- Director: Albert Birney
- Writers: Albert Birney, Pete Ohs
- Stars: Albert Birney (Conor), Frank Mosley (Victor)
- Runtime: 90 minutes
- YouTube Trailer Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG9VrEeKk-I
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
Conor leads a quiet isolated life at home with his dog, computer, and media in 1987. And everything is so normal until he plays the computer game OBEX. Then reality and digital start to blur together when he goes on a quest to find his missing dog inside the game. It’s slow moving and fascinating, kind of surreal. We both really enjoyed it.
Spoilery Synopsis
It’s 1987. Conor watches three TVs at once. He feeds the dog and takes out the trash; he seems normal enough. He watches a show about people making a cicada omelette. He then types in and prints off an ASCII portrait on his computer.
Mary comes to the door, bringing groceries, but he doesn’t let her in– he apparently never leaves the house. After she leaves, he checks the mail, and finds that he’s got a new computer magazine. He’s got an ad in there about his photo art service. He turns the page and sees an ad for a new game called OBEX. It promises to “insert you into the game.” Cool! He records a video that tells the gamemakers about himself so that he can be put into a game. He has a weird dream about his dead mother.
The OBEX game soon arrives in the mail. He loads it right in and gets started. The game actually has Conor’s image in it. It’s clunky by today’s standards, but he seems to enjoy it for a minute or two. It doesn’t do much, so he quickly gives up and deletes it.
Mary comes to the door, asking if he’s found blood in his milk. He looks outside and sees a dying cicada. The cicadas are everywhere in his backyard, and he constantly sees them. He gets back to work digitizing children’s photos but the picture is ruined by a cicada in his printer. That night, it’s another nightmare but then he wakes up when he hears the printer working. It says “Remove your skin” over and over.
The next night, the TVs come on by themselves, the OBEX game comes onto the computer, and a glowing creature comes out of the TVs from the game. It wanders around the house and notices Sandy the dog.
In the morning, Sandy the dog is gone, missing. Conor goes looking for his dog out in the nearby woods and finds his computer out there, still with the OBEX game running. Sandy the dog is now inside the game, along with cicadas. All of a sudden, Conor is inside the game as well, now with a long beard and surrounded by little fairies. He runs into a videogame version of Mary, who is an NPC now. She tells him about the demon king Ixaroth, who took Sandy. She gives him supplies and tells him where to go.
Conor walks through the Dark Forest as it’s shown on the gaming map. He camps in the “Meadow of Regrets.” The next day, he comes across a pair of humanoid cicadas torturing a humanoid TV monitor. Conor kills the baddies with his sword. The TV man is Victor. The two find a car that reminds Conor of his mother. Victor explains what TV Heaven might be like.
That night, he stops when he sees a naked woman and man in the road. They start to spin and lose their skins– they’re just skeletons. They attack him, and he sees “Game Over” in the sky. He does, however, get the option to “Retry.”
Conor wakes up with Victor and Mary; he’s reborn, and they soon restart their journey to the dark castle. They soon arrive at the Nightmare Realm but there’s a big combination padlock keeping the gate shut.
In the morning, Conor has aged significantly. Victor has opened the gate, but died in the attempt. Conor enters the videogame castle, and it’s full of cicada-men. He finds Sandy’s bones, and there’s also a wolf– and Freddy Krueger. All his worst nightmares come to life all at once. Eventually, Ixaroth appears and demands that Conor remove his skin. Conor attacks and defeats Ixaroth.
We, and Conor himself, watches as Sandy and Conor’s avatar reunite and go to the beach. “The End” comes up on the computer screen, and Conor exits out of the game. The two then go to the beach for real– happy ending!
Brian’s Commentary
I loved all the old computer technology, although I never imagined people did that kind of ASCII art by hand. The rest of it– I remember. The black-and-white makes it all seem more surreal, and it does fit in a bunch of old videogame tropes.
It’s slow-moving, and there’s not much action, but the concept and execution are really interesting, and it never gets dull. I liked this one a lot.
Kevin’s Commentary
It was a quiet nostalgia trip through 1987 at first, watching Conor go through his days. Then things get weird when he plays OBEX.
For such a slow-moving film, I kept expecting to get bored, but I didn’t. It’s strange and very good.
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