Arcade

Something fishy is going on. After playing the newest, hottest video game on the market a bunch of teenagers in the neighborhood begin to disappear. The special effects are the main attraction here. At the time of it's release they were pretty good, but today they are badly dated. Pretty bland entertainment without any excitement.

Rated R; Violence.

This is a harmless little sci-fi for pre-teens that mom and dad can scan at any time and see no sex and only a touch or two of violence grace the screen. The plot and pseudo- science are of the leave-your-brain-at-home variety while the graphics are nothing special. The direction is slow, clear and undistinguished. The photography is pedestrian, but not bad. The cast is cute, led by the beautiful Megan Ward. She is demure and fully clothed as a teenaged heroine who saves her boy friend and pals from an evil virtual-reality game gone amuck. The fact that she was 23-years-old at the time and a little too old for the part did not bother me at all. Her fresh face and great beauty allowed me to watch the whole thing! The once vampish Sharon Farrell has a small part as the star's mom which she plays flawlessly with just a touch of irony.

Yes, this is the worst film I have ever seen. That's not to say it's the least enjoyable film I've ever seen, that dubious honour goes to My Dog Skip, a hideously patriotic story of a boy who learns all life's lessons through his pet dog that I was forced to watch on a bus. But Arcade has the worst plot, the worst production values, the worst script, the worst acting, the worst... everything, really.

This complete lack of virtue is, of course, Arcade's saving grace. This really is a freak show exhibit of a film. I watched it all the way through because I simply could not take my eyes from the grotesque spectacle on the screen. I had to see how much worse it could get. And boy, did it ever get worse.

How did this film get made? Who knows. I'm glad to see it went straight to video, which is where it deserves to be. Watch it if you've got a taste for the truly horrible.

As a once avid gamer, I'm compelled to mock the utterly boring experience that the "Arcade" game offered, while shake my head at what gets portrayed as the gamer's world. This is a movie for people who've barely ventured into a real arcade or picked up your PS controller (or to be fair to the film, a SNES controller.) If you're oblivious to the game world, then you may buy into it.

I could nitpick the "Arcade stealing souls and taking over the world" plotline or the technical general "eh" elements of the production, but I'd rather nitpick the gaming inaccuracies.

One - character design. You're hardpressed to find a game where the characters are dressed only in a wetsuit-lookin' outfit. Let's cut away from the typical anime-ish stuff that's expect from Japan with freaky colored hair etc--we have actors and a low budget, we can't redo their look from the ground up. Still, character outfits are usually more visually interesting than an all black wet-suit and motorcycle-wannabe helmit. The motioncapture artists wear this, yes. The characters in the game no. And typical female characters, regardless of genre, usually show a lot of skin. Whether the wardrobe department abided by this rule or not, I wouldn't have cared . . . even the hideous outfits the characters wore outside the game were more interesting than the in-game stuff.

Oh yeah, and as for "Arcade" himself? Heh, I don't think I've ever seen a game-last-boss design that stupid

Two - Interaction. Yes, there's Myst and 7th Guest and a Tetris of every imaginable flavor as well as other "puzzle" games, but for the most part in the gaming world you're up to your eyeballs with interaction. From blasting the hell out of zombies in Sega's House of the Dead, Slashing through the demon castle in Symphony of the Night, or bouncing through the colorful world of Mario, you're facing things/fighting things and/or constantly interacting with your environment. And if not, you're sitting through plot in an RPG . . . me personally? You'll find me over at the Soul Calibur machine and nowhere near that boring game featured in the film.

It's not the obvious blue screen that gets to me, it's the fact that they never do anything inside "Arcade."

Three - Typical games have a distinct look and feel to it - a certain game play style. Ridge Racer, you get in a car and do nothing but race. Mortal Kombat 2, you fight one other person and that's all you ever do. Dynasty Warriors 4, you constantly fight 500 guys, Tomb Raider constantly means exploration. And usually these games are the best at what they do. Occassionally you'll have a game that switches between game styles but it only has a handful of styles and ends up switching back and forth frequently. Why do film makers always make the games in their movies "action/adventure" games?

Four - once upon a time programmers would put cheat codes into their games to ease the testing phases and speed things up and programmers got lazy and left these codes (sometimes even debug modes) in the final product. Then as gamers found codes, it became common practice putting codes into the game. The movie Arcade fell into this era of gaming history. Now adays, they've implemented a "Beat the game x amount of times x amount of ways to unlock the things codes used to do" and dropped the codes.

Five - Granted Mortal Kombat only had 4 people on the team, the movie implies that the developer of "Arcade" is a big name company and this is their next big seller . . . the setup of the developers did not convince me of a blockbuster game development team.

Six - An all knowing game . . . BS! Sorry, watch eXistenZ to see what the game characters would really sound like. Even advanced AI wouldn't be able to know what this game knows and if it did we'd have freakin' Skynet from the Terminator films. Game AI is pretty stupid. It does what it's programmed to do and nothing else, and if a programmer didn't anticipate it then you just found yourself a loophole and a freeride.

Seven - Maybe it's just where I live, but Arcades don't look like the entrance to a bar . . . and before you point any fingers, yes I get the Alighieri reference and found it inappropriate. They're usually turned off at night and turned back on the next morning (each going through their own little boot-up sequence) via power strip to start a whole group at a time, and I've never found a home game that comes in an oversized shoebox.

Oh well, on the plus side it is interesting hearing Alan Howarth and seeing Star Trek's Q (John De Lancie) alongside Dr. Evil's son (Seth Green) in the same movie. I'd recommend eXistenZ for freaky virtual reality games . . . as screwed up as that world is, at least the nailed the in-game elements. Go figure.

Original (excludng Disney's actually inferior hit 'Tron') Full Moon picture whereby a group of slightly irritating youngsters get wrapped in a game called 'Arcade' down at the local bargain basement, ummm, arcade. The cast is a staggering one considering the low budget (though at the time they were largely unknown). Lead Megan Ward (also in Full Moon's 'Crash and Burn'; 'Trancers 2/3') is a fantastic actress and the now successful director/producer/writer/actor Peter Billingsley, A.J. Langer and Seth Green are among the other teens. To give the film some Sci-Fi credibility we have Star Trek's John de Lancie. The effects, though good considering budget and scope are too adventurous for their own success and frequently characters sucked in to the game look like they are not in the game at all merely wearing tight all-in-one swimsuits and pretending to touch or hold game components (which in reality they are). Megan Ward is an unlikely heroine which adds to the credibility (not all hero/heroine types are built for the role) and the cast have striking chemistry. Put any understanding of big budget CGI and your own knowledge of computer graphics aside to really appreciate this film and you may be pleasantly surprised. Writer David S. Goyer who wrote a few Full Moon films including 'Demonic Toys' has achieved great mainstream Hollywood success since and this is probably significant on his path there (as it was for stars Ward, Green and Langer). Director Albert Pyun is generally pretty poor and this is - without doubt - his best work. Good, (and except for some pointless bad language) clean, fun.