Arcade

In a smoke-filled teen hangout called Dante's Inferno, apparently open 24 hours and conveniently deserted most of the time, neighborhood juvies flock to try a new virtual-reality maze/race called Arcade. But players end up dead or disappeared, sucked into the demon machine which eats souls as eagerly as quarters. A comparatively bright girl named Alex (Megan Ward) figures out Arcade is no mere amusement, and joins her joystick-jockey boyfriend Nick (Peter Billingsley) in a showdown with the game. Score yourself points if you can explain exactly how Alex comes to beat Arcade and emerge with all her schoolmates alive and well. The attempt at a sequel-friendly trick ending is an indecipherable mess.

Action-prone director Albert Pyun (CYBORG, THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER) can't seem to energize the trite material. Even inside Arcade's computer-generated landscapes the story remains uninvolving, as a wetsuit-clad Nick and Alex face skeletal chromium pursuers, logic puzzles and remarkably little in the way of Nintendo-style mayhem. The visual effects are snazzy but nothing beyond what can be seen on a '90s TV commercial; even Disney's TRON, done way back in 1982 before virtual reality became a buzzword, rendered cyberspace with more imagination. The young cast portray mainly shallow and surly characters, though it's nice to find an agreeably matured Peter Billingsley, best remembered from 1983's A CHRISTMAS STORY. Foul language accounts for part of the R rating in what would seem a feature with natural kid appeal, but the script has grim undertones of child abuse. Megan's mother shot herself, and similarly threatens her daughter in a fantasy/flashback, while the malevolence in ARCADE is revealed as the vengeful brain cells of a boy fatally beaten by his own mom, secretly implanted in the game hardware as a technological shortcut. (Violence, profanity, adult situations.)