MY CALL: This movie opens and closes with gore, CGI effects and horror, and middles in the realm of crime thriller with a lot of illegal legal advice from a videogame demon. Yeah, I’d watch that movie! But I might just regret it. MORE MOVIES LIKE Arcade: So other early techno-horror include Demon Seed (1977), 976-Evil (1988), The Lawnmower Man (1992), Brainscan (1994), Virtuostiy (1995), Strangeland (1998), White Noise (2005) and Pulse (2001, 2006).
High schooler Alex (Megan Ward; Crash and Burn, Trancers 2-3, Amityville 1992) joins her friends to Dante’s Inferno arcade for the release of an all-new game with next level virtual reality. After her boyfriend Greg (Bryan Dattilo) plays and loses the game, he disappears. When Alex plays the at-home promotional version of the game, the game knows her name and taunts her that it has Greg inside.
Alex insists that the game is somehow “alive.” Not surprisingly, Nick (Peter Billingsley) and Stilts (Seth Green; Ticks, Idle Hands, It) are skeptical until they find their friend Laurie (A. J. Langer; The People Under the Stairs) clearly driven mad by the game. Meanwhile, the game directly challenges and threatens Alex to play by its rules, or it would come for her in her world.
The writing and acting are bottom shelf. And whereas the videogame effects may have been acceptable in the early 90s, they verge on insufferably bad now—and not bad in a way I could enjoy. The dialogue has the feel of a young adult novel, giving the teenagers unrealistic confidence and agency in the world to investigate this game and the disappearance of their friends… but it never feels earned as it did in Invaders from Mars (1986) or The Stuff (1985). When I was 12 (in 1993) this may have been great for me. But now (at 43 years old) I fail even to find a nostalgic pleasure from it… and for me, that’s unusual! The problem isn’t the YA tone, but the lousy writing behind it. It’s insufferable. And the game’s dialogue is equally awful.
When inside the game, Alex and Nick explore what looks like Pitfall and Doom meets Tron. And guess what? If you are hurt in the game, what you suffer is real. I know, right? Barf. Oh, and be sure to watch out for the computer game demon. Double barf! Well, at least all the effects suck and the finale sucks, too. They also totally rip off the riddle of lies from Labyrinth (1986). It hurt listening to that scene play out.
Director Albert Pyun (Cyborg, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Kickboxer 2, Dollman, Nemesis 1-4) tried… but not very hard. This movie is terrible. Really terrible. I kind of hate this movie. But I also kind of enjoyed hating it. So, I guess there’s that.