Full disclosure: similar to previous reviews of The Jerk and Dune, I recently received a copy of The Wizard from Special Ops Media in return for writing a review.
The Wizard was released in 1989 and stars Fred Savage in his Wonder Years prime as Corey Woods. Here’s the blurb from the package:
Corey (Savage) refuses to let his emotionally disturbed younger brother Jimmy (Luke Edwards) be institutionalized, and the two run away together. They soon join forces with a resourceful girl (Jenny Lewis), who notices that Jimmy has a special talent: he is a “wizard” at video games and gets the high score on absolutely everything he plays. Evading their parents and a sinister bounty hunter, the trio head for a climactic showdown at the video game championships in California.
Co-starring Beau Bridges and Christian Slater, it’s an inside look at the world of video gamers that will have you cheering the whole way!
If you haven’t yet noticed, for the most part I’m a die-hard ‘80s fan, so I will usually defend even the crappiest of ’80s movies solely because I saw them back in The Day and have a soft spot for them. No such luck here, as I don’t think I saw this back in ’89, and I just didn’t like it very much. I was hoping for a lot more footage of classic ’80s arcade games, but clips were spotty at best and consisted mostly of Nintendo ports of arcade games, something I never really got into. I was also hoping for a better ’80s soundtrack, but this was by no means a classic ’80s soundtrack; here’s a partial listing of the tracks. Although I didn’t expect much from the plot, it was clichéd and full of holes, with little payoff or character resolution at the end. The DVD itself didn’t have any special features to speak of.
At the IMDB entry, there were a couple of people who really seemed to like the movie and were excited about this DVD release, so this is definitely for fans like them. It’s hard for me to recommend this DVD to anyone else…
