Retro Gaming Cinema: The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud & Boss Level
A Fight Pizza Shitty Movie Double Feature
The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud starts with perhaps the cheapest spaceship crash ever filmed. It looks like a close up of a day-glo painted Star Wars toy being dropped on a shag carpet.
Turns out Max and crew (inside the toy spaceship) land on a prison planet (shag carpet) filled with numerous baddies - much like Riddick and Ripley before them. Unlike those two legendary space combatants however, Max Cloud spends the rest of the movie in two rooms: one is a teen gamer girl’s bedroom, the other is the spaceship filled with foam core props. We do also get some fairly okay video game sequences that look a bit like the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles side-scroller games (TMNT seem to have become our new mascots here at Fight Pizza).
You see, it turns out teenage gamer girl is playing the Max Cloud video game and gets sucked into it by a Space Witch or something and must complete the game to survive, with the help of her disinterested Dad (with a secret!), and friend-zoned buddy.
The movie gets the Fight Pizza treatment as martial artist and B-movie hit-man extraordinaire Scott Adkins stars as Max Cloud. Here he tries out his comedic chops to mixed result. He does however do some cool video game inspired fight sequences straight out of Street Fighter 2, complete with soundtrack and shoryuken. They switch up the style to the other great 90s fighting game Mortal Kombat for the finale against the final boss.
In sum, aside from a few (very few) nice moments, Max Cloud is a cheap, poorly-acted movie that attempts to capitalize on 80s nostalgia and 8-bit video gaming (using a U.K. approximation of largely American archetypes and accents). Max Cloud is, in its way, very similar to the next film on the docket, Boss Level, though that may have better acting, several more known stars, and most definitely a larger budget.
I watched Boss Level around the same time I watched Fatman and I didn’t think to write anything about it, but it fits with the retro video game vibe so I’ll give it a mention here. Underrated action man Frank Grillo stars as our hero stuck in some sort of perma-death time loop with a squad of hitman set out to kill him in myriad interesting, silly, straightforward, or complicated ways - every time he’s killed, he wakes up to start the same morning. There’s some stuff with his son and ex-wife, but mostly it’s a chance to run the same bit of the game over and over and over again until you get the timing perfect, which he eventually does. Mel Gibson costars as the main baddie and/or final boss.
The interesting thing about both of these movies is they actually rely on video game mechanics for plot and fight choreography i.e. if you stand in the right spot and shoot the boss they won't see you and eventually die; if you miss the jump you have to do the whole fucking level again. It’s at least something a bit different to see genres bleed into each other like that, and also to compare video games today with video games thirty years ago - despite the limitations, they were way more challenging back in the day. That said I wouldn’t particularly recommend either one of these movies and you’d probably have more fun spending the time with an 8-bit emulator and the games that inspired them.
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