Remembering Arcade, Peter Billingsley's B-Movie Springboard to Couples Retreat

When the combined star power of Couples Retreat rolls over the box office this week, what's also taking place is the second act of an American life. While the film's stars, producers and writers are indelibly Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau (enthusiastically abetted by Kristen Bell, Jason Bateman, Malin Akerman and others), the man behind the camera is Peter Billingsley, best known to America as Ralphie Parker from 1983's A Christmas Story -- which in the quarter-century since its release has become the definitive yuletide classic.

That Billingsley has called the shots on such an A-list project as Couples Retreat comes down to his ability to transcend a childhood spent as a star and his enduring friendship with the film's drawcards. But an important factor is also Billingsley's barely known sci-fi horror film from 1993.

In Arcade, Billingsley stars as the leader of a bunch of kids used as the test market for a new virtual-reality game called... you guessed it, Arcade. Problem is, it sucks them body and soul into its clunky 3-D graphic environment. It's very Tron, a little bit Videodrome and Brainstorm, but also Poltergeist and A Nightmare On Elm Street -- just not very well-executed via primitive graphics and sets dressed mostly with dry-ice smoke lit with colored gels.

Crude though it is, Arcade makes you wonder why V-R games didn't take off. And then you realize that perhaps movies like this -- and Virtuosity and Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace -- may have had something to do with it. The visual effects are terrible. Mostly the game action is kids in bodysuits and helmets skateboarding through unconvincing corridors lined with easily avoidable spikes. And the actual game play itself -- go through said hallways, collect keys, open doors -- is less sophisticated than a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Tron cycle-race and Dactyl Nightmare rip-offs don't help things.

And rather than Tron's MCP or Nightmare's Freddy, we get "Arcade", a seemingly 10kb chip made with an assist from 100,000 brain cells of a dead 4-year-old child whose spirit is none too pleased with the situation. Dialogue like, "I'm cold, and I need young souls to keep me warm; now kiss reality goodbye forever" -- delivered in a faux Megatron voice -- provides no menace but at least regular mirth. For such lines, thank screenwriter David S. Goyer, who'd catapult from here to the higher heights of Batman Begins before slinging himself into the lower lows of The Unborn.

Goyer's script, however cornball, might've been better served by a director other than Albert Pyun. This disciple of Akira Kurosawa made a promising B debut with 1982's The Sword and The Sorcerer but it was pretty much downhill after that. Here he's on autopilot, seemingly content to let the camera run in longer dialogue scenes before wrapping up with a lazy zoom. On the Pyun-o-meter, Arcade ranks lower than his charming lo-fi 1990 turkey Captain America but is at least stratospherically better than the putrid Urban Trilogy he'd churn out in 1999.

Pages: 1 2