u/shajes90

And why did it get pulled? Does Jeff Bezos want us to suffer?

From the AVGN episode of TOMB RAIDER

Hey there, my name is Jesse Shade, and I wanted to post here to thank you guys for sharing my AVGN movie review last year off my YouTube channel Awfully Good Movies. It was a huge help for our subscriber numbers at the time, which are now at the 16.6K mark in our second year, so I wanted to thank you guys with a recently posted text review of mine from my channel which is right up your alleys. Lemme know what you think, and I hope you enjoyed my older review (which, to clarify, was done in 2015 at a time WAAAY before we knew what we know now). Enjoy, and keep up the good work!

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On today's installment of the #AwfullyGoodFiles: Case File #004, where I'm gonna take you back to the past to look back at a previously reviewed movie of mine which, upon rewatching, sucks ass...

ANGRY VIDEO GAME NERD: THE MOVIE (2014)

DIRECTORS: James Rolfe & Kevin Finn

CAST: James Rolfe, Jeremy Suarez, Sarah Glendening

This past month, James Rolfe celebrated the 20th anniversary of his first review posted on his Cinemassacre YouTube channel as the Angry Video Game Nerd, and I’ve spent most of those years as a fan myself mercifully unaware of the building backlash against James’ work, especially in the past decade when he’s been handing off much of his work duties to his corporate distributors at Screenwave Media instead of handling the videos himself like he used to alongside AVGN co-writer Mike Matei in the channel’s halcyon days, which has even led to the creation of a popular Reddit page made by disillusioned fans known as “The Cinemassacre Truth”--a fascinating online read, BTW, if you’ve grown up with James’ content as I have. And although I’ve been personally agnostic towards the decline in James’ content, it’s been fascinating to see the YouTubers of my youth now facing the same complaints of growing stale with age and becoming corporate mascots as THE SIMPSONS or SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS have. In fact, the Nerd’s work has one big thing in common with those two shows: being accused of declining in quality after they make “The Movie”. And yes, I may have given an overly generous review myself to ANGRY VIDEO GAME NERD: THE MOVIE shortly after its 2014 release, believing as much as any other fan of James’ at the time that his independent spirit and gleefully dumb sense of humor could lead to a film as delightful as any of his numerous reviews and retrospectives on terrible games from the NES era which he’d made a name on. But nowadays in 2026, with my more mature eye as a critic and knowing everything that we’ve come to know about the movie’s truly baffling production--namely how James’ insistence on filming in California blew a huge chunk of the fan-raised budget and led to a meltdown over the film “ruining his life”, as well as handing off post-production VFX to volunteering fans--I can only ask him the same question that the AVGN has asked of many a shitty video game… “What were you THINKING?!”

Or more appropriately, “What were THEY thinking?!”, because I neglected to mention in my 2015 video review that the AVGN movie is co-directed and co-written by Kevin Finn, better known to Nerd fans as the “Glitch Gremlin” from the “Game Glitches” episode. Apparently he was tasked with most of the directing and writing duties after Rolfe’s behind-the-scenes breakdown, and that surely explains why this inexplicably two hour movie is so far removed from most of the things that made the AVGN series so appealing. The grumpy friendless loser of a Nerd living in his basement from the YouTube reviews is replaced in the film by a Nerd who’s gainfully employed at a GameStop knockoff store, beloved by all the fans demanding his autograph in the streets at any given moment, and is helped in production by his apparently lifelong friend Cooper (Jeremy Suarez, THE BERNIE MAC SHOW), while Mike Matei is relegated to an obviously green-screened cameo alongside AVGN theme singer Kyle Justin. I know full well Mike Matei’s a bit of a head case from his Reddit reputation and didn’t want a part of this flick even though he’s arguably as responsible for the Nerd as James is, but he’d surely have been a better on-screen partner than Suarez is here as a Diet Kevin Hart character whose most memorable moments are inexplicably humping a bar table and getting together at the movie’s literally last minute with Rolfe’s equally unimpressive on-screen female partner Mandi (Sarah Glendening)… how sadly appropriate that both of these actors have barely worked in Hollywood since this flick, with a pre-Gamergate portrayal of girls in gaming that can best be summed up in the immortal line of dialogue: "She's not a girl, she's a GAMER!" Man, 2014 was truly a different planet!

As fans of the Nerd’s work know, this entire movie was conceived as a pretext for his long-awaited thoughts on the infamously bad E.T. game for the Atari 2600--with that game's Howard Scott Warshaw providing a cameo--only for that review of the renamed "EEE TEE" to be shown in the movie’s final eight minutes like it was a Hal Needham outtake reel, while the rest of its two hours are taken up by the Nerd and his co-worker pal driving out to the New Mexico desert to debunk the then-popular myth about the E.T. game’s numerous buried cartridges, as a way of promoting the deliberately bad sequel for this game that’s about to be published by… *sigh* Cockburn Industries. As much as this base plot is kind of relevant to how much more sloppified the video game industry has become in the past decade, it has aged particularly poorly now that those E.T. cartridges got found shortly before the AVGN movie’s release, as well as having to battle with a bunch of overstuffed subplots, whether it’s the rogue Army general who keeps bloodily losing his arms like he’s the Troma movie version of Sean Penn in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, the bland female sergeant serving as the general’s sidekick who inexplicably brags about “not wearing any panties”, the British video game developer in hiding from this general who reveals the E.T. game’s level design is actually a map to Area 51, and a goofy looking rubber alien in hiding there voiced by Michelangelo voice actor Robbie Rist. Try as all these actors might, they clearly have as little of an idea of what this movie’s about as its writers and directors do, and this results in a rather miserable two hours for both casual viewers and AVGN fans alike, with only a slight laugh or chuckle to be had at an obviously fake stunt dummy or two. Much like MACHETE KILLS or SHARKNADO’s numerous sequels, it tries so hard to be a good bad movie that it’s instead just a bad bad movie, particularly with the third act introduction of a giant kaiju robot with the hardly pronounceable name of Death Mwauthzyx, where the film’s lack of a professional visual effects crew or a good looking green screen couldn’t be more apparent and not really in a charming B-movie way, as well as a truly baffling exit scene for this monster character where James Rolfe’s perpetually gaping expression of shock feels totally appropriate. When the best actor in your cast is comedian Eddie Pepitone doing some awkward improv as the Nerd’s boss in what appears to be a broom closet doubling as an office, you’ve got some serious problems. But on the positive side? Video game legend Bear McCreary does a bang-up job on the soundtrack even if the film doesn't deserve it, and his wonderful orchestral rendition of Kyle Justin's AVGN theme makes me miss Kyle's presence on the channel nowadays even more.

In fact, it’s kind of heartbreaking that James Rolfe has yet to dip back into serious filmmaking in the 12 years since the AVGN movie’s release, but anyone who’s read his autobiography or watched any of the numerous YouTube essays about this movie can tell the experience of this film was surely disillusioning towards his dreams of movie making stardom, no matter how much he’s tried to spin it since. Yet for all of the movie’s flaws, it’ll never not be impressive that he got it done in the first place, even if he went about it in a financially and mentally destructive fashion, and seeing the cameos from some of his fellow YouTube creators such as Doug Walker, Pat the NES Punk and the rightfully disgraced Justin “JewWario” Carmical gives the entire enterprise a bittersweet feeling, knowing what was to come for the likes of Cinemassacre or Channel Awesome in the next decade, and how much these guys’ dreams never came as true as they wanted, even as other YouTubers like Markiplier (IRON LUNG) and the Philippou Brothers (TALK TO ME) have found cinematic success in the far cheaper realm of horror. I’ll never not root for James Rolfe as a fellow YouTube critic also making money off my autistic hyperobsessions, but I can tell him as a fellow “autist” that there’s nothing wrong with accepting your limitations, and if he’d pursued the AVGN movie with that attitude instead of pushing himself to the breaking point, perhaps we’d be looking back on it as a classic instead of just “ASS”, to use a turn of phrase that the Nerd himself would approve of. At least he can take comfort that there continues to be such a big audience on YouTube and Reddit that still cares about his work this much in the first place, and I for one will keep rooting for his continued success, but as for revisiting his movie… well, I’m sad to say it, but as a wise man once said: “What a shitload of fuck.”

ENJOYABLENESS CONTINUUM SCALE: 3/10 (originally 6/10). Man, I originally gave this a SIX? I think the more appropriate question is: What was *I* THINKING?!?

#avgn #angryvideogamenerdthemovie #cinemassacre #whatweretheythinking