Angry Video Game Nerd The Movie hits blu-ray shelves tomorrow. Here's Blake's review!!!
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| "Oh. My. God. It smells so bad." |
Eight years ago, a fellow nerd put on his
white button-up shirt and khakis for the first time, complete with pocket
protector, and sat his ass down in front of his VHS camera to speak about one
of the worst Nintendo games of all time: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. If you
haven’t played the game, consider yourself lucky—it’s one of the single most
maddening and incomprehensible events of my generation’s childhood pastime. You
play as Jekyll, walking around while being attacked by the townsfolk for no
discernible reason. Your only weapon is a cane which does absolutely nothing;
braille copies of Playboy have been put to better use. When you take
enough damage, which will be in about 15 seconds flat, you turn into Mr. Hyde.
This is when it actually starts to feel like a game, since you can fire
projectiles, but no sooner are you getting into the groove when suddenly
lightning will strike your Hyde sprite, the screen will turn black, and those
two words appear that inspired most of us to drop our first F-Bomb as children:
Game Over.
If you were looking for the cure for the
will to live, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was pretty much it, and it was an
almost spiritual experience to see this young dude staring out at you from
behind his glasses and across the internet, to bond with us over our childhood
trauma, his mouth agape, his frustration absolutely real, screaming, “This game
is f**kin’ horrible!!” Yes, yes it is, and it would be just one of many
horrible games covered by James Rolfe in his now iconic internet series.
Playing everything from Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest to the litany—or
should I say, “shitany”—of titles released by the abhorrable LJN, all while
sporting his trademark comic frown, he’s the angriest gamer you ever heard.
He’s the Angry Video Game Nerd. And now his feature film debut, Angry Video
Game Nerd: The Movie, is available on Blu-ray exclusively through Amazon.
The plot of the film involves the landfill
in Alamogordo, New Mexico that was the site of a mass grave for over 2 million
copies of “the worst game of all time”: E.T. (or Eee Tee so they
don’t get sued) on the Atari 2600. The opening sequence of AVGN: The Movie
tells this whole story in exhilarating detail, a story that, until recently,
was thought to be a myth. Not long after Rolfe had completed making his film,
the landfill was excavated to discover it was all true, and the cartridges were
unearthed. I’m not sure if that qualifies as life imitating art, but it’s one
hell of a coincidence that’s fun to keep in the back of your mind while you’re
watching this film.
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| "Nope. No crack rock in here." |
A video game developer known as Cockburn
Inc. decides to capitalize on the recent resurgence in popularity for old bad
video games by making a sequel to Eee Tee that’s even worse than the
original, and getting the Nerd to “endorse it” with his shit-stamp of
disapproval. Cockburn sends a pseudo-nerd gamer girl Mandi (Sarah Glendening)
to get the Nerd on board, but the idea of playing the game at all is enough for
him to upchuck what looks like Ecto Cooler all over the demo. His ensuing
nightmares—amusingly depicted in all their CGI-rendered Atari glory—convince
the Nerd that his mission must be to save the fans by digging up the landfill
and proving the “dozens of eyewitness accounts” were all a hoax. Only then will
the fans let go of the legend, and as a result, the new sequel can die with it.
But what if the legend is true? Then the Nerd will have no choice but to review
the game, in fact he’ll “play every single one of them.”
It’s not long after arriving in Alamogordo
that a scenery-chewing military general with a tank for legs (Stephen Mendel)
shows up with some equally over-the-top military henchmen, thinking that the
Nerd, the nerdette, and his cameraman Cooper (Jeremy Suarez) are there looking
for government secrets. This is when the film really takes off and continues to
divert course in about twenty different directions, hitting all the key notes
of B-movie cult status with all the self awareness you’d expect from a film
whose main character once took a dump on Bugs Bunny’s face. We get aliens, we
get miniature nuclear missile silos, we get a giant man in a plastic suit
breaking the Eiffel Tower over his knee. Yeah, it looks fake as hell, but to
tell you the truth, I loved it. This feels more like Godzilla than the new Godzilla.
In this age of oversaturated CGI everything, I was downright grateful for the
chance to laugh at a man in a suit made from old furnace parts and popsicle
sticks. Oh, and do we get a group of Asians running away from a green screen
with fearful expressions? You bet your sweet ass we do. It’s glorious.
Let me just say that this is not a movie
for everybody. This is a film that was not just made for the fans of AVGN, but
was completely financed by them as well, with a successful Kickstarter campaign
that yielded a budget of just over $300,000. It’s littered with in-jokes for
fans of the series, including some of Rolfe’s signature lines, re-packaged and
re-delivered for our pleasure; it even includes special appearances from AVGN
regulars like Kyle Justin and Mike Matei, as well as many who sent in video
responses to an online request for fan footage to incorporate into the film.
Rolfe knows his audience, knows what they love about his show, and knows how to
put together one hell of a Blu-ray.
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| "Damn, this looks a lot better than that Godzilla movie." |
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie may have standard
packaging, but it’s what is inside that counts. Over 10 hours of bonus features
are on this bad boy, including commentaries, a beautifully rendered 5.1
surround sound track, a live audience reaction track, numerous production
vlogs, outtakes, bloopers, featurettes on everything from here to the moon, and
even a special Nostalgia Critic review of the movie. Anyone who is a fan of the
Nerd knows about the “feud” between Doug Walker and James Rolfe that was a few
years back, resulting in one of the funniest fight scenes ever committed to
video. To have him as an extra on the blu-ray is not only fun for fans of both
personalities, but another in-joke all on its own for Rolfe to let the fans
know he was thinking about us.
While the final result may not be perfect,
it is precisely the B-movie love letter for the bygone age of practical effects
I was hoping for, and more—much, much more. Anything goes in this movie. Rolfe
and his co-writer/director Kevin Finn have thrown everything into their feature
debut, to include the kitchen sink as well as the dishwasher and several other
major appliances, utilizing the leftovers to create their cardboard box robots,
sugar glass casinos, and alien sock puppets. “Even my dreams are low budget,”
says the Nerd, after waking from a nightmare in which he’s attacked by a
hilariously bad monster hand puppet. Well that may be so, but with more visual
effects shots than the original Iron Man, and a loving look that feels
handmade from start to finish, Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie just
might be the most ambitious low budget independent film ever made.
-Blake O. Kleiner