Rando! Arcade (1993)
Even by the exceedingly lenient standards of this website Albert Pyun’s 1993 video game horror movie Arcade is weird and random. It’s one of those obscurities that promises to be utterly fascinating then utterly fails to deliver.
On paper Arcade is full of interesting, eccentric and noteworthy elements. It was directed by prolific schlockmeister Albert Pyun, who made his name with the independent hits The Sword and the Sorcerer and Radioactive Dreams.
Pyun hooked up with Cannon and directed the early Jean Claude Van Damme vehicle Cyborg, which began life as a sequel to Masters of the Universe that Albert Pyun was going to direct back-to-back with Spider-Man.
Needless to say Pyun did not end up directing Spider-Man or a Masters of the Universe sequel but during that very strange period when superhero movies, particularly Marvel movies, were seen as a low-budget garbage for small children he did get to direct a 1990 feature film adaptation of Captain America starring J.D Salinger’s son that can best be described as politely forgotten.
Marvel movies are now of course the engine that powers the global economy and mankind’s reason for being but there was a time when superhero movies were B-list at best, and not commercial behemoths.
Pyun did not get a chance to bring Steve Ditko and Stan Lee’s web-slinger to the big screen but he did direct a number of films of note, including the Full Moon franchise-starter Dollman, the memorably named Andrew “Dice” Clay vehicle Brain Smashers: A Love Story and any number of exploitation movies starring various rappers shot quickly and cheaply in Eastern Europe.
If Pyun never quite made the big time his Arcade screenwriter David S. Goyer ended up playing a huge role in the superhero movie boom with his work on the screenplays for 1998’s Blade, 2002’s Blade 2, 2005’s Batman Beings (which he co-wrote with Christopher Nolan), 2008’s The Dark Knight (whose story he co-wrote with Nolan), 2013’s Man of Steel and 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
But before Goyer was an A-list screenwriter of D.C and Marvel blockbusters Goyer paid his dues at Full Moon writing Dollman, Arcade and Demonic Toys.
For a zero-budget direct to video horror movie Brainscan has a shockingly loaded cast as well as a surprisingly auspicious writer-director team. Star Peter Billingsley is of course best known as the lovable lead of A Christmas Story while female lead Megan Ward was a staple of Clinton-era cult movies like Encino Man, Freaked and PCU and A.J Langer had already achieved horror immortality when she was cast in Arcade thanks to her role as Alice, the dewy innocent at the heart of Wes Craven’s cult allegory The People Under the Stairs.
Seth Green was similarly only a teenager when he snagged the thankless role of “Stilts” but he’d already appeared in The Hotel New Hampshire, Radio Days, Can’t Buy Me Love, Pump Up the Volume and Buffy the Vampire Slayer .
Even at that early stage of his career, Green was too successful to be wasted in a supporting role in a go-nowhere video game thriller in a role so bland that his character’s defining characteristics are that he’s short, wears sunglasses and likes playing video games.
That, unfortunately, is also the essence of Billingsley’s character although, to be fair, he’s taller than Green, wears different kinds of sunglasses and is better at video games than his more diminutive chum.
Arcade has a ridiculously semi-star-studded ensemble but the only actor who has anything remotely interesting to do is John De Lancie, Q of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who is an absolute blast as Difford, a video game pimp and Fagin figure shamelessly selling the unimaginatively titled new horror game Arcade to the kids down at Dante’s Inferno, the local arcade.
Difford is a very bad man, a Falstaffian figure who delights in the power he and his sinister wares have over gullible, suggestible children. Arcade comes alive whenever De Lancie is onscreen, which is unfortunately only for about five minutes. He steals the film, then disappears, never to return.
When the gamers entered Dante’s Inferno the first time I prepared myself for a glorious nostalgic trip through some of the most beloved arcade games of my youth, zeitgeist-capturing masterpieces like Double Dragon, Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter 2.
I should have known better. Arcade was shot as cheaply and simply as possible so they did not bother to get the rights to show even a single goddamn game, no matter how obscure. True, you get a glimpse of a Simpsons arcade game at one point but it’s literally a blink and you miss it cameo predicated on Full Moon guessing that Fox wouldn’t sue over its intellectual property making a split-second appearance in a low-budget horror movie.
The final element that makes Arcade fascinating on paper if not in actuality is that the eternally litigious folks at Disney were so enraged by how shamelessly the computer generated imagery in the original version of Arcade stole from Tron that they threatened to sue unless the filmmakers threw out all of the existing CGI and started over from scratch.
So instead of ineptly ripping off Tron on a Full Moon budget the filmmakers instead paved the way for Disclosure with their portrayal of a dazzlingly sophisticated, futuristic virtual reality world whose most impressive feature seems to be realistically recreating the sensation of what it feels like to walk down a hallway.
In Disclosure that manifested itself in Michael Douglas’ character being able to cyber-walk down a digital hallway in order to thrillingly retrieve some computer files. Here that means that the kids playing Arcade can walk or skateboard down “corridors” (a fancy word for hallway) while dodging spikes and wearing dumb helmets.
I would compare the CGI here to early screen savers but that would be an unforgivable insult to screensavers. One of the reasons I wanted to watch and write about Arcade is because I find early computer animation adorably primitive.
Even I have my limits, however, and the computer world of Arcade is less ingratiatingly homemade and embryonic than shitty.
The evil game at the film’s core lures high schoolers in with the promise of the ultimate thrill ride, then traps them forever inside a cyber-reality whose sub-par graphics and unimaginative game-play are horrifying.
For it seems that in its bid to give Arcade a Zack Snyder level of grit, grime and intensity they decided to use the brain cells of a little boy who had been beaten to death by his mother in order to make its titular villain more realistic.
Instead using the psyche of an abused little boy ends up making the game a deadly child-trap.
Alex ends up freeing her friends from the game but she frees the evil little boy as well. Like Brainscan Arcade desperately wants its villain to be Freddy Krueger, right down to “Bitch!” being his wildly unimaginative catchphrase.
With a runtime of about eighty-one minutes, Arcade is a good ten minutes shorter than Brainscan but it feels at least a half hour longer.
Going into Arcade I thought it had so many compelling elements that there was absolutely no way it couldn’t be, at the very least, mildly interesting. I was wrong. Arcade is an endurance test that proves that movies inspired by video games can be just as dire and unwatchable as movies adapting proper video games, particularly if all the folks behind them know about video games is that they’re violent and silly and the kids seem to like them.
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