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By Chuck Francisco January 22, 2014 Source: Mania.com

Movies centered around the dangers of technology run amuck focused on two primary flavors, in the cyber drunk decade known as the 1990's: angsty cyborg killers with the will to fight their evil corporate programming, and operatic cyberspace dreamscapes populated by "hackers". Sure, every flick didn't fit into this flock, but with the swift tap of my fingers on Apple glass I've just described dozens of films. From among their number rolls Evolver, off the John de Lancie assembly line. Yes fellow nerds, the man who would be Q is the fictional brains behind the Evolver home game, having crafted a prototype robot to engage the imagination and children of consumers at Christmas season. But how should its bugs be tested and kinks worked out?

Perhaps in a nod to The Last Star Fighter, the company decides to bestow that beta tester status upon the highest scoring player of their virtual reality version of the Evolver game (I want to be involved in one of these board meetings at some point in my life. "Yes, give our multimillion dollar prototype to a twitch kid, high on energy drinks and ADD!"). Onto the scene, spinning like a top, rotates Ethan Embry (who I will shameless admit to loving in both Empire Records and Can't Hardly Wait). The spinning analogies are apropo as we are introduced to him engaged in a 90's VR booth, which includes a surrounding, waist high rail, VR helmet, and blaster gun. These earliest games had very rudimentary directional tracking and, while they had their own specific games, were mostly used to play ports of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D (I spent a good chunk of time working at a laser tag and virtually reality place on the Jersey shore in the 90's). So I'm familiar enough with the tech to know the game represented on screen, while cutting edge CGI of the time, was just not possible outside of the fanciest of screen savers.

Embry is one of those actors that is delightful in pretty much whatever he pops up in, including his recent stint on Once Upon a Time. As our protagonist in Evolver, he is moments from claiming the high score when into the game spawns Cassidy Rae as "the love interest". Her appearance womps Embry over the head, leaving him enshrined at second place by a mere fifty-five points. With a quick bit of Hollywood Hacking (TM), he quickly adjusts the score and is awarded with a home visit from John de Lancie's robot install service. I should quickly point out that the hacking itself has a bit more credibility than most films (for the time or at all), which is probably a result of budgetary constraints, but since it actually works, we won't begrudge it.

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Shock-O-Rama: Evolver