Written by Kevin Finn & James Rolfe
Release Date: 21 July 2014
Running Time: 115 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Editor’s Rating: Three out of four broken controllers and one out of one sobs of abject frustration resulting in a four out of four “I know that feel, nerds,”
A while back I arrived at a station where a train had left several years before. I was watching YouTube to shut the world out while I wrote commercials, and I came across James Rolfe, a guy calling himself The Angry Video Game Nerd. Let’s just say he wasn’t lying. He had a pocket protector, thick black glasses, and a bone to pick with the crappy video games people in my generation had to put up with. Nintendo games were his forte, but as time went on and he grew more popular he branched out, embracing other terrible pieces of festering dog vomit parading themselves as entertainment, all the while giving insightful commentary and establishing himself as the voice of a community, spewing hatred and profanity-laden malice against the one medium we all loved, but never seemed to love us back.
Let’s just say that it was very hard for me to hold my laughter in while working. When I had finished the over 100 episodes he had produced, I found out there was a movie in the works. Waaaay in the works. Since 2006, in the works. When things started coming together in 2011, an IndieGoGo campaign was launched to fund a portion of the film’s budget.
It ended up funding the entire movie. Turns out when you have millions of fans clamoring for a YouTube video of the world’s worst video game, they go a bit rabid when you tell them you’re going to make a movie out of it instead.
The film opens on a brief history of the Atari 2600 and its biggest failure, E.T. It was a game that crashed the entire American video games industry back in the early 1980s, and has been a black mark on the gaming community ever since. The game was such a commercial failure that rumors were spread that millions of unsold copies of the game were dumped into a landfill in New Mexico, and rest there to this day. It turns out that a video game publisher by the name of Cockburn Industries is trying to profit off of that notoriety, planning a sequel off of its hated predecessor. And when word reaches The Nerd, it’s up to him and his friends to save his fans from another terrible video game.
Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie is not a blockbuster special effects masterpiece. It’s not a film carried by the sheer acting talent of its players. This is a movie that revels in low-budget special effects and cornball characters, silly acting, and props that look like they were made by an uncle that took shop class once in high school and thinks he’s a carpenter. And I wouldn’t want it any other way.
When all of these elements come together on the screen, you’re presented with an experience you just can’t help but laugh at. Not because of the limits of the budget, but because of what ridiculous premises the film is able to create with it. AVGN the movie takes what could have easily been a ten-minute review and molds it, sculpts it, into a near two-hour epic that truly goes wherever it wants: a quiet neighborhood on the east coast, a desert landfill, Mount Fuji, Area 51, Las Vegas, even space, yet somehow the script manages to keep it all in some degree of context. If you like laughing at bad horror flicks on the SyFy channel, Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie is the movie that will make you laugh with it for once.
This is a movie I really can’t help but recommend. It was created for fans, by fans, and every ounce of it shows. I’m an Amazon affiliate here, just one of the perks of working with BellaOnline, and I want to invite you all to check this film out, if you’re interested: Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
.FULL DISCLOSURE: I do get a little money if you decide to buy the film on Amazon. It’s also available on YouTube for digital download and rental, but Amazon is the only outlet where you can get the film and over ten hours of extras, including the documentation of the truly epic series of events around this film’s creation. It’s the full experience, and most importantly, it’s the most significant way to support Cinemassacre, Rolfe’s film production company, for all of the work, love, and passion they put into this.
**I bought this film because I’ve wanted it for a very long time, I just didn’t know it. I was not compensated for this review.**
