npfares What made 'Arcade' cool was that despite it's many faults was a decent Cult Movie. The writing was terrible, the acting was average at best, the directing was bad, The budget was well below what it needed to be to make a great film. But for what it was, a low-budget Cult Movie, it hit the mark like nothing else. I suggest at least one viewing for everyone.

Scarecrow-88 The lovely Megan Ward's lone star vehicle for Full Moon (she had acted in nice supporting parts in Crash & Burn and Trancers II) has her as a burdened teenager struggling with the loss of a mother to suicide, soon having to deal with a malicious virtual reality arcade named ARCADE, equipped with artificial intelligence. ARCADE can take the souls and bodies of those who lose against it! Preposterous premise is typically B-movie as only a Charles Band production could be. The special effects are very much of the rough variety as opposed to what we see today (Big Hero Six, this is not), of the time right around when The Lawnmower Man would introduce some promising signs of a fabulous future in science fiction. The cast of recognizable faces will be perhaps this film's interest as a curio: Peter Billingsley (A Christmas Story; The Dirt Bike Kid; Death Valley), Seth Green, Bryan Datillo (known as the flawed long-time character, Lucas, on Days of Our Lives), AJ Langer (My So-Called Life; Escape from LA) as friends of Ward, including the creator of ARCADE played by Star Trek The Next Generation's Q, John de Lancie and Don Stark (of That 70s Show) as a brutish bully arcade player who picks on Green. Even Sharon Farrell (It's Alive and lots of television) has a bit part as Ward's mother, efficiently used as a traumatic device by ARCADE to hurt his nemesis during a faux "nightmare awakening" sequence which milks her suicide. Use of neon aesthetic for the arcade itself produces a nice visual but overall director Pyun seems to be going through the motions with little use of his enthusiastic camera stylistics on display. I think Ward is good enough to keep our attention even if the film doesn't seem as interested. The budget just seemed too small to really set this film off. Arcade seems to be a middling effort from Full Moon but it falls in line with the output regarding the use of sci-fi for off-the-wall plots. The ending is a bit of a clunker pulled right out of the ass of the filmmakers but goes with the "virtual reality could be dangerous if toyed around with" theme that echoes throughout. Jonathan Fuller's voice for ARCADE has a full snidely confident relish, deep and antagonistic (listen to how it often refers to Ward as "BITCH!") which fits in line with the purpose of the machine's evil manifesting itself against players wanting to defeat it. ARCADE's taunting Ward as a failure is a strong dramatic device for us to root in favor of her.

Cardcaptor_Jim The newest video game sensation is "Arcade", a virtual reality game that one must win....or lose your mind and forever be part of the game. Alex (Megan Ward) and her friends try the game, but Alex's boyfriend loses and disappears. One of Alex's friends tries a home version of the game and disappears before her eyes. Determined to get their friends back, Alex and her friend Nick (Peter Billingsley) take on the mind-reading Arcade! While the plot may be familiar to anyone who's seen TRON, this is a decent low-budget sci-fi film. Many of the actors are now familiar faces: Seth Green, A.J. Langer and John DeLancie among them. Although director Albert Pyun usually directs low-budget boredom (DOLLMAN, CYBORG, etc.), this movie actually has a good story and some pretty good actors. The pace is somewhat slow, and the CGI F/X won't impress today's kids accustomed to video game-like movies with endless amounts of special effects, explosions and loud music, but fans of movies that actually have a plot and characterization will find it entertaining. I'd place this with Pyun's better movies such as RADIOACTIVE DREAMS and THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER.Charles Band, the film's producer and CEO of Full Moon Pictures, held this movie's release back for a year in order to redo the CGI F/X. For those curious to what they originally looked like, watch the 10 minute "Videozone" featurette included on the DVD. I think it was a wise move, and the movie benefits greatly because of it. The only complaint I really have is that the DVD didn't include the full "Videozone" segment, which included this film's trailer. (This DVD was part of a import boxed set of region-free DVDs.)

jaywolfenstien 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 stupidTwo - 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.