Arcade is an early example of one of the truly awful trends to overtake low budget horror and sci-fi over the past twenty years: the use of CGI effects by films that do not have the budget to pull them off. Full Moon Entertainment reported spent three years trying to master the effects for this film, and it still looks bad, even by early nineties standards.
The plot follows a young woman who discovers that a new video game, Arcade, is stealing the souls of its players. With the help of her friend Nick, she has to find out the game's secrets and play it to rescue her friends.
One of the biggest problems with the film is that it attempts more than its budget can pull off. Full Moon Entertainment simply did not, and does not, have the money to do CGI in a competent manner. Consequently, the film is one long special effects failure. Actors are clearly just running around in front of a green screen, and one scene of the protagonist running across a virtual reality wasteland clearly features shots of the actress going through a vacant lot. Indeed, the film's effects, along with its emphasis on virtual reality technology, date it so much that it appears to have been one of the few Full Moon releases never to be issued on DVD.
More damningly, the film does not really live up to the horror one expects from a Full Moon release. There is very little violence or gore and no nudity. The R rating is largely for cursing and a scene where a woman rather graphically kills herself with a handgun. Charles Band would have been better off editing out the language and blood and releasing under Full Moon's Moonbeam Entertainment label as a PG / PG-13 family thriller.
The plot follows a young woman who discovers that a new video game, Arcade, is stealing the souls of its players. With the help of her friend Nick, she has to find out the game's secrets and play it to rescue her friends.
One of the biggest problems with the film is that it attempts more than its budget can pull off. Full Moon Entertainment simply did not, and does not, have the money to do CGI in a competent manner. Consequently, the film is one long special effects failure. Actors are clearly just running around in front of a green screen, and one scene of the protagonist running across a virtual reality wasteland clearly features shots of the actress going through a vacant lot. Indeed, the film's effects, along with its emphasis on virtual reality technology, date it so much that it appears to have been one of the few Full Moon releases never to be issued on DVD.
More damningly, the film does not really live up to the horror one expects from a Full Moon release. There is very little violence or gore and no nudity. The R rating is largely for cursing and a scene where a woman rather graphically kills herself with a handgun. Charles Band would have been better off editing out the language and blood and releasing under Full Moon's Moonbeam Entertainment label as a PG / PG-13 family thriller.