Fate Federal Agent 8

This film looks like it was chopped together from video game cutscenes that were made in 2003, by hallucinating high school art students.

I FRIGGIN LOVE IT!

The props and environments look like they were taken from a geocities 3D modeling instruction website that went down in 1998. The character models look like someone took the default models from a late 90s freeware human model software and put them through a blender, and the voice acting and writing are honestly indescribeable in any existing human language.

Nearly every character sounds like someone's parents gargling liquid LSD, while trying to fight off a frighteningly aroused grizzly bear. That's honestly the closest the English language can come to describing them in my hands. Their delivery is ackward and stilted, that's practically a given for a project like this, but it's much more than that. Their tones are utterly insane, completely innapropriate for their situation, and often intersperced with bizarre grunts, sighs and gurgles that I couldn't explain or understand if my life depended on it. Additionally, these bizarre bits of vocal flair are apparently so important to the narrative that they are even included in the subtitles!

The direction, though, is where I began to have some doubts as to the strange quality of the film. As a whole, this peice is basically a compilation of almost every tired, overused and generally terrible action, sci-fi or just plain movie cliche and nowhere is this more obvious than the cinematography.

For example, the beginning of the film starts with some guys who are probably the bad guys, I honestly can't tell with how demented and nonsensical the story is. They kill a bunch of scientists and aliens for no noticeable reason, then one turns to the boss baddie and says "I thought you said no killing?" Then the boss turns to the camera and with a dramatic zoom on his expressionless face he says, with Bollywood levels of melodrama, "I LIED". This is despite the fact that he clearly ordered them to kill EVERYONE less than 10 seconds before. I laughed for a good minute after that.

Another example, just a little bit later, they show up at some guys house, knock on the door politely, some guy opens it and they are just standing there with guns drawn, looking like they are posing for an 80s action film made by children. The door opening guy stands motionless at the doorway, looking completely normal for a person who has recently received facial reconstruction surgery from a garbage compactor.

The man then drops suddenly into a look of surprise which is nearly cut out of the screen by a hilariously obtuse dramatic zoom into the center of his face. He says " May I ask who's calling?" As innocently as if they were selling Girl Scout cookies. "DEATH!" they reply in unison, before opening fire with their little stock 3D model laser guns. He then literally vanishes into a formless cloud of blood, while the scene cuts to some never-before-seen woman, who was apparently behind him, wrestling with her own slowly-extruding mid-air bloodstain.

This where I began to wonder if this film was really as bad as it looked at first glance. Is it really the cliched peice of poorly constructed crap that you can see in the IMDb screenshots, or is it a lighthearted and self-referential piece of unappreciated satirical genius? That's the question I alluded to in the title of my review, I'm not mocking it here, I genuinely cannot tell. If it's serious, it's obviously garbage, genuinely entertaining, but unintentionally so. However, it's just so rediculously over the top when you look at the choices made in its writing, voice acting, design, virtually everything about it, that I really wonder.

Obviously, the terrible quality of its visuals counts against it, there are time when it actually made me physically uneasy. However, that could simply be a sign of poor resources or even a deliberate thematic choice, as the abominable animations, facial design, expressions...heck, EVERYTHING of the characters leads to consistently humorous moments on a regular basis.

So, the verdict. Is it genius? Or is it dreck? I can't state with certainty or even confidence either way, but it made me laugh all the way through, so I'll give it 6 stars. As to whether I'm laughing with it or at it, well... maybe that doesn't really matter.