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Arcade
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Full Moon Features Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (29th July 2025). |
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The Film
 Depressed since the suicide of her mother (It's Alive's Sharon Farrell), high school student Alex (Crash and Burn's Megan Ward) reluctantly accompanies her school friends - including boyfriend Greg (Days of Our Lives' Bryan Dattilo), nerdy Nick (A Christmas Story's Peter Billingsley), bully-magnet Stilts (Ticks' Seth Green), perv Benz (Brandon Rane), and snarky Laurie (Escape from L.A.'s A.J. Langer) - to local "hole in the wall" video game arcade to test out the new virtual reality game ARCADE being test marketed by Vertigotronics executive Difford (Star Trek: The Next Generation's John De Lancie) who tells them that the game is alive and can change strategy as it learns about its opponents. Greg tries out the game and mysteriously disappears while the others are given portable home versions of the program. Alex becomes convinced that the Greg is trapped in the game, the "brain" of which (voiced by Castle Freak's Jonathan Fuller) is goading Alex into playing it herself. When others in their group mysteriously disappear, Alex and Nick realize they must enter the game - armed with its schematics by programmer Albert (Midnight Express' Norbert Weisser) who is just as afraid of his creation - in order to rescue their friends and destroy its brain. An early credit for David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight), Arcade is not so much a low-budget CGI DTV take on TRON as a low-budget stab at the "virtual reality" film craze of the early nineties. The film would have aged badly even if the digital imagery had been state-of-the-art thanks to music video style of director Albert Pyun (Alien from L.A.) and the forgettable scoring and sound design of John Carpenter's scoring collaborator Alan Howarth not to mention some emo rock music that very much situates the film in the nineties that, along with the casting attributed to Cathy Henderson-Martin (UHF) and Tom McSweeney rather than the studio's usual casting directors, suggests that Full Moon was attempting to aim higher. While the film is definitely let down by the film's visual effects – more on that below – other faults include Pyun just not being a director of actors relying on the actors to hit their marks but letting scenes run long and out of steam or relying on some ad-lib filler at the start or ends of scenes that just falls flat, as well as either a script that was not fully-developed or severely-pruned for a sub-eighty minute running time (taking into account the opening and closing title sequences that take it just over). Alex's traumatic backstory is of course a storytelling shortcut but none of the other teenage characters are particularly defined apart from Nick, and the film leaves ambiguous the state of their friendship in the aftermath. Things get weird right away without much buildup and the middle section consists of running from one place to another in a rush to the third act where the schematics of the game laid out just before are thrown out the window. Finished in 1992, the initial version of the film was withdrawn allegedly at the threat of a lawsuit by Disney for preceived similarities to TRON and the original digital effects by a company called Digital Fantasy were replaced with new CGI by DHD Postimage (Shrunken Heads) for the 1993-copyrighted release which also replaced the original mostly-superior score by Pyun's regular composer Anthony Riparetti (Nemesis) with music and sound design by Howarth that drones between the awful added songs but does better goose the game soundscape with atmosphere. The newer effects are certainly better than originals – and that might have actually been the real reason for the delay and replacement – but still feels like the kind of work that would have been more acceptable in Full Moon's cheaper, erotic VR films like Virtual Encounters and Cyberella: Forbidden Passions. It does feel like Pyun and/or Band used the delay to rework some of the film, including some alternate takes, either unused or reshot footage, and a few definite additions. It seemed at first like some of the inserts were missing but others are present, suggesting that Pyun might not have thought it was necessary to show the photograph Greg takes of himself and Alex or the ARCADE flier. The meeting between Alex, Nick, and Albert was substantially re-edited for the better, getting to the point faster than the drawn-out original version while the question left hanging in the air over the final shot gets a shock ending answer with a new coda. Full Moon would incorporate more CGI a few years later when they switched over entirely to digital post-production, but it was usually on the lower end, evening out into the acceptable in later years as CGI became the norm across the industry at all levels of production. 
Video
Arcade was released direct-to-video and laserdisc in 1993 after the effects and scoring were redone. Due to the mixing of 35mm footage and CGI, presumably the footage finished on video was never scanned to film and conformed to the negative – some later Full Moon productions in the early digital era had their negatives conformed without the digital effects necessitating composite transfers for HD – as the overseas home video releases made use of an NTSC video master including the U.K. Entertainment in Video VHS and the 88 Films' 2014 DVD. As part of the Paramount distribution deal with Full Moon, Arcade first turned up on DVD in the U.S. in 2007 in a roundabout way as part of the Full Moon Classics: Volume One, a set of five Paramount-era Full Moon titles in region 0 NTSC transfers ostensibly from an Australian label called Kangaroo Video which is surprisingly non-existent. Full Moon's first official DVD came in 2012 from the existing video master. While Full Moon was able to go back to the negatives for a lot of their titles from this era – including materials more recently discovered like those of Crash and Burn – but the film materials for Arcade are either lost or would have necessitated a mix of film and upscaled video for the effects. What Full Moon has given us here is a 1080i60 MPEG-4 AVC 1.33:1 pillarboxed fullscreen upscale – possibly AI although executive producer Charles Band notes in the commentary that they were recording with a draft and that a colorist was still working on the final product – and the results are only slightly improved over the DVD and SD streaming versions online due to the color work which enhances the previously gray blacks and improves saturation. The film scenes fare worst – That 70s Show's Don Stark is unrecognizable due to the smokey, hazy photography of the Dante's Inferno sequences – looking at their best like a nineties shot-on-film-finished-on-video television project while the video game sequences look best due to the more artificial backgrounds, pumped up colors, and backgrounds that already lacked much in the way of texture. Presumably, this is the best that can be done with the materials and it is hard to imagine this one being licensed to boutique labels in other territories in its current state but we may be encountering more of this when it comes to not only some of Full Moon's CGI-heavy titles but other nineties, early 2000s titles finished on either analog or standard definition digital video. 
Audio
The film was mixed in Ultra Stereo and the Blu-ray's default audio option is a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track which does not wow at the start with Howarth's droning scoring but the songs added to the second version of the film stand out in the mix – enough to "appreciate" some of the mediocre lyrics – and the goosed soundscape of the replacement effects also gives the game sequences a more "interactive" feel along with electronic and foley effects work as the game intrudes upon reality. A Dolby Digital 5.1 track is also included – selectable via remote or your software player's menu options – that just gives the track more spread without any added effects or any of the echo common to older upmix algorithms. Optional English SDH subtitles are also included. 
Extras
Newly recorded for this release is an audio commentary by producer Charles Band and actress Megan Ward who reveal that Pyun filled the crew with his people and convinced character actors he knew to take roles in the film. They are a little vague about the production difficulties but it appears that Goyer's script was complete in terms of plot and character arcs but the logistics around the effects were not fully worked out. It also appears as though Pyun was not involved in later post-production as Ward reveals that her ADR work was directed by Band's father Albert Band (Zoltan, Hound of Dracula) – who was one of Full Moon's on-set producers both in the U.S. and Italy where he had worked in the fifties and sixties where sons Charles and his composer brother Richard Band (The House on Sorority Row) grew up – while music editor Daniel Schweiger directed the additional inserts and Billingsley supervised post-production. Band and Ward warmly reflect on their collaborations, and Ward – whose brother and future husband were both on the grip and gaffer crews – fills him in on the subsequent work of much of the cast since Band confesses that he is a homebody outside of work and he has someone else run his social media.  The disc also includes the original Videozone making-of (9:43) piece that originally followed the feature on Paramount tapes and laserdsics was included as an extra on the DVDs. The piece features the usual EPK interview comments from Ward and DeLancie, a look at Pyun working on the set, and some footage of the young cast hanging out. More interesting is the discussion of the film's 2D and 3D visual effects work with some footage of the original effects including the TRON-like racing sequence. Not included previously elsewhere is an interview with actor John DeLancie (15:42) that is a little awkwardly-moderated but has the actor reflecting on his "affinity" for science fiction (and a little defensive about it). The rare EFX reel (18:03) features a look at the original digital imagery taken from the Paramount screener (the full version of which can be found online showing more of the differences not restricted to the effects). The disc also includes a video trailer (1:44) and trailers for five other Full Moon titles. 
Overall
One of Full Moon Entertainment's first films that made substantial use of digital effects, Arcade looks decidedly "analog" in its transition to the Blu-ray format.
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