arcade

what the film does

alex manning (megan ward) is a troubled teenager still dealing with her mother’s suicide. she and her friends visit dante’s inferno, the local video arcade, where vertigotronics executive difford (john de lancie) is hyping a new virtual reality game called arcade. the kids take home free console copies, but when they play, they start disappearing. the game traps their souls inside a digital world, and if they die in the game, they stay dead.

alex and her friend nick (peter billingsley) discover that arcade was created using the brain cells of a young boy who was beaten to death by his mother. the game’s programmer albert (norbert weisser) knew the project was dangerous and tried to stop it. with his help, alex enters the virtual world to free her friends and defeat the malevolent arcade intelligence. she succeeds, but in freeing the trapped souls she also releases the dead boy’s spirit, who taunts her in the final moments.

why it is in the canon

arcade is full moon entertainment doing what full moon did best: a high-concept genre premise on a micro-budget, shot fast, with actors who would go on to bigger things. it is a david s. goyer script from before he wrote blade and batman begins, and you can see the dna: a dark psychology premise wrapped in genre spectacle. the cgi is primitive in a way that is now charming, but the film is genuinely bleak for a movie about a killer video game. the protagonist is a girl whose mother killed herself, the villain is a murdered child, and the ending is not a clean victory. there is something honest about a 650,000-dollar b-movie that takes its own premise seriously enough to be this grim. dvd.