User Reviews

I have seen a few of these gamer movies popping up from time to time over the last few years. The Gamers and its sequel Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising set the bar pretty high, however.

I came across THACO on YouTube. I laughed several times. Great gamer in-jokes. It's not as coherent as the Gamers movies (particularly the 2nd one) but I still enjoyed it. Thankfully it didn't run on for too long and was actually edited fairly tightly.

I recognized several of my own friends' quirks in the characters and the gags about the game mechanics and different versions were good. A bit on the esoteric side for some, but funny for the intended audience.

Great effort.

I entitle my review as such having watched it after having seen all of The Gamer's movies from Dead Gentlemen and Zombie Orpheus. Though some of the newer iterations in that franchise came after Thaco, the essential idea from the original remains the same.

A movie based on the exploits gamers get up to, while exploring stereotypes and many of the inside jokes gamers share. A novel idea indeed, however, like the original Gamers movie, in my opinion, it falls SLIGHTLY short.

I won't spoil anything in my review, however if you are familiar with The Gamers: Hands of Fate, then you might understand my main (though only) problem with Thaco. Hands of Fate was actually my favorite of all of these movies, though criticized by many (due to it's divergence from the focus on D&D towards card games), the film succeeds where the others fail, in my opinion, in it's complete expression of a story which has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Thaco does not have this. It's campy, fragmented (which is fine in a lot of ways, in fact it reminds me of the original Clerks, a movie which holds a real soft spot in my heart), and overall simply meant to make you laugh and feel good, with no new ideas to really bring to the table.

On the whole all of this WORKS. I like it; it was entertaining and definitely worth the watch. But would I watch it again? Do you think you would ever watch Chicken Run again? How about the Shawshank Redemption? On a base level this comparison is a bit unfair, Hands of Fate being no Shawshank (and to be fair, I wouldn't sink Thaco down to Chicken run, but hey, exaggerated example to make the point right?). But I feel it shows amply how I feel about Thaco. It's no Godfather, but it certainly does alright in a Clerks kinda way.

So far as comedic scenes goes, THACO has some chuckles here and there. But there's not a whole lot else going on here. The movie namedrops a myriad of roleplaying games, and then blasts them for a quick laugh (which falls flat). The optimistic Bill must wrangle the impulsive Duck and the obsessive Jon while they wait for the neurotic Aaron to show up. We watch as they go to the local comics and gaming shop for their various reasons, discuss their backstories as gamers, argue over their hangups in regards to Tom Hanks and Peter Jackson, and try to play Dungeons and Dragons free from interruption in an age of cell phones.

The movie has some real inconsistencies when it comes to audio levels, characters will be whispering and barely audible only to be seconds away from shouting their shrill voices. Characters seem to be almost completely ADR throughout the movie, thus things like background sounds don't really exist and it sounds somewhat unnatural. As far as acting goes the four characters can be adequate and believable when not shouting, and there's even a cameo appearance of Neil Gaiman! The humor is often exaggerated and more referential than original, and listening to the scenes of them around the table is like a game of trivia, where you try to guess what the next line is referencing.

What we don't get much out of this is an actual movie about the hobby or the players, instead we get anecdotes and urban legends told as if the characters themselves have experienced it at one time or another in their lives. Perhaps the most annoying portion of the movie is when the characters decide to go on a 5 minute riff on magic/cursed items, and it becomes unnecessarily raunchy.

It's an alright movie, but you can get much better out of the genre from The Gamers. Too much time spent on making references, and not enough on actually showing what an actual gaming session is like.

The runtime probably gives away that this is a next-to-nothing budget indie film. I'm guessing the script was pretty short, just covering some of the beats, and that a lot of it was improvised.

Ironically, this movie's best moments seem unscripted, or lightly scripted, as the three characters all have their own charm, and work very well off each other.

The acting is about what you'd expect, some flat delivery, except when the conversations really start going, where everyone picks up a very natural feel. The topics of conversation are very relatable to anyone who's done any kind of RPG sessions.

If you want to catch an hour of 3 guys talking D&D, with some funny scenarios thrown in, it's worth it.