He’s gonna take you back to the past to play the shitty games that suck ass. He’d rather have a buffalo take a diarrhea dump in his ear. He’d rather eat the rotten asshole of a road killed skunk and down it with beer. Now, he’s going to be the focus of this week’s B-Movie Enema article, the 350th to be exact. I’m going to discuss both the man and his film – 2014’s Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie.

I’m going to get to the significance of this particular movie and the man behind it, James Rolfe, in just a few moments, but first, I want to circle back around to that number I just mentioned. This is the 350th edition of this blog (is that a thing – can I call a blog post an edition?). That’s hardly an insignificant feat. I’m going to take a few minutes to pat myself on the back over said feat.

I’ve mentioned a few times over that the blog started on October 3, 2014. Then, after six articles, I took a break and returned on March 4, 2016, and only stopped for a brief period after the 100th article in order to help get Film Seizure up and off the ground. However, I want it to be known that the journey to get here, to this milestone and this specific article about this exact movie, wasn’t one that just kind of happened overnight. I had another life once upon a time.

The year was 2009. I was 32 and had been, at the time, back in the comic book collecting game for about 11 years. For a little while, I wanted to get into sharing my thoughts about what it was I was reading. I didn’t exactly care if anyone else read what I wrote, but I wanted to write. I always felt extremely peaceful and pacified when I wrote. It was better than any therapy I couldn’t afford. So, in July of that year, I started a page on Blogger and wrote about stuff. I didn’t have any real agenda. I didn’t have any critical background. I just wanted to toss out a few hundred words on how I felt about a comic or a series or whatever caught my fancy. When I attended Wizard World Chicago (once known as Chicago Comic-Con, now known as Fan Expo Chicago), I put my pictures that I took up there. I enjoyed doing that.

That said, I didn’t do that for very long because a bigger opportunity presented itself. A website called A Comic Book Blog came calling. They didn’t pay, but was looking for someone who might be interested in writing for the site. I asked if I could be part of it, and after the editor looked at my past stuff on my own small blog, I was in. I ended up writing something like 1,100+ posts, mostly reviews, for ACB over a few years. I loved it, but it was not really sustainable to put in the time that I did for that site. But while I did get an opportunity to reach a larger audience of fans and haters, I got to do a couple pretty cool things. The first was I attended three major conventions in Chicago (two C2E2 conventions in 2011 and 2012, and the last Wizard World Chicago I ever attended in 2012).

The second cool thing is where we come full circle with Angry Video Game Nerd (henceforth referred to as either The Nerd, James Rolfe, or AVGN). About the same time I began writing about comics, I had discovered AVGN on YouTube and was just into it. But what’s more, I was enamored with James Rolfe’s appreciation for things about which he was either sentimental or nostalgic. He did a short called The Dragon in My Dreams that, no matter how often I’ve seen it, touches me. It was about connecting with something he had a great love of when he was a kid. It maybe also reveals some things on the personal level about Rolfe. The Nerd was a character, but this was straight from Rolfe’s heart.

Between shorts like The Dragon in My Dreams, his fairly regular productions of AVGN episodes, movie reviews, and his annual Monster Madness series, Rolfe became a significant online figure in my life and rose to be a fairly important inspiration to how I approached my writing. Because of that, the other really cool thing I got to do at ACB was write a series called Geek Life. I was able to pour a lot of nostalgia and memories and appreciation into very specific things I grew up liking or something that shaped who I was as a proud geek. Topics ranged from playing little league baseball to watching Doctor Who every Sunday afternoon on Indianapolis’ public television station to Madballs to ROM: Spaceknight to attending conventions. The inspiration for these types of articles came directly from Rolfe and how he talked about his favorite things growing up.

What’s more, from 2010 to 2012, I did a daily October series at ACB called Comic Book Monsters. That was directly influenced by Rolfe’s Monster Madness. My weekly show at Film Seizure called Monster Mondays is 100% a continuation of that influence. I’ve mentioned before how, when I discovered The Cinema Snob, Brad Jones, I became concerned that I had accidentally ripped off his schtick, but, frankly, nothing I do here, and ever did online, could be without James Rolfe.

Rolfe began his internet career kind of by accident. He did two episodes called Bad NES Games in May of 2004 which were reviews of Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His character was known as The Angry Nintendo Nerd in the early days. That name stuck until the 14th episode for the Power Glove when he changed the name to Angry Video Game Nerd. It’s said that he changed it for the ability to spread his net to cover more systems and games. However, I also thought it maybe had more to do with Nintendo being in the name, but I could be wrong.

Either way, in 2006, Rolfe, through the insistence of friends, continued his series with the angry gamer who obsessively cracked under the pressure of bad programming and frustrating gaming things that irritated most people. Rolfe’s success as the Nerd grew and he ended up inspiring almost all the earliest generation of YouTube reviewers. Whether they were video game reviewers or movie reviewers or comic book reviewers, their inspiration lineage can trace back to Rolfe in one way or another. Today, YouTube is drowning in “angry” or negative reviewers. Rolfe was ahead of the curve, but also a character. Some of the others that exist online are hardly characters, or, if they kind of are… Well, they’re insincere. But that’s not what this is about.

Of my favorite AVGN episodes, I would have to easily say the four-part Castevania series episode is my #1. It’s so honest in its loving tribute to his favorite game series. The first Castlevania and the amazing Symphony of the Night are two of my favorites too. Among other favorites are Plumbers Don’t Wear Ties, the two-part Batman and the two-part Superman videos, Rambo, Godzilla, and SwordQuest. There are so many more too. However, I also realize that I will, as soon as I finish this paragraph, think of a few more that I dearly love, but we’ll get back on track.

As much as Rolfe was rolling along with AVGN, and each new episode was becoming someone’s new favorite episode of his, it was clear that maybe the character couldn’t go on forever – at least not in the way it had for the first four or five years of the show. Rolfe had aspirations to be an earnest filmmaker. He had toyed with shorts and movies since being a kid. Of course AVGN was important, but it didn’t seem to be his long term plan. On top of that, during the course of his rising popularity online, he began dating and eventually got married to his girlfriend, April. They have since welcomed two daughters into the world, with the elder daughter needing a lot of medical treatments from unspecified complications.

I believe this, above all else, changed the course of the Angry Video Game Nerd and James Rolfe.

During this general era of the Nerd’s existence, some significant things began to arise that, personally, I completely understand. Rolfe had begun preproduction on Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie in 2012. Post-production was likely happening around the time he and his wife was dealing with those complications from their first daughter being born. In addition to that, Rolfe’s original distributors, GameTrailers and Screw Attack, was reorganizing and his distribution was falling out. This was when Screenwave Media came into play.

We’re going to talk in depth about the events of Angry Video Game: The Movie, but let’s talk about the modern era of AVGN and where Rolfe’s life seems to be headed with his interests. Many people are more than happy to express their frustration with AVGN and Rolfe over the last four or five years. This isn’t actually anything new. Going back as far as maybe 2010 or 2011, when Rolfe was starting to focus more on longer episodes with more complicated editing techniques and releasing them less frequently, people were irritated with what they said were a lack of appreciation of fans and blah blah blah.

It only seems to have intensified and it mostly focuses on long time contributors moving on and leaving the production and helping with episodes, a different feel in the writing, and a general inclusion of the people “assigned” (if it can even be called that) from Screenwave to help produce the episodes. You don’t have to go very long before you find YouTube videos that are anywhere from two to nearly SIX hours long. Yeah, there’s a video out there that is nearly six hours breaking down supposed controversies around Rolfe and Cinemassacre (his company he operates with for AVGN and all his other projects) and Screenwave.

Here’s the thing. I don’t necessarily disagree that there has been an evolution of the character and series for the Nerd. This is going to happen with anything that has been long running. Read some of those old B-Movie Enema articles. Those are scuffed as fuck. However, I think this is a classic example of negative parasocial relationships rearing their ugly heads. Look, are all my favorite AVGN episodes from years past? Yes. Do I find the writing of the more recent episodes feel a little less risky than they used to? Yes – but I’m not sure it’s not such a bad idea to be more mindful of what you’re saying in an online video. Am I disappointed in revelation that Monster Madness 2021 had some issues behind the scenes that revealed plagiarism was involved? Of course I am.

But, you know what? That doesn’t tarnish years of entertainment I’ve gotten from Rolfe. That doesn’t change the fact that Rolfe is a human and there have been some things that are better than others and sometimes mistakes are made. It also doesn’t mean that he, as a person, can’t evolve. All that matters is how HE feels about his work and the mark he leaves as an entertainer. No one is forced to watch anything. If you’re not enjoying what’s out there, then don’t watch it. I know the YouTube algorithm is geared to promote videos loaded with negativity, but it’s kind of gross how much people are piling onto Rolfe over what they perceive to be gaffs or mistakes in his own life and productions.

For me, well, I am still a fan. James Rolfe is a guy I’d love to have a conversation about monster movies and some of the favorite games and movies we might have in common growing up in the 80s. But that’s just it… I can admit that I know that the guy I want to hang out with has just as good of a chance of being only a character or someone who only exists on a video and not the guy I think he is. If he is the good guy I think he very well might be, fantastic. If he decided tomorrow to stop being the Nerd, I’d be happy for what he had given us for these many years. I still hold onto my personal desire to see him do more with his appreciation of horror and become a host where he can delve into history of a topic like a favorite of his, Joe Bob Briggs. I’d love for him to be able to express his knowledge and nostalgia for those movies he grew up loving.

But that’s just me. If he decided to stop being the Nerd and he never did another episode of Monster Madness ever again and he simply rode off into the sunset, I’d still be thankful. I’d totally still support his artistic decisions he’s made over the years and I’d still tip my hat and appreciate all the literal months-worth of hours I’ve spent watching his content over the last dozen years or so.

Now with all that said… Let’s talk about Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie. The idea for this movie started relatively early in the history of AVGN. Rolfe began developing the idea as far back as 2006. It was totally based around him constantly being asked to review the infamous Atari game for E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. He raised $300,000 on Indiegogo and filmed in California and closer to home in eastern Pennsylvania around the Philadelphia area. He also did a lot of work with miniatures as well. The film was not exceptionally well received across the board. Some “””””fans””””” were disappointed in the final product, though I’m not sure what they expected or wanted from an expansion of a webseries, but what do I know? Critics were split but it depended on their knowledge of the series and character. It came down to this really being a movie made for fans of the webseries. But, of course, we live in cynical times, so some decided to get loud and obnoxious about the movie, the show, and Rolfe in particular. See above for more.

But let’s dissect this son of a bitch and dig deep into a buffalo’s ass to see what might be stuck up there and have ourselves a good time.

The movie opens with a little bit of a history of the Atari 2600 and its downfall. For the most part, it recaps how Atari had a brand recognition and loyalty higher than almost every other company. Sales were through the roof, but then, in 1982, came the adaptation of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. When the game came out, and received pretty bad reviews, things went downhill fast. In a year’s time, the video game crash killed the industry. We also hear about the rumor of two million copies of E.T. being buried in the New Mexico desert.

Enter Mandi, an executive at Cockburn Inc. She unveils a plan to create a game called Eee-Tee 2. She’s not going to make a game that is better. It’s going to be worse. Much worse. Based on market research, video gamers are now playing games they hate just as much, and possibly more, than the good ones. If this bombs, they’ll be able to cut their losses and through some trickery with the books, and come out doubling their profits. There’s a masterplan that Mandi is counting on…

An endorsement of their shitty game by this guy…

We check in with the Nerd and his fans constantly begging him to do E.T. for Atari. After finishing this episode for Xenophobe, we see that he’s getting help from his friend and co-worker, Cooper. Cooper is essentially the Nerd’s trainee in being a, well, Nerd. He has some rules – no physical fitness, no social popularity, and no chicks, man.

When they get to work, Nerd is hit with the surprise of the advertisement for Eee-Tee 2. When Cooper asks if he’ll review the original one now that a sequel is coming, the Nerd simply says that he’d rather “suck the dried shit out of a dog’s ass fur.” When a fan comes in saying that his last review was so funny, he had to go to eBay to buy the game and find out how bad it was. This is NOT what the Nerd had in mind in reviewing these bad games from the past.

He’s called into his manager’s office, and the manager of the Game Cops store that Nerd works at is insane. He’s constantly yelling and cussing and just a general madman. I love how out of place this character is. I think he’s probably meant to be like those 70s and 80s police captains that are irascible and always chewing the ass of our hero cop – which is why this store is called Game Cops.

Welp, you got me there, movie.

Now the crazy boss wants Nerd to sell the new “War Duty 3000” game that just came in. Nerd instantly thinks the game looks bad, plus, he’s not very familiar with the newer games. However, when someone comes into the store and asks about War Duty 3000. he says it makes want to have an anal evacuation. That only makes the customer want to buy it more.

However, the customer then starts talking about Eee-Tee 2. this starts a whole chant from everyone in the store begging him to review the original game. He reveals to Cooper that he knows the game sucks ass through a straw. But he can’t even feel bad about something and have it mean anything anymore. Cooper tries to get him to go into the whole story about the movie being buried in the landfill, but Nerd doesn’t believe that story.

Cooper gets a call from Mandi who meets the guys at a video game bar to offer the Nerd a business deal. She wants him to see the footage from the new Eee-Tee 2 game so he can review it. The Nerd’s reaction is exactly what you think it would be.

That night, Nerd has a nightmare of when he was a kid playing the first game. When he wakes up, he gets attacked by an E.T. monster. He wakes up again to find an AVGN themed carnival totally dedicated to E.T. and the upcoming sequel. Then he gets attacked by zombies.

You know, typical nightmare shit.

Realizing he needs to do something about this Eee-Tee 2 game to prevent future generations from becoming emotionally scarred as he was, he goes to the Nerd room and boots up his Commodore 64. He finds Cooper in a fantasy online RPG site and tells him he needs to act. This is one of the subtle jokes of this movie that kills me. Of course, Cooper is on a state-of-the-art Mac and the graphics look great. However, for the Nerd, on his Commodore 64, he is seeing it as 8-bit. That just tickles me so much.

Nerd decides to find the E.T. Atari landfill. He plans to disprove the legend of the buried cartridges. He hopes that will help get people to forget about just one of a multitude of bad games. He promises Cooper that whatever he finds in the landfill will get reviewed.

However, they’ve got a little bit of a problem. They don’t have the tools and machines to do an excavation. It’s a good thing that Cooper knows Mandi and Mandi isn’t just hot, but she’s got resources. She pulls up with a van from Cockburn Inc. with all the tools they need to go through with their plans. To the Nerd’s dismay, it’s clear he’s connected to the whole Eee-Tee 2 things now.

As the trip travel across country, Mandi checks in with the head of Cockburn Inc., Mr. uh, Cockburn. Betcha didn’t guess that was his name. Anyway, he tells her that this excavation deal is really expensive. But she tells him that with the Nerd doing a review, all the behind the scenes documentary stuff they are shooting, they’ll make a million times more than what it cost to make the game.

He warns her to not get too close. These guys are the product and not to be treated too kindly. She says he has nothing to worry about because these guys are just a couple of dorks. It’s like I always say: Never trust anal lube made primarily of crushed up fire ants…

Er, I mean, keep an eye on super cute redheads with windowless vans.

They make their way out to where the supposed landfill is. They find their excavation team which is only comprised of about 3 day workers with a metal detector. They begin filming the first part of the new Nerd video. When they start rolling, Nerd talks about how something happened out here in the desert long ago and he’s talking about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. They don’t realize they are being watched by some men in black who are particularly interested in that mention of extraterrestrials.

These men in black are run by an over-zealous general who plans to deal with these interlopers, be they tourists OR terrorists, with the secret base’s armament of missiles. He’s thwarted by one of the soldiers in the base. He orders for some MPs to search the Cockburn van. He doesn’t want any secrets or threats to national security to escape their notice. This General is so overly zealous, that his wheelchair is basically a tiny tank.

When Cooper tries to show that they only have video games with them, the General think he’s pulling a gun. The General pulls a pin on a grenade and drops it near him and it blows his arm off. Apparently, the General has many accidents. His various soldiers and government agents around him can’t quite keep up with all the various things that’s happened to him. In a classic chase through empty cardboard boxes, fruit stands, and a panes of glass, the Nerd and crew get away from the army.

The Nerd realizes that the military guys are clearly looking for something other than what they were looking for. There’s more to that spot the supposed landfill is than meets the eye.

Cooper thinks they should just find the guy who designed the game, Howard Scott Warshaw, to ask him what the deal was behind the creation of E.T. When they get to his place, they find a dilapidated shack with an outhouse and all sorts of shit all over the place. Thinking it’s the FBI, Warshaw shoots at them before eventually allowing them to come in. What they find inside is like a level of a video game with fire traps and difficult jumps.

Turns out the man in this shack is not Warshaw, but a kind of loony tunes doctor named Zandor. He is a paranoid former employee from Area 51. He was the lead engineer to reverse engineer the spacecraft that crashed there. He refused to give the government the spaceship in fear of handing over a weapon of mass destruction. Over the years, he grew bitter and decided to use video games as the instrument of his revenge. He took notice of Howard Scott Warshaw and when Warshaw was up against it, Zandor gave him the game he created – which happened to be a map of Area 51.

Because Zandor was on a watchlist, it was the government who ordered the recall of E.T. not Atari. That’s what the government wants in the desert – the remaining pieces of the spaceship. Zandor says that he wants to get back into Area 51 and save the alien that was also recovered in the wreckage.

It’s a good thing Zandor spilled the beans to our heroes in the fridge to prevent anyone from listening in because the General and his gang are listening in trying to find out what Zandor was telling them.

About halfway through this movie, you can sort of see the positives and negatives of the movie getting pretty clear. As for the good stuff here, there are a lot of jokes that do work. I’ve already talked about the irascible boss at Game Cops. That’s a broad joke that works. The few instances of physical comedy are pretty good like when Cooper sneaks out of his house carefully in order to not be caught by his overbearing mother, only for him to fall out and land hard on the ground. That’s a funny little moment – especially backed up by him bouncing back to his feet as if the fall didn’t bother him. The General character is crazier each time you see him. After blowing off his arm, he’s just got a gaping, scabby wound where his arm used to be. These are the more charming cartoonish elements of the movie.

There are also some really good, quieter, jokes that land too. The Nerd being almost like something from the past in almost everything he experiences from his Commodore 64 being able to interact with a new Mac to his near insistence that he doesn’t play new games. The Nerd is kind of throwing out one-liners too as if he’s narrating or commenting on some of the kookier stuff in the script like the line, “Oh, now there’s an alien…” comment when Zandor talks about needing to save what he couldn’t in Area 51. These things work pretty well when it comes to the expansion of AVGN as a character and a character in the world he inhabits.

But it isn’t all great. One of the bigger issues that I think this movie has is that for it being called Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, the Angry Video Game Nerd is only a piece of a larger puzzle that makes up the movie. The movie is kind of happening to the Nerd. He’s almost a supporting character in his own movie. Part of this is probably because this is a character that is expanding from a 10-minute video into a 115-minute movie. There’s not quite enough for the character to do for a full feature. If I were to juxtapose that to the Cinema Snob’s movies, the Snob is still the Snob, but he finds himself embroiled in a situation that he is taking the steps to solve. It’s almost as if the Nerd is an unwilling participant in this movie. That makes it easy for him to kind of fade away in the presence of the story at large or the craziness of a character like the General or this mad scientist from Area 51.

Then there’s that beefy runtime of 115 minutes. That’s great that Rolfe had enough to write a script that would make up a movie of nearly two full hours, but the movie is overstuffed. It probably is why I find the Nerd himself, the guy I want to see more of, kind of disappear into the background. One of the saddest things to kind of roll out of the reaction to this movie’s release is that this was perceived by some of those cynical turds who like to make whole documentaries trying to claim AVGN is objectively a bad thing to be an abject failure. That the [insert hyperbolic adjective here] failure of the movie was why people don’t like the AVGN show now and that it somehow changed Rolfe.

That’s all horseshit.

Generally speaking, this script is absolutely fine if this wasn’t the movie made for/about AVGN as a character. If Rolfe had made this movie about any ol’ internet reviewer and sent him on this adventure, it basically works on that alone. It wouldn’t even be hurt by the long runtime. James Rolfe is not a flawed content creator because he made a movie that isn’t the greatest movie ever made on a $300,000 budget and based on a character who usually only exists in small bits online. Again, there are people who will point to other things, some of it personal and, frankly, I don’t like how that’s commented on, that led to the show possibly fading with popularity, etc. But I don’t think this has anything to do with it. If nothing else, it’s possible this was meant to be the end of the character, but that’s just my own theory.

Back to the movie. Zandor gives our gang a place to stay. He’s got this crazy thing that keeps the house difficult to find on radar if and when the military come for them. The big stipulation is that they must stay inside. This stealthy radar thing also creates havoc on TV and cell phone reception. Cockburn calls Mandi to say he’s got a great idea. He wants to do a convention at the landfill site and use that to release Eee-Tee 2. However, the bad cell phone reception leads to a miscommunication when she tries to tell Cockburn to not go to the landfill. She leaves the house to call him back, but that gets her captured by the military.

The next morning, Cooper is convinced that Mandi is working with the government and Nerd learns about the impromptu convention at the landfill. He and Cooper also learn that, yes, indeed the extra copies of E.T. were buried in the landfill in the desert.

Mandi is able to stall the military who has her captive by using simple misdirection. First, she’s given the wheel of the big military truck to drive them to Zandor’s place, but she keeps driving in circles and eventually takes them to a frozen yogurt place called Dingleberry’s. Then, she basically leads them back to the landfill and just turns them around in circles knowing that the General won’t let the soldiers hurt her because she knows where Zandor is. Meanwhile, at the landfill, the people keep showing up, including longtime AVGN contributors Kyle Justin and Mike Matei.

Nerd shows up at the landfill to try to tell the people there that there are no games buried in the landfill and all the legends around it are bullshit. He’s happy that people are starting to turn around and leave. Cooper is disappointed in how Nerd is turning away his fans and denying their requests for his the review of E.T.

The real Howard Scott Warshaw shows up to tell the audience that the legends are real, and that the game is a map to Area 51. Warshaw wants everyone to help dig up the games and they will find the captured alien from the crash. The Nerd decides he’s going to break into Area 51 himself and disprove all the mystical stuff that surrounds the E.T. game and finally end all this crap – which I guess means he didn’t buy into anything that Zandor said the day before despite him taking Zandor’s hospitality and all the other stuff concerning the FBI and military and what not. Also, Nerd and Cooper discover that McButters, the main military lady that was sent to capture Mandi, has her tied up at the top of the Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas to use as bait for the Nerd. The Nerd refuses to go to Las Vegas to save Mandi. He’s dead set on going to Area 51 to disprove the E.T. game legends.

Anyway, what’s the Nerd’s plan to get into Area 51? Well, duh… He needs to dress up like an alien!

This is one of those moments that works really well for me and made me laugh pretty hard. He decides to get into Area 51 will be deadly unless they find a reason to want him to be inside. So he dresses as an alien and they have this makeshift UFO they create. He gets dressed up, gets inside the ship and he tells Cooper that on the count of three, he’s going to push him down this rocky formation. He counts to one and Cooper pushes and slips off the rock. We watch a dummy of Cooper bounce down to the ground and he gets back up as if nothing is wrong. Meanwhile, the Nerd goes shooting off like the rocks created this slide that basically sling shots him into Area 51. It’s fucking perfect. Again, there’s this cartoonish feel to this movie that when those jokes happen, they are perfect.

The Nerd is successful in getting inside. However, at Area 51, he’s going to be dissected if they really do think he’s an alien. The doctors cut open the mask and reveal that he’s an intruder. He fights his way out of the operating room. He can’t open the door because he, first, believes it’s a retinal scanner, but the label on the lock actually says “Rectal Scanner”. Now, see? That’s a good AVGN joke. It’s all dick and butt and fart jokes and that’s what we come to expect from the Nerd.

Just as Zandor said, when Nerd gets into the main area of Area 51, it is literally the same thing as the E.T. video game.

The Nerd gets captured. The General says they won’t be fighting anymore. He watched the Nerd’s videos and liked them. He wants the Nerd to play E.T. While the General tries to get the Nerd to play the game to help him rule the world somehow, McButters says that if Mandi tells her everything she knows about Zandor, she’ll make Cockburn’s new Eee-Tee 2 game the biggest success in history. Both Nerd and Mandi refuse.

Nerd tells the General that Zandor took all the space metal when he left Area 51. What he left behind was actually tin foil. The General was literally foiled. Meanwhile, Cooper is playing a version of the original E.T. that happens to have a connection to the goings on in Area 51. He is able to free Zandor’s alien buddy from his captivity chamber. Things start getting to a fever pitch as the General now decides to blow up Mt. Fuji in Japan – the mountain Atari used as an inspiration for their logo. The missile launching will also kill the Nerd. It’s a good thing that E.T., or I should say Eee-Tee, is there to save the Nerd in the nick of time.

After escaping the room, the Nerd sees a lot of the other conspiracies locked away inside Area 51 – Tupac, Elvis, and Michael Jackson, all alive, all inside Area 51. You know what else Area 51 has? Boxy robots that chase after the Nerd and Eee-Tee and fire lasers at them.

And so here we are… The video gamers at the landfill are trying to break into where the games are buried. Nerd and Eee-Tee escape Area 51 in a jet. Cooper is going to break into Area 51. The missile is on the way to blow up Mt. Fuji.

So a very weird thing comes back from earlier in the movie and I really need to try to explain this because we’re basically at the climax of the movie. Earlier, Cooper was talking with the Nerd and Mandi about all the various conspiracy theories that he believes in. One of the crazy things he mentioned is basically this all-powerful, god of all gods, Death Mwauthzyx. Basically, he can undo the entire multiverse with a twitch of the radio antenna on top of his head.

Now, apparently Eee-Tee has something to do with the human race and came to Earth to put an end to all the nuclear shenanigans before Death Mwauthzyx found out and decided to undo everything. Where does this god of all gods live? Mt. Fuji. When the missile the General sent there destroys the mountain, Death Mwauthzyx awakens.

Sigh… Seriously, I feel sorry for those of you reading this article who have no idea who AVGN is or anything about this movie or anything. If there weren’t pictures from this movie in this article, would you think I was having a massive stroke? This is all batshit insane.

In order for Eee-Tee to help solve all this, he needs to get his ship. Unfortunately, the ship is in a million pieces. The good news is that Zandor knows where those pieces are buried.

Everything is basically off the rails. The General is at the landfill looking for Zandor. Mandi and McButters are having a sexy catfight on top of the Eiffel Tower. The Nerd and Eee-Tee are being shot at by the air force. Death Mwauthzyx is rampaging through Vegas with a captive Cooper. All the while, Whitney Moore, best known for Birdemic, is just trying to get married to her boyfriend at a Vegas chapel.

In Vegas, Mandi knocks McButters off the Tower, but gets captured by Death Mwauthzyx. At the landfill, Eee-Tee summons all the pieces of metal hidden in all the E.T. Atari cartridges and rebuilds his ship. The General tries to go after the alien but drives off a cliff to his probable death. Eee-Tee and the Nerd go to Vegas and save Mandi and Cooper and take on Death Mwauthzyx. They figure out a way to alter the antenna on the monster’s head to make him want to stop rampaging and leave the planet.

As a final act, the Nerd reviews the new Eee-Tee 2, but it’s the original that matters most because that wasn’t intentionally bad, it stood the test of infamy. So he reviews the original game finally for his adoring fans.

This movie is absolute batshit insane. It goes from a straightforward adaptation of the AVGN show before briefly becoming a road trip movie and then a conspiracy theory movie and finally a kaiju movie. Again, if you have never seen Angry Video Game Nerd, you wouldn’t have any idea what the hell the big deal is or why you’re watching it. On top of that, again, if I didn’t include pictures in this article, you’d think I had some sort of serious brain fever trying to explain this.

Much like the idea that the E.T. video game has such a bad reputation, this movie is often cited as maybe when AVGN jumped the shark, if you will. I don’t think this movie is all that bad. Overstuffed? Yes. Sometimes it feels like the Nerd is a supporting character in his own movie? Yeah, sometimes. But bad? No. It’s a movie that the guy we like, James Rolfe, wanted to make, got the funds for, and made. He made a nearly two hour movie, people. That’s kind of amazing. It doesn’t always work and you’re shocked sometimes to see what all is in this movie, but it’s far from bad and it’s hardly worth some of the ire the cynical jerkoffs online give it.

And I mean it… A large percentage of the internet is made up of jerkoffs.

On top of that, it’s a little bit more than your run-of-the-mill internet-personality-makes-a-movie-movie. This is a grand adventure that starts small and becomes an epic that ends with an actual alien trying to stop an all-powerful god-thing. When you watched that very first Simon’s Quest episode of Bad NES Games, did you expect that to be where James Rolfe would go in just ten years?

Alright… Time to call it quits for this 350th B-Movie Enema article. Next week, we start the counting toward the next 350 with the third and final Leo Fong classic. This time, I’m going way back to the 70s for Enforcer from Death Row. Make sure you’re right here next Friday for that

Finally, to kind of put a bow on this milestone post, I want to say thank you for anyone and everyone who has ever laid eyes upon one of these articles. I enjoy writing them. I hope you enjoy reading them. Not all of the movies have been good. Thankfully not all of them have been bad either. I’ve done some good articles and musings. I’ve done some bad ones. Generally, I would say it’s a mixed bag. But don’t take it from me, Here’s what the man of the hour, the Angry Video Game Nerd himself, says about mixed bags that can perfectly sum up B-Movie Enema as a website.

See everyone back here next week!