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Shakma (1990)


A bunch of college students play a live-action fantasy role-playing game like Dungeon & Dragons in an (apparently) locked building with caged primates, with their professor acting as Dungeonmaster. They wander alone from room to room, communicating with the professor by walkie-talkie. There’s some supposedly unbeatable villain in the game named Nemesis, but I don’t know who he was. They’re supposed to figure out some sort of word puzzle from things written on blackboards, which I guess is a code word to give to the heroine, who is the only one who bothered to dress up in a costume for the game.

The game is deadly boring, and they really should have made it more interesting and involving, or else contrived some other reason for the students to be in the building. I’d have to guess this movie is actually older than 1990, due to the poor picture quality and the terribly simplistic computer graphics on the computers that appear in the movie (although that may be the fault of the budget and not the age).

In between boring unsuspenseful scenes of people wandering around, a baboon attacks. The attacks are fairly violent, and if the movie’s editing had been tighter, this might have been a better movie. There is a good scene of the baboon running down a hallway, and also towards the end a student has a plan to beat the baboon when we think he has given up that is also a good scene.