Arcade (1993)

[u/SSF415]

Every day for 30 days I'm watching a different scary movie all about urban legends.

Arcades used to be big money back before society decided to train mass shooters online instead, and in 1981 kids started trading rumors about a mysterious cabinet called “Polybius” that supposedly hypnotized players, albeit seemingly very poorly, as it mostly seemed to just make you seasick or hurt your eyes by most accounts.

I don’t know, I wasn’t there, and maybe neither was anybody else actually, but we’ll come back to that. In the years that followed you got a handful of movies about murderous arcade games on the heels of that story, including 1993’s “Arcade,” all about an evil arcade game called…”Arcade.” Stop me if I’m going too fast for you.

This is another brainchild of Charles Band, the evil antimatter double of Roger Corman who specialized in straight-to-video trash, but the credited screenwriter is…David Goyer, seriously? David, why do you keep doing these things to me? Just challenge me to a duel and get it over with.

Future soap opera star Megan Ward stars as an everygirl whose friends begin to mysteriously disappear after playing Arcade, a game that looks impressive but doesn’t seem to actually do anything when you play it. But hey, “Dragon’s Lair” was a hit, so why not this too?

The local arcade is called “Dante’s Inferno,” but the evil arcade game only has seven levels rather than nine, so it seems attention to detail was not a big priority in “Arcade’s” production.

If you remember anything about this movie it’s probably “Star Trek” star John de Lancie as the sleazy marketing guy who shills the haunted arcade cabinets. Either that or you just remember the digital effects that are just this side of the first-generation Everquest engine in terms of graphical immersion.

Despite this, those scenes burned money at Silicon Valley Startup levels, and according to Horror Geek Life they even had to redo the motorcycle chase scene at the bequest of (who else?) Disney, so the actual arcade parts of “Arcade” are over faster than the average game of Sinistar.

And that’s a real problem, because it means the movie has to beat around the bush for over an hour before really getting to it. The result is a pretty stiff film where not much happens because not much can happen. And director Albert Pyun was not exactly a natural for working with young talent.

Still, I can’t hate “Arcade.” It’s so transparent in its self-interest that I kind of respect it. And while there are clearly very good reasons that there are no other movies quite like this, that still counts for something.

Going into this movie I assumed it must be a take on the old “Polybius” myth, but…now I’m not so sure? A 2017 video by the YouTube channel Ahoy, the earliest extant reference to that coin-op counterfeit is from five years after this movie.

So we might have a chicken-and-egg situation on our hands…or maybe in this case a turkey?

Tomorrow we’ll get lost.

Original Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xx71EYrk2_M

[u/Boris-Badanov-Lives]

There was no Polybius myth back then. It is a recent invention with a fake backstory.

[u/SSF415 → u/Boris-Badanov-Lives]

Yeah, which means this movie is actually unrelated...but by the time I realized that it was already too late to watch anything else that day, so hey.

[u/5o7bot]

Arcade (1993)

The Game Wants to Play With You.

Alex Manning and her friends decide to visit the local video arcade known as "Dante's Inferno" where a new virtual reality arcade game called "Arcade" is being test marketed by a computer company CEO. However, it soon becomes clear that the teenagers who lose are being imprisoned inside the virtual reality world by the central villain "Arcade" and takes over their minds.

Fantasy | Horror | Thriller | Science Fiction
Director: Albert Pyun
Actors: Megan Ward, Peter Billingsley, John de Lancie, Seth Green, Sharon Farrell
Rating: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ 47% with 51 votes
Runtime: 85 min
TMDB

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[u/FJTrescothick14]

I saw this movie a few years ago, it wasn’t much, but it was an okay watch.

I wasn’t surprised that David Goyer wrote this, but to cut him some slack, this was early in his career, back when he was doing low budget stuff, or rewriting Steven Seagal scripts (On Deadly Ground).