Movie Review Gamers Director: Christopher Folino Cast: Kevin Sherwood, Kevin Kirkpatrick, Scott Rinker, Dave Hanson, Joe Nieves, John Heard, Kelly LeBrock, Bevery D’Angelo, William Katt Release Date: 2006 Platform: DVD Movie Movie Review by Ray Ivey March 27, 2007

When I pulled out the DVD of this movie and took a look at it, my first reaction was that I must have done something to displease Randy in some fundamental way.

But I live to serve, so I popped the disk in, only to be pleasantly surprised!

First, it must be said that the world of gaming has not been well served by the movies.  Except for Disney’s Tron, Wargames and The Last Starfighter, I have trouble thinking of any Hollywood treatment of gaming that doesn’t make me cringe.  Remember The Wizard with Fred Savage?  Or ExistenZ?  Stay Alive? The painful list goes on and on.

The absolute worst in this category is worth remembering here because its subject is so close to Gamers.  In the 1980s, potboiler author Rona Jaffe wrote a bestselling novel called Mazes and Monsters which was infamously made into a TV movie with Tom Hanks in 1982.  It told of a group of role-playing freaks who got so “into” their game that they lost touch with reality.  The results were insanity, suicide and murder.  This type of story was completely fed by the media-driven fear of Dungeons & Dragons in the early Eighties.

Well, a lot of time has passed since then, and fortunately the Gamers movie can look at RPG geeks with a bit more sense of humor.

The movie it told as a “mockumentary,” one of my favorite forms for comedy.  (It’s also a smart choice for any movie on a budget.)  It’s the story of four friends who have played the role-playing game Demons, Nymphs and Dragons together for a staggering twenty-three years.  The film focuses on the red-letter day when they expect to break the all-time record for a long-running D&D game.

The movie has lots of fun with the geek stereotypes.  The quartet of gamers, each nerdier than the last, are gleefully played by Kevin Sherwood, Scott Rinker, Kevin Kirkpatrick and Joe Nieves.  To balance out these unknowns, several smaller parts are played by fading names like Bevery D’Angelo, John Heard, Kelly LeBrock, and William Katt. 

In true documentary form, the film spends time with each of the gamers, describing lives that are in various stages of comically arrested development.  These are guys who have been out of high school for twenty years, yet live with their parents and all work at jobs that earn less than $25,000 a year.  D&D is pretty much ALL they have in their lives.

The movie details their cringe-worthy jobs, which include videographing city council meetings (but with dramatic zooms and camera sweeps!), custom song-writing for over privileged kids, and manual horse-semen harvesting.

What saves the movie from utter predictability is that there’s a lot of cleverness in the details of the writing, not only when it comes to the men’s jobs but also in their back stories.  And while most of the gags tend to be pretty lowbrow, they are often funny.  There are jokes about horny middle-aged swinger parents, a whole series of Ku Klux Klan gags, and hey, when’s the last time you experienced Ronald McDonald clown porn?  Or how about the hilariously gay community theater Jesus?  And I haven’t even mentioned the custom-songwriter’s enthusiastic ballad, “Everybody Loves Dick.”

The movie also includes flashbacks that show just how far back the characters’ ubergeekiness goes.  There’s a painfully funny one that takes place on Prom Night 1982 which pretty much sets the tone of these guys’ sex lives for life.

The climax the movie moves toward is The Big Night when the quartet is scheduled to beat the world record of hours played in a single campaign.  Naturally the team members have some pretty high expectations of what will happen when and if the golden moment arrives.  The actual results are funny, sad, and even a bit believable.  Producer-director Chris Folino – who previously worked as a video production manager at Interplay and THQ – has said that Gamers is a semi-autobiographical chronicle of his own adolescent obsession with strategy and video games.

Though I’ve never played tabletop role-playing games, I’m a fiend for computer RPGS, and have played dozens of them.  Not to mention the fact that I’m a 2.5 year veteran of World of Warcraft.  So even while I’m laughing at these desperate nerds I recognize that spiritually, they are my brothers. 

Adding to the fun on the DVD are interviews with the cast and crew and lots of commentary.

Against all expectations, Gamers is actually a mini-triumph of low budget but clever filmmaking.  It even won the Best Screenplay Award at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2006.

Final Grade: B+ (find out more about our grading system)

If you liked this movie, then Play: Duh, World of Warcraft Watch: Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run Read: Blockbuster by Patricia Marx and Douglas McGrath

This review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link back to Just Adventure.