Arcade (1993)

 

Alex Manning is a troubled suburban teenager. Her mother committed suicide and the school counsellor feels that Alex has not dealt with her feelings properly. 

Alex, of course, thinks the counsellor should just leave her alone. She blows off any offer of health and instead heads to the local video arcade with her friends, where it turns out there is a new virtual reality arcade game called Arcade being test marketed.

The game's publisher gives Alex and her friends free samples of the home console version for marketing purposes.  I'm not sure that giving free games to random teens is actually an effective technique, but the movie needs the kids to play the game when they're alone, so that's what it is going with.

In any case, given that Arcade is the title of the film as well as the in-movie game, it's probably no surprise to you to hear that this new video game turns out to have a sinister side.  Soon Alex's friends are disappearing, absorbed into the game itself.  The only way to get them back is to go in after them ...

Let's start with the most important point: Arcade is not a very good film.  For those with knowledge of B-movies, this won't be a surprise: it is directed by Albert Pyun, whose name is synonymous with low budget fantasy and science fiction films.

Ironically, given how excited all the characters are about it, Arcade the game also doesn't look very much fun to play.  For instance, the first level is just a dull 'skate along tunnels' thing where the only decisions that players get to make are whether to take the left or right tunnel each time there is an intersection, while a later level is just a variation on the old "one always lies / one always tells the truth" riddle.

Visually however, the game is ridiculously advanced for the date in which it is supposed to happen.  The in-universe justification for this is pure woo-woo nonsense, but eh, it'll do - movie world is not the real world and as long as the film's clear and consistent on what does and does not work in its setting, I'm willing to do with it.  A bigger issue is that "bringing the level schematics into the game" is a key plot-point to help Alex rescue her friends, and the film depicts this being done by her writing the level names on her arm. Presumably, in this film's universe, if I wrote "Australia" on my arm, I would never need Google Maps again!

The game's "way too good for home consoles of the time" CGI was actually something of an issue for then film.  When initial trailers for the movie came out, Disney sued over a sequence where the designs were too like the light cycles from Tron.  The producers responded by replacing not just the problematic sequence, but all of the CGI for the movie, leading to the graphics in the final film looking nothing like those of the early marketing spots.  I'm not sure why they made such massive alterations - they changed Arcade's basic appearance, the look of each level, and multiple monster designs - but I do have to admit that the revised stuff does look consistently better than the original, based on the samples of the latter that can be found online.

The new CGI still isn't great, mind you, and it's 30 years old now as well, but it's definitely better than you might expect for a film of this age and budget.

Also better than you might expect for a film of this budget is the cast.  Both Seth Green and John de Lancie turn up in minor roles, as does the current Countess of Devon, believe it or not, though she was still just "A J Langer" back then.

Other than that, there's not much to recommend about the film.  I doubt there's much of the plot that would surprise you, and the movie has a completely underwhelming 'twist' ending that the script is even foolish enough to have the characters flag 60 seconds before doing it.  This is not being genre-savvy, it is being dumb.

The one thing I did find mildly amusing is a scene where the kids extort the computer company guy to talk to them by leveraging the 80s satanic panic.  Even if that was a bit past its use-by date by 1993, the whole 'video games cause violence' rhetoric was definitely still in full effect - and would be soon again thanks to Doom, which came out in December of that year.

This one is only for fans of late 80s and early 90s wannabe 'cyberpunk' schlock.