Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie
Directors: Kevin Finn, James D. Rolfe
Starring: James D. Rolfe, Jeremy Suarez and Sarah Glendening
The nerd (James D Rolfe) must overcome his fear of the worst video game in history to save his fans and the world from a crazed General hell bent on destroying every Atari 2600 game cartridge of E.T (for the sake of a lawsuit they refer to the game as EEE TEE) as it contains a map of the top secret facility .
With his sidekick Cooper (Jeremy Suarez) and video game representative Mandi (Sarah Glendening) in tow ‘The Nerd’ and crew head off l to Alomogordo New Mexico the rumored site of Atari’s ET cartridge dumping grounds to review the upcoming sequel ‘EEE TEE 2’ and put an end to people playing the worst game in history.
If Beaker from the Muppets came to life he would look like ‘The Nerd’ , there is particular look ‘The Nerd’ makes that he uses to convey pretty much every emotion from shock, to fear to rage. They are all done with a frown that perfectly resembles an upside down smile or the hinged lower jaw of a Muppet. The major difference being that Beaker makes cute little noises while ‘The Nerd’ passes out rage induced expletive filled rants such as the gem “I would rather lick the shit skid off the inside of a toilet bowl”. That is the charm of the nerd he never ceases to come up with hilarious vulgarity to express how stupid, mindless and poorly thought out something is, Of course finishing off the diatribes with his customary Rolling Rock.
AVGN the movie isn’t a big studio production nor does it pretend to be. This is about as low shelf a B movie a person can make and still call it a B movie. That is where the charm lives, from the character of General Dark Onward (Stephen Medal) constantly getting hurt which is very reminiscent of Monty Python and The Holy Grails ‘Dark Knight’. To the super low budget special effects, I am pretty sure I saw a model rocket get shot out of a collapsible metal colander and miniature models with fireworks strapped onto them. The point being that it is so good at being bad. There are nods to some of ‘The Nerds” most famous rants including his immortal take on landing a plane on an aircraft carrier from his review of ‘Top Gun’.
In the words of ‘The Nerd’ in his opening remarks on the game Die Hard Is this movie good or does it suck? Well take a wild fucking guess? You only get so many minutes in life and you should probably throw 90 of them away on AVGN: The Movie. Yes I said it, see this movie. It’s great it revels in all its ultra low budget glory. It not only tells the history of the game that sunk Atari and collapsed an industry it also pays homage to B’ movie goodness. The ending is pure Godzilla but the heart is pure Angry Video Game Nerd.
Grade – 83
