Arcade

There really isn't anything special about this movie. Filmed 2 years before its release year. Charles Band wanted to punch up the CGI to make it look better...He should have tried again. The acting is decent with such actors as Megan Ward, Peter Billingsley and Seth Green to hi0llite some of the main characters.

Arcade, though one of Full Moon better, not great, but better movies, really tries to be something big, but due to a poor script, fails to deliver the goods.

5 out of 10

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.

Rating Breakdown.

Story - 1.25 :: Direction - 0.50 :: Pace - 0.50 :: Performances - 1.25 :: Entertainment 1.00 :::: TOTAL - 4.50/10.00.

Ah, Arcade (1993), a cyber-horror movie that promised to make us "kiss reality goodbye" but instead delivered a virtual reminder of how far CGI has come since the early '90s. Albert Pyun, known for his low-budget miracles, takes a big swing here-unfortunately, it's more of a foul tip than a home run.

The premise is tantalizing: a malevolent VR video game traps teens in a digital hellscape, forcing our lead Alex (Megan Ward) to rescue her friends. It's a concept worthy of Tron's neon dreams or The Lawnmower Man's techno-paranoia. But unlike those films, Arcade buckles under the weight of its own ambition. The budget is painfully evident, especially once the characters enter the VR world, a green-screen nightmare where the CGI resembles a rejected screensaver from Windows 95. What should've been high-octane spectacle becomes a sluggish chore, as scenes that should dazzle instead drag.

And yet, there are glimmers of hope. The cast-led by Ward, with a young Seth Green and John de Lancie along for the ride-does its best to sell the material. They bring a touch of humanity to their clichéd characters, even if the direction falters once they step into the digital void. Pyun struggles to translate VR peril into cinematic thrills, leaving the actors adrift in a sea of garish polygons.

Still, there's an earnest charm to Arcade's flawed ambition. It's a film that aims for the stars but lands in a low-resolution crater. If you have fond memories of the movie, be warned: revisiting it might tarnish your nostalgia. For everyone else, it's a cautionary tale about dreaming big on a small budget.

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.