Paul Bradford: Well, I reject your reality and I substitute my own!
A sci-fi/fantasy film from 1984, divided into seven distinct story segments, each written and directed by a different person (including one segment by its producer, Charles Band).
Paul Bradford (Jeffrey Bryon) is a super smart, but underpaid, tech worker who's having trouble with his girlfriend, Gwen (Leslie Wing), over the feeling he likes his work more than her.
One night an evil wizard named Mestema (Night Court's Richard Moll) pulls them into another world, to challenge Paul to save Gwen's life and his own. All Paul has to help him is his computer system, X-CaliBR8, now turned into a Super Wrist-Gadget.
This film is also known by several alternate titles, most prominently Ragewar: The Challenges of Excalibrate and Digital Knights. In spite of its most popular name, it has no connection to the game Dungeons & Dragons.
Tropes:
- The All-Solving Hammer: Paul realizes pretty quickly that he can solve the challenges by just shooting everything in them with lasers. It earns him a What the Hell, Hero? when he shoots his way past a challenge he was meant to treat as a riddle, but otherwise works perfectly.
- As Himself: One segment takes place at a WASP concert, with the band playing the villains.
- Big Bad: Mestema, the Evil Sorcerer forcing Paul into the challenges.
- The '80s: Came out in 1984.
- Challenge Seeker: Mestema has been seeking a worthy opponent, finally finding it in Paul.
- Depraved Dwarf: The first danger Paul faces is having his X-CaliBR8 stolen by two dwarfs. Later he encounters another dwarf leading a band of bandits in a post-apocalyptic airplane graveyard.
- Evil Sorcerer: Mestema
- Hack the Traffic Lights: In an early scene, Paul is out jogging while X-CaliBR8 resets the traffic lights in his favor.
- High Collar of Doom/Mystical High Collar: Mestema wears one.
- I Reject Your Reality: Trope Namer. Not actually an example, though.
- Kick the Dog: Mestema relates a story about how, as a boy, he once covered a cat in tar and lit it on fire to watch it become "a howling torch."
- Living Statue: Paul fights one on the first world he gets sent to.
- Magical Computer: Even before the sorcery gets involved, Paul's devices can change traffic signals and hack ATMs, and are mounted on his glasses. Apparently he created it by accident and could never replicate it. After it gets turned into a Super Wrist-Gadget, it can shoot laser beams, create solid energy bars, and create dragons, just like a Green Lantern Ring.
- Meaningful Name: The X-CaliBR8 system is a play on the name of the sword Excalibur.
- Mestema's name is almost identical to that of Mastema
, a Hebrew angel who often antagonizes mortals, and who depending on the work can be a Fallen Angel or even Satan outright.
- Mestema's name is almost identical to that of Mastema
- Nerd Action Hero: Paul.
- No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction: Paul gets Mestema to fight him hand to hand when he tells him that only someone who faces danger can know true satisfaction.
- Sadist: Mestema, an Evil Sorcerer who has spent the centuries kidnapping random people and holding their families hostage to make them fight him because he's bored.
- The Three Trials: Well, seven here. But the principle's the same.
