Cold Fusion Video Reviews

• Directed by Albert Pyun
• Written by David S. Goyer
• Starring
  • Megan Ward
  • Peter Billingsley
  • John De Lancie
  • Sharon Farrell
  • Seth Green
• Produced by Cathy Gesualdo
• Executive produced by Charles Band

It’s just too easy to launch into the de rigeur introductory paragraph about how Albert Pyun is the cinematic antichrist, how he creates a negative zone of non-entertainment and tedium out of the normal tools of film, etc. I would like to point out, though, that Arcade is less demonstrably Pyun-y than most of his other movies. I attribute this to other strong creative pulls in the production which held in check the overwhelming influence of the single best (negative) example of the auteur theory. For one thing, Full Moon during the Paramount years was very much Charles Band’s baby; he had something in mind for each of the movies when he greenlit them (and contributed the much-ballyhooed “original ideas” of the opening credits), and I imagine that there’s only so far a director could go in search of his own “artistic vision” or whatnot without getting a slapdown from on high. The other factor would be screenwriter David Goyer. While Pyun often has the ability to infuse scipts he didn’t write with his own personal idiom (to the detriment of all involved), Goyer’s ascent from low-budget beginnings to his current position writing and directing theatrical genre releases demonstrates that he’s got a level of vision of his own — matched, unlike Pyun, by a demonstable degree of talent.

Mind you, none of the above should be interpreted as meaning that Arcade is a good movie, but that it sucks much less, and in differing ways, than the average feature that follows the words “An Albert Pyun Film.”

“Abandon quarters, all ye who enter here.”

Our protagonist is high school student Alex (Megan Ward), who is royally screwed up, as we are shown in great detail: her mother (Sharon Farrell) shot herself, and Alex found the body. Now, a year later, Alex’s father is a drunk basketcase, and Alex is still pretty depressed and emotionally self-abusive. (Gotta love the professionalism of the high school’s psychological counsellor. Exactly what psychological discipline is it that is willing to let a patient declare, “It’s all my fault,” and leave without any attempt at intervention?) Alex’s remaining touchstones are her posse of friends, including boyfriend Greg (Bryan Dattilo), galpal Laurie (A.J. Langer), slacker Stilts (Seth Green, near the beginning of his career of playing teenagers)… and Nick, as played by Peter Billingsley. Name sound familiar? You probably know him best as the kid from A Christmas Story. At age nineteen during principal photography, Billingsley looked only a little like his most famous role, and this was his attempt to break from his “child star” persona and hook into adult lead roles. It didn’t work very well, but hey, Ralphie, thanks for trying.

And I’m going to attempt to keep from attributing all good things in the story to Goyer and all missteps to Pyun, so I’ll just remark without particular attribution that I’m glad that Alex’s friends are emphatically NOT the ethnically and economically diverse assortment that one has come to expect in teen ensemble movies (you know — one jock, one rich bitch, one African-American, etc.). Instead, this is a group of middle-class white kids who would believably hang out with each other without the influence of Central Casting.

Of course, every compliment needs to be balanced with criticism, so here are two: The kids pass around a flier from the local video arcade for a new game being demonstrated there tonight — called “Arcade.” Okay, not only is that insipidly generic, it’s also pretty misleading. Unless you’re trying to tell me that it’s some sort of meta-game, encompassing all of the game features you’d find in an arcade, and thus it’s something of a self-contained arcade. But it’s not; that’s just the name of it. That’s kinda like going to a restaurant, and ordering a dish off the menu called “restaurant.”

Be careful! You’ll put your eye out!

Oh, and to make things sillier, Nick tells the others all of the great buzz he’s been hearing about Arcade — specifically, that “it’s interactive.” Really? You mean it? A videogame that’s interactive? You don’t say! Here I was expecting a videogame that required the player to be completely passive, like a television program. Boy, ain’t modern technology something!

So they head down to the arcade (that is, the business establishment featuring videogames, not the specific videogame) to check out Arcade (that is, the specific videogame, not the business establishment featuring videogames). It’s subtly called “Dante’s Inferno,” but least the fact that it’s in a basement shows that somebody knows what “inferno” means. And there they meet… John de Lancie!

As Vertigo/Tronix sales guy Difford, de Lancie probably spent all of two days on set; as such, well, de Lancie is pretty much playing de Lancie as Star Trek fans know and love him — supercilious, snide, and dismissive. (Boy — Peter Billingsley and John de Lancie? Feel the star power, baby!) Those are actually qualities shared by Arcade (that is, the specific videogame, not… aw, skip it), minus the nasal voice. See, Arcade is a game with brains and ‘tude; it learns the name of the player to taunt him specifically, and responds aggressively to comments within earshot. The game machinery consists of virtual reality gloves (you know that’s what they are because they’re black with white wires stitched up the fingers), a joystick (which somehow seems counterintuitive when you’re already wearing the gloves), and a viewscope (which seems like a tremendous design flaw compared with goggles, since the scope shows no signs of adjusting to the player’s height). Yup, looks like just as much thought went into the mechanical design as into the name.

“If someone doesn’t adjust the vertical hold, HEADS WILL ROLL!”

Nick, because of his smart mouth, becomes the first playtester, and he’s like, blown away by the realism of the game. To us, it looks more like he’s in a black bodysuit with bluescreened computer graphics processed in. Not terribly bad graphics, really, for the time period and the budget, though any half-decent PS2 game could blow them away now. But the game design really gives new meaning to the term “lackluster.” For the first level, Nick skateboards at a leisurely pace down a stone hallway, ducking poles that stick out from the walls, until a huge metallic skull — the “Screamer” — jumps out and kills him. Well, not actually — he hits the “escape” button on the back of one of his gloves, and forfeits the game before the Screamer does him in.

Since the kids are all impressed by this, they immediately leave the room where Arcade is because Difford offers them some play-at-home versions for playtesting. All except Greg, who stays to try it himself. And when Greg doesn’t hit the escape button before the Screamer gets him… Alex returns to the Arcade room to find nothing but a puff of brimstone left behind.

Of course, no one else in the posse is the least bit worried that Greg left his girlfriend behind in the arcade without saying a word, and leaving his keys with her, too. So they all head home with their home versions of Arcade; Alex plugs hers in in her bedroom, and immediately Arcade starts demonstrating that attitude of most supernally evil entities that just screams, “Actively oppose me!” He taunts her, calls her “bitch,” and tells her that Greg is stuck inside the game. These entities, they’re not so much into making clean getaways.

“So, what do you do for a SECOND date?”

She calls on Nick, who pooh-poohs her claims that Arcade is alive and evil, even though he himself was mesmerized by the game’s fractal patterns, and even though the game starts itself up again after he clicks the off switch. (”It’s probably just a fault relay,” he says. A relay? Jeez, why not blame it on the dilithium manifolds while you’re at it?) It’s only when half their circle of friends — in fact, just about everyone who took home a home version — doesn’t show up at school the next day, with their phones out of order, that Nick starts to take Alex’s claims as anything more than the paranoid ravings of a messed-up chick. And when they actually see Laurie get sucked into the game via her TV set, well, you know that it’s going to be up to Alex and Nick to go inside the game and get them out.

I said that this movie shies away from most of Albert Pyun’s hallmarks, but a few still manage to peek through. When Alex and Nick arrange to meet one of the game’s designers to get some tips, he manages to mention in passing that part of the game design revolves around actual graymatter from a braindead donor, included to allow the game to emulate human thought. Hey, Pyun found a way to include a cyborg reference! Not that that makes any sense; is there brain tissue in every edition, home and arcade, of Arcade? For that matter, what exactly is the evil intelligence of Arcade supposed to be — the ghost of the donor? A malevolent AI gone awry? Whatever it is, it apparently can dilate time, read memories, disrupt phone lines, and blow ominous winds out of TV screens. Are all of the home games somehow a hive mind possessed by a single entity? Aw, shaddup and lookit the pretty pitchers, wouldja?

In a rare display of attention to quality, Charles Band delayed the release of this movie for three years while he replaced the original computer graphics with something more upscale. (You can still see some of the original graphics in isolated background shots, and it’s quite an improvement, since they originals look like they were from a program written in BASIC on a Commodore 64.) On the other hand, if quality were really the end goal… well, would Band have hired Pyun to direct in the first place? I’m sure Albert Pyun is a warm, engaging, likeable human being, but the fact remains that every single movie he’s ever made sucks green weenies; in fact, the most defensible movie he ever directed was his first, The Sword and the Sorcerer — and that’s the one about which Pyun bitches because he didn’t have final artistic control.

ZOMBIE FLYING MONKEY!!!

More than being an Albert Pyun film, though, it’s most recognizably a Full Moon film in its squandering of dramatic opportunity. Despite Alex’s declaration that her mother’s suicide was “all my fault,” there’s no further explanation or exploration of her culpability, real or imagined, in that calamity. Similarly, Alex is said from the beginning to be the kind of person who always loses at videogames — and, by extension, at just about all endeavors — but aside from being a pretty obvious setup for the climactic showdown between Alex alone and Arcade, there’s no attempt to portray any particular character growth to overcome that weakness. When Arcade is taunting Nick, he snidely remarks that with Greg caught in the game, Nick can have Alex all to himself — but any groundwork for an unrequited attraction for Alex is so subtle that it’s almost nonexistent (a good thing,because the resolution of the main plot does nothing to resolve any Alex/Nick interpersonal subplot). (And that’s not even mentioning the lousy game design — who wants a videogame that gets lamer as you reach new levels?)

All told, it’s a forgettable film that tries obliquely and unsuccessfully to rip off TRON — and when you realize the lackluster reception that TRON got from audiences everywhere, you understand just how doomed the whole project was from the start.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 1
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 2
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • John De Lancie (Difford) of course played the recurring role of the trickster god Q on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager o Don Stark (Mr. Finster, owner of Dante’s Inferno) played Nicky “The Nose” in First Contact and “Ashrock” in the DS9 episode “Melora”

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