
After a few weeks on the doctor’s chemicals-and-VR training regime, Jobe emerges as a super-intelligent, shirtless stud in tight jeans who quickly seduces his horny neighbor. Undeterred, Angelo continues his research on Jeff Fahey’s intellectually-impaired gardener, Jobe Smith. Unfortunately, his experiments on a chimp leave the beast running around with a gun in its hand. Angelo, an archetypal mad scientist who thinks that human intelligence can be expanded via a heady cocktail of virtual reality videogames and injections. You know you’re in for a wild ride when a sci-fi thriller opens with a scene shot from the perspective of a chimpanzee.

Or worse, prompt you to hack off a neighbor’s foot and keep it in your fridge. Ryder Smith admitted as much on his website.Īs a result, what we get is a largely forgettable, reactionary remake of Videodrome the message seems to be that retreating into a world of comics, games, and heavy metal rather than going out with your friends really will turn your brain to mush.

Unfortunately, his screenplay was altered before shooting with a hokey, sub-Freddie Krueger-style villain written into the film – actor T. If all this sounds very dark, that’s because it was written by Andrew Kevin Walker, who also wrote Sevenand 8mm. And worse, there’s also a severed foot lying in his freezer… Then he notices that an uncannily similar murder occurred in his neighbourhood. Goaded by an unseen narrator into entering a house, killing the occupant and hacking off his foot, Michael emerges from the game horrified yet exhilarated.
DRUG DEALER SIMULATOR VR SERIAL
Michael’s sucked into a virtual realm that looks almost exactly like his own cosy suburban community – except here he’s cast in the role of a gloved, knife-wielding serial killer. “Unleash the dark side of your soul! Enter the game more real than your reality!” “We dare you to experience the most frightening game on this planet,” an advert for the game (called Brainscan) reads. In fact, Brainscanwarns of the dangers of exactly this kind of behavior Edward Furlong plays Michael, a horror movie, videogame-obsessed teenager who ends up trying out a new VR game. My memories of this horror flick are a little hazy, but maybe that’s because years of playing ’90s videogames have turned my brain to mush. The sex, violence and chimps with guns of the original have all been airbrushed out of this more child-friendly sequel – Grant Morrison was even approached to write the thing at one point – and Beyond Cyberspaceloses the last shred of its so-bad-it’s-good charm as a result. The one proper link with the previous film is young actor Austin O’Brien, who returns to play the now teenaged Peter Parkette – Jobe’s old next-door neighbour. Unfortunately, the creative inspiration ends there, as Jobe hatches another tedious plan to take over cyberspace. With this being the case, we decided to revisit the virtual reality films of the ’90s and try to rank them in order of quality.

The past year or so has seen virtual reality once again grab headlines, with devices like Oculus Rift and Sony’s Morpheus either available to buy now or coming out in the near future. This nascent technology seemed to capture the imaginations of writers and filmmakers everywhere suddenly, movies like The Lawnmower Manand Disclosurewere appearing in cinemas, each presenting us with the possible ways virtual reality might change how we interact with each other – or warp our perspective of the everyday world. By wearing a cumbersome helmet and manipulating a joystick, you could play games like Dactyl Nightmare, a 3D shooter where a dinosaur flickered and swooped above your head. Perhaps inspired by decades of science fiction, from Ray Bradbury to William Gibson, something called virtual reality promised to whisk us off to digital realms more colourful and thrilling than our own.Ī system called Virtuality captured the media’s attention near the start of the decade. In the early 1990s, we seemed to be standing on the cusp of a breakthrough in technology.
