Past Misdeeds: Dungeons & Dragons: The Book of Vile Darkness (2012)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A long time ago, a secondary world fantasy continent was kept under the thumb of the exceedingly evil followers of the Book of Vile Darkness, a tome made of bits and pieces of an evil necromancer. This reign of terror ended when a new order of knights, the Order of the New Sun arose, blessed by the powers of the god of light. The knights freed the lands, and, while they didn't manage to destroy the Book, they did force its few remaining followers to split it apart and hide it away.

During the course of the following centuries, with their goal fulfilled, the Order of the New Sun descended in importance and power. At the beginning of the film, none of its knights have been blessed with godly powers for eight hundred years, and the Order has been reduced to a handful of people. Just after young Grayson (Jack Gerges) has been initiated into the Order - of course without any resulting supernatural powers - a band of evildoers slaughters what's left of the order and kidnaps Grayson's father. Our hero doesn't know it, but it's all part of a plan to find the remaining pieces of the Book of Vile Darkness, and create it anew.

Grayson barely makes it out alive, and swears to do anything to rescue his father. "Anything" in this case means the young man goes undercover with a small party of evildoers led by the witch Akordia (Eleanor Gecks) who are out looking for the cover to the Book. Soon, Grayson's virtues are put to the test, his oath of chastity threatened by a certain witch, and he just might realize he carries rather more darkness inside himself than he expected. On the positive side, Akordia grows rather fond of him, which just might become helpful when Grayson's plans start going awry.

It's a bit ironic that the third Dungeons & Dragons movie, which was after all produced for our dear friends of SyFy by the same companies who made the - not quite as horrible as the first one, yet still pretty bad - second D&D film, and even was directed by the very same Gerry Lively, turns out to be rather fun. On paper, made-for-TV movies are a step down even from direct-to-video films, after all, even though the borders between both have begun to dissolve increasingly in the last decade or so.

It's best I'll qualify the word "good" here right at the beginning, for The Book of Vile Darkness is certainly made for an audience willing and able to suspend their disbelief regarding a fantasy world full of characters dressing like (good) LARPers, sometimes cheesy melodramatics that fit the generally melodramatic acting style (which again fits D&D, and I do mean that as a compliment), and dialogue that can be sharp and funny, yet at other times sounds as tinny as an old shellac record. I guess if you can say the film's title three times without giggling or rolling your eyes, you're a) like me and b) perfectly able to actually enjoy this.

Personally, I find myself enjoying the seriously played cheesiness of the whole affair in particular, and see the melodramatics as a way for the film to demonstrate how seriously it takes itself. In fact, I don't think secondary world fantasy can work on the movie screen without a film treating all its sillier elements with dignity and quite as a matter of fact; irony does not build worlds. Why, yes, of course evil people dress in black, have sex (unlike good people), have tattoos and piercings and like long philosophical speeches about the appropriateness of their alignments! And make no mistake here, writer Brian Rudnick does clearly know how D&D's alignment system works and just as clearly realizes how much of a shame it were if he didn't use it. Having respect for one's source material is of utmost importance for a movie like this, even if its source material is not the be all and end all of philosophical thought.

The film's core character developments are deeply grounded in the alignment system, but they're also constructed flexibly enough to produce Book of Vile Darkness's main message, namely that your "virtue" isn't much of a thing to be proud of if you never had any reason not to be virtuous; it's also a nice change for the fantasy genre in its on screen incarnation that Book does seem to realize not all evil aligned people would be raving maniacs, nor see themselves as "evil" as much as following a violently libertarian philosophy (the jerks!). So, just like real libertarians.

Obviously, Book of Vile Darkness is rather darker than its predecessors, with a hero who will even stoop as low as murder by poison (including a use of a Bag of Holding right out of a slightly out of control table top session) - clearly, he's Chaotic Good at best - and a pleasant sense for the bizarre. The latter is demonstrated via elements like a prehensile eyeball (which is awesome, if I even have to explain that), an - decidedly creepy looking - undead child nourished by negative emotions and evil yet poisoned by love and compassion, or the Book of Vile Darkness (do I love writing the phrase? Yes I do.) needing to be written with the pain of someone with a pure heart. If you have played fewer RPGs than I have, you'll also find scenes like the one where a helpful prostitute brings Grayson (a stupid name for a hero, but what can we do?) into an RPG-typical shop for magic items that is about as mystical as a supermarket rather strange. Yes, I'll take that Bag of Holding, this Ring of Force, and of course that evil looking armour, because I am evil now. It is, as our American brethren would say, awesome.

I was also positively surprised by some of film's effects: the red dragon our evil party of adventurers fights is particularly great for this budget bracket, as is the undead child, but spell effects and digital matte paintings are also much better than I would have expected. There's nothing half-assed about the film in this regard, at the very least.


Nor is there much half-assed to find in The Book of Vile Darkness as a whole. Lively and Rudnick go about their job of creating a low budget sword and sorcery movie with an enthusiasm and a care you don't always find in the genre, turning what could be as perfunctory as the second D&D movie, or as embarrassing as the first one, into a whole lot of fun.