a talent show at school a mysterious magician awakens the curse that had up to that point been dormant within him. But now that it’s been activated Adam has trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Thinking he is now the Warlock character he created for the game, every time his gaming group is given some kind of quest to defeat an enemy Adam goes out and tries to complete the quest on his own, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.



It’s October again! Yay! *throws confetti* And for this October I decided that I’d just follow the parkour method of choosing movies, and just watch whatever the hell I wanted, dedicated theme be damned. Sound good? Sounds good! But (!) the first part of the month shall be dedicated to horror movies that are in some way related to: ‘gaming’. And no, that doesn’t just mean that I’ll be watching a bunch of idiots staring at Ouija boards and accidentally summoning demons for two weeks (though I can’t promise that won’t happen at least once.) Nah. I’m going to be watching a variety of gaming related horror. Because variety is the spice of life and all that shiz.


We won’t be doing Lawnmower Man though. Because 1) I’ve seen it before and 2) it’s too obvious.

First up we have Skullduggary, a Canadian horror/comedy from 1983 that has a GREAT name, but a really lousy plot. Why? Because it’s really confusing. And often nonsensical. And surprisingly absolutely none of that is related to whatever Dungeons and Dragons inspired game they happen to be playing. In fact, their brief little role-playing sessions might be some of the most coherent parts of the whole plot. Which is actually kind of sad, since we’re only given small glimpses of the beginning and end of each of their gaming sessions. On the plus side though, at no point do we have anyone in the film pointing at the characters and screaming “Ah! The Devil’s Game!” every other time their role-playing game gets mentioned. Hell, one player’s father comes to pick her up at the end of the game and doesn’t even bat an eye. Just calmly asks if they’re done for the evening. Seems like a nice guy. Considering this was released right in the middle of the ‘Satanic Panic’ that’s actually a small blessing, trust me.



A lot of what I’ve since read online claims that the reason the movie is bad is due to it being incomprehensible. And in those commenters’ defense, the movie does try to add a lot more attempts at surrealism than its very meager budget really allows. It’s simply one of those cases where they might have had the VISION, but sadly they lacked the funds to pull it off. So instead of things feeling surreal, most of it just comes off as outright weird. It also really doesn’t help that the movie’s representation of “evil” is a medieval jester puppet with one of the derpiest-looking faces you’ve ever seen. It’s kind of hard to buy something as being ‘dream-like’ or even ‘sinister’ when it winds up being so stupid looking.


The Evil Sorcerer guy calls this thing the “Spirit of Evil” and I… I just can’t buy that. Sorry, movie.

But even with that, I still think the movie is rather easy to follow. A sorcerer curses some dude’s whole family, and then we get to watch one of the dude’s descendants slowly lose his mind and kill a bunch of people. Does it make any sense that the sorcerer’s curse impels Adam to go on a hallucinated, fantasy-fueled killing spree when all the witchy guy said he wanted was his soul? Absolutely not. That little hiccup in logic is the most puzzling plot point of the whole film. But compared to something like Things, the story is still remarkably easy to follow along with.



In fact, if you took out the whole ‘evil curse’ thing entirely, the movie could actually be an interesting, low-budget take on some poor guy’s slow descent into un-diagnosed schizophrenia. Because here’s this dude who occasionally thinks he’s a wizard and he’s trying to complete all these quests to destroy these ‘evil’ beings, and all because a ‘higher power’ (the dungeon master) told him too. If you think about it, it’s really not all that different from someone with a similar condition having a religious delusion. Except instead of angels and witches its evil sorceresses and guilds calling themselves the Apostles of Hell. Same diff. Oh, and there’s a creepy little jester involved for some reason. And a costume shop. And it’s set in Canada.



No, sadly the reason the movie ends up being rather lousy is because it commits the cardinal sin in horror movies by simply being dull. Over 15 minutes of the film’s first half hour is dedicated to the Junior College that Adam and his friends attend putting on a talent show. Did any college any of you ever attend ever put on a talent show? Well, this school sure did, and it looks just as annoying and dull as any of the ones you’ve possibly seen put on by grade schools, either fictionally or in real life. Which means it drags on and on AND ON for way too long. The talent? Boring. The behind the scenes skits? Also boring, just perhaps with more skin on display than you’d find in an elementary school. There’s great emphasis put on a magic act that only works because the camera cuts away just in time for the magician to perform the ‘trick’ (David Copperfield in Terror Train this is not.) In the film’s defense they couldn’t get an actual magician to perform so they had to improvise. But it’s still pretty bad.


Huzzah!

You do get your hopes up at the end of the talent show (we’re almost a full half an hour into the movie at this point) when the curse finally kicks in and Adam actively starts stalking a woman and you think, “Finally! Something’s actually going to happen in this movie!” But those hopes end up quickly dashed, because believe it or not Skullduggary is also supposed to be a comedy. Now, is it a good one? No. But it tries (and fails) on several occasions. As evidenced in this ‘stalker’ scene where Possessed Adam tries (and, again, fails) to kill this chick and instead ends up thwarted multiple times. And when he finally does kill someone during the show it’s due to a snake…except as it turns out it’s not due to a snake, because nobody else could see the snake that Adam and the audience saw, and we’re later told the lady died due to a heart attack. All of which is just a perfect example of how all such scenes in the movie go. Things that should be exciting end up irrevocably hindered. Either by confusing the audience with things that may or may not be happening, or by the film trying to throw in some random bits of humor that fall completely flat. The end result being that most of the death scenes wind up feeling anti-climactic or just plain dull. Not even a costume party where the host tries to recruit Adam to his cult has the ability to liven this film up.



I’d love to tell you the movie at least has some other things going for it. Like maybe some nice locations shots, or acting, or just… Well, anything, really. But it doesn’t. The video quality of all of the prints I found circulating online look horrendously dire. Almost like someone dunked the film print in coffee and only decided to pat it dry a couple hours later. There’s a nice brown tint to most of it, it’s got a few scratches and pops, there’s an occasional glare where there shouldn’t be, and everything is way too dark and blurry. So as far as print quality goes, it can’t get much worse than this.


I hope you all have good eyesight.

And the acting? Oi. I’d like to tell you that there were at least a couple of standouts but…nah. It’s all very low-effort and unimpressive. Think…oh…two or three steps below community theater. Overacting and underacting abound. And with dialogue like, “Oh shucks, my beloved,” you should be prepared to cringe throughout. Granted, it’s not all THAT bad. But it’s…still pretty bad. I think the best interactions end up taking place during the D&D sessions. But even those scenes are sadly interspersed with certain players’ lewd and sexualized comments. So while the gaming sessions during those scenes feel fairly accurate they’re still not a reprieve from the film’s crappy characters and their conversations.


Alas! Any and all hope for good acting was abandoned with the framing.

So overall, I’m not really impressed with Skullduggary. I do rather like the way they portrayed Adam’s slow descent into madness, as I do think it’s an interesting representation of his continually deteriorating mental state. But the rest of the movie just can’t keep up with that decent idea. The visuals and sound are lackluster, to say the least. The characters are either annoying or uninteresting. And the slasher parts are filmed so poorly as to become painfully boring. So other than the rather accurate representation of D&D sessions, there’s not really a lot going for this one, sadly. If they’d had a bigger budget they might have had something here. But their funds couldn’t match their vision. So unless you’re some kind of Canadian horror completionist, or you’re just curious about the Dungeons and Dragons-like role-playing angle, then I think it’s safe to say you can give this one a skip.

Skullduggary is available on a variety of streaming services.

Skullduggary is also available on DVD. Just don’t confuse it with the 1970 film of the same name starring Bert Reynolds.

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