Derek ·
August 18, 2010 at 9:55 pm
· Filed under Film
Editor’s note: Here, friends, comes a maybe-NSFW review of Dungeonmaster, the 1985 sci-fi/horror flick based loosely on computer game geekery turning dungeon-y (mentioned, however briefly by me, here, in a feature about movies about video games that turn deadly). You see, during a recent conversation, I learned that my boyfriend Derek reviewed Dungeonmaster for a website ten years ago (I’ve only just seen it!). Maybe the movie ultimately has little to do with video games, but now having read Derek’s column, I certainly feel culturally literate. I tried to clean up Derek’s language a little, also, but that was a losing battle. His review, updated for our modern times, below:
The Dungeonmaster
3-Second Synopsis: Paul fights Bull from TV’s “Night Court” in a winner-takes-all fight-to-the-death in various locations around the world, in the underworld, and in a few alternate dimensions.
General Info: Rated PG for being the worst/greatest film of all time.
* Written and Directed by Dave Allen, Charles Band, John Carl Buechler, Steven Ford, Peter Manaoogian, Ted Nicolaou (Satan), and Rosemarie Turko. And also, Satan.
Starring Richard Moll (AKA Bull from “Night Court”)
Run Time: 73 minutes
1985.
The Treachery: Do I need to preface all this by telling you I haven’t done one of these in awhile? I mean, it’s been almost ten years since I wrote a review for the foul.com website—which, by the way, doesn’t exist anymore, but that’s all right, now that they are You Me Them Everybody—and anyway, I plan to make up for lost time. Starting now!
Basically, the plot of Dungeonmaster is straightforward: a computer geek named Paul, with a superior, AI “wristband” that can control any electronic device, and also apparently the space-time continuum, has this girlfriend named Gwen. She is kidnapped by the evil wizard/Satan character, Mestema, played by Richard Moll, who is none other than Bull from “Night Court.” Since I’m not too familiar with Bull’s career post-1985, I’ll just assume he was in this shitfest of a movie for coke and whore money. If you haven’t clicked “back” in your web browser already, man, you’re in for the ride of your life.
Jenn Frank ·
August 17, 2010 at 1:06 pm
· Filed under Film
Get Lamp is a documentary about text adventure games. It has been in the works for a long time. You can order it on DVD. It comes with a coin. Filmmaker Jason Scott promises that the documentary is “spoiler-free.” The region-free, two-disc set includes featurettes on other subjects, too, including a history of Infocom. It is very dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
For fans of retro games, the Classic Gaming Expo holds a certain allure. Ever since its founding in 1997 as the World of Atari expo, CGE has attracted guests from varying eras of the video game industry, including Steve Wozniak, Al Alcorn, Ralph Baer, and Rob Fulop. Collectors, exhibitors (who have ranged from Konami to Retro Zone), and video game enthusiasts the world over annually congregate for the event. Unfortunately, the 2008 show was canceled due to the inability of its organizers—Joe Santulli, Sean Kelly, and John Hardie—to find a venue, and it looks as if the 2009 show, too, has been canceled for as-yet-undisclosed reasons.
Therefore anyone curious about the expo might also be interested in the CGE 2007 DVD box set, which is finally available for preorder after spending roughly a year in editing. As someone who was there in 2007 (and in 2004), I can honestly say it was one of the most entertaining conventions I’ve ever been to. Standing around chatting with Keith Robinson from Intellivision about a Burgertime movie a few of my friends made, to playing actual Pong and Computer Space arcade machines, to visiting the museum: it was just an excellent time. This DVD box set may well be the closest anyone gets to recreating that feeling, at least for a while!
Jenn Frank ·
December 4, 2008 at 5:37 am
· Filed under Art, Film
Recently, the Telegraph published an interesting article about Immersion, photojournalist Robbie Cooper’s artful anthropological project in which his preadolescent subjects are filmed as they play violent videogames.
The children are filmed from the neck up, straight-on and unwaveringly. The effect is startling: the children seem to stare right through you (there is a camera inside the television screen, the Telegraph explains), and you, in turn, are able to search the children’s faces in a distinctly creepy, voyeuristic way.
Some children are hauntingly dead-eyed, while others are more animated and emotive. And then there are the gigglers, those splendid sickos who can’t let themselves witness a head being blown off without tee-heeing to themselves.
It’s no understatement to say that what Cooper has committed to film is altogether disturbing. Cooper himself notes his fascination with people’s “absorption” of the “unreal,” and even at this early stage, his own footage is appropriately engaging and uncanny.
But I was quickly reminded of something I read in Everything Bad Is Good For You, about the horror of seeing your child sitting, slack-jawed and apparently unresponsive, in the television screen’s horrible glow. But what parents or critics are quick to misconstrue as the face of vegetative hypnosis, Steven Johnson countered, is actually the face of fierce concentration, of deliberate and active thought.
I worried, then, that the ultimate goal of Immersion could be one of fearmongering. So it seems valuable to note, for context’s sake, that Cooper identifies himself as a gamer. Maybe more surprisingly, though, the Telegraph article—which I myself read only after watching the video, twice—gets it right.
The Immersion Project is far from over. For the next 18 months, reports the Telegraph, kids’ facial responses to news footage, web videos, and movies will also be filmed and compared. It’s an interesting idea: how will children react, videotaped in the passive act of viewership, to simulated violence, or to news reports of real violence? In a culture of media supersaturation, in which we cope by emotionally disconnecting ‘reality’ from ‘the screen,’ what will our own faces tell?
Jenn Frank ·
November 26, 2008 at 10:00 pm
· Filed under Film
Granted, “Facebook” isn’t the timeliest way to get up-to-the-minute news, but Ray Barnholt left a “link” on my “wall” about the upcoming animated Professor Layton movie, to be released in 2010. The president of Level5, Akihiro Hino, is currently writing the screenplay.
But that’s not all! According to the news article, a live-action film version is also in the works. Whaa??! No other details were provided, but the mere mention has worked me into a giddy panic.
Jenn Frank ·
October 31, 2008 at 7:44 am
· Filed under Ephemera, Film
Your mother was right: those games will rot your brain.
Here are ten (?!) horror movies for gamers. Thanks to the combined efforts of reader comments and my own loathsome late-night cable TV habit, catalogued below are, count ‘em, ten—not seven—horrific parables about videogames and those who have the misfortune to play them.
Note: To everyone who linked to TV episodes, those were also great.
These movies are, almost uniformly and without rival, the absolute shittiest the horror genre has to offer. Enjoy.
How to Make a Monster, 2001
A made-for-TV movie based, however loosely, on the 1958 horror flick of the same name. In it, a team of game developers are pulling all-nighters, attempting to finish their next survival horror title. But when lightning strikes an AI chip…
Yeah, I can’t really recommend this movie. At all.
Verdict: No.
“Bishop of Battle,” Nightmares, 1983
Emilio Estevez stars as a teenaged arcade rat whose game obsession results in inevitable, supernatural comeuppance. This is pretty much the greatest, most archetypical videogame horror story ever written, set in that remote era back when Berzerk could kill a man.
Verdict: Perfection, crammed into 26 perfect minutes.
Stay Alive, 2006
For a movie that nobody watched, Stay Alive is weirdly watchable. And although the movie title is supposed to sound ominous, I’ve always been reminded instead of a popular disco tune.
Anyway, the plot. A bunch of twentysomethings get a preview copy of a PS2 game. Then they start dying. Honestly? I remember being surprised by how much I liked the cinematographer’s use of color.
Verdict: It isn’t Shakespeare, but it might be free on cable.
St. John’s Wort (Otogiriso), 2001
A videogame artist (J-horror staple Megumi Okina) and her producer decide, inexplicably, to explore a creepy old mansion. The plot unfolds like a survival horror adventure game—think Silent Hill or Fatal Frame—but without the scares.
In short, it’s the Japanese version of Stay Alive.
Verdict: A stylized clunker with a weird, tacked-on twist ending, but one that I own on DVD anyway.
Just when you thought it was safe for CD-ROM gaming to finally take off, Eddie Furlong and his post-grunge bowl-cut go on a murder spree from inside the game. And this was well before anyone ever thought to call videogames “murder simulators”!
My favorite part of the trailer is when the puddle of computer-generated blood pools into the shape of a compact disc.
“And then there’s the movie Ghost in the Machine, once again from the the early 90’s, and starring Karen Allen. Brainscan and Ghost in the Machine are at least watchable.” —SpatulaOfDoom
I just realized this entry isn’t technically about gaming, but because of its thematic strength I’ll give it a pass.
Verdict: Thanks to its comparatively high recommendations, this might be one to add to the ol’ Netflix queue.
“There was a movie in the early 90’s called Arcade. It starred A Christmas Story’s Peter Billingsley.
“Arcade looks about as childish as Spy Kids [3-D], but it did have enough violence and language to earn an R rating. It’s an awful fucking movie nonetheless. David S. Goyer (Dark City, Blade, Batman Begins) wrote the abomination.” —SpatulaOfDoom
In spite of Spatula’s derision, this movie trailer is, for me, pretty effective—probably because I am still infatuated with the VR machine they had in the mall movie theater in 1993.
Verdict: Peter Billingsley…!
HALLOWEEN BONUS: Thanks to Zort in the comments, as well as three belated recommendations from Chris Person, I am adding three more movies to the list—bringing the list from its initial seven to a nice, round TEN.
Which brings me to a brief editorial note: in our collective strain to think of ten whole movies, the genre definition of ‘horror,’ at this juncture, becomes rather lenient. Does sci-fi/dark fantasy/suspense/action/thriller count as Halloween horror? Sure!
Does eXistenZ count as straight-up horror? It sure counts as bizarre.
I actually don’t remember this movie very well, but here’s what I can type from memory: Jude Law is in it. Christopher Eccleston is in it. Cronenberg directed it. And, uh, to play the game inside the collective dream, they put their hands into an alien vagina. That’s how it went, right?
Just seeing the trailer makes me want to go screaming to a psychotherapist.
Notoriously bad fantasy flick with a cult following. In it, a computer gamer with muscular legs wakes up to find himself… See? You don’t even need me to continue.
In keeping with the established format of this blog, I should really post a trailer. But this pebble-in-the-rough is so obscure, it doesn’t seem to have a trailer. So, in lieu of a grainy VHS dub, here is crisp footage of a young man earnestly synopsizing The Dungeonmaster instead:
Verdict: Why do people love this movie so much? So you don’t have to.
Game Box 1.0 is styled after some of the earlier entries on this list, and it is a glorious mess. In it, a heroic game tester (the guy from “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch”) fights to avenge his dead girlfriend (the girl from “Boy Meets World”). Um. Here’s a trailer.
Verdict: Brain Scan 2.0.
There you have it: seven cautionary tales for gamers and three honorable mentions, each a story about the game becoming real; every one, a misguided masterpiece.
If you think of any more (and I’ll be pretty annoyed if you do), leave ‘em in the comments.
Jenn Frank ·
November 28, 2006 at 7:30 pm
· Filed under Film, Music
Man, we wish we were in NYC sometimes. For fans of Chip Music and glitch electronica, the 2006 Blip Festival is a must-do. It runs for four days, beginning November 30. And Mark DeNardo—whom we remember fondly from our Chicago days as a tremendous electrofolk talent, a zealous chipmusic teacher, and a nice guy—is one of the featured musicians.
In addition to magical lo-fi music, the Blip Festival will also screen the film 8 Bit.
For fans of retro games, the 
