OK So I watched this on NETFLIX and didn't expect to get more than 10 minutes into it before shutting it down, but I immediately related to the lead character. This film obviously had no budget but still it grabbed me and I couldn't turn away from it. The storyline was really quite good and kept moving. I would LOVE to see GAMEBOX 2.0 with something like a $30,000,000.00 budget. Some great CGI ala Avatar. Some of todays video game effects and of course some SEX and EXPLOSIONS! Wow, this could easily become the new franchise line of films done correctly, right up to GAMEBOX 13.0. Seriously, SAW has grown old, Friday the 13th, Halloween and Freddy are done and in remakes. I really wish some exec with a ton of cash sees the promise of this film.

First there are some plot holes in this movie. We see in the very beginning a kid dies from playing the game. But who was tied up in the mail truck delivering the package which contains the game? How did the driver place the package into the mailbox when he was lashed to the steering wheel? It is not like he was Mr. Fantastic. Wow that in just the first 15 minutes... The actors are second rate, take the "Bad Guy" played by Patrick Kilpatrick (who?) exactly he has appeared in one episode of everything on TV and some secondary roles in poor movies (like this one). So most of the acting is like TV dramas, I can live with that, but the graphics or special effects are horrible. The disembodied "Game" voice sounds like a poor clone of Hal from "Space Oddessy 2000". What they called Zombies looked more like shadows jumping around like monkeys from "Planet of the Apes". The Aliens had transparent bodies like the shadow zombies. In most cases, the movie was just predictable as it had no hook or hidden agenda going. The story was a good idea but like most good ideas discussed over lunch was never developed beyond that good idea stage.

Gamebox has a lot of things in common with Brainscan and Stay Alive, both of which came before it and were probably in the same budget arena. I don't know what Ed Furlong made back then but it couldn't have been much and Frankie Muniz is the only guy in Stay Alive who made any money. I think Brainscan is one of the best of its kind and I'd add Gamebox to the Brainscan end of the spectrum. Charlie's such a mess in the beginning you can't help rooting for him to at least start interacting with humans again. When he gets sucked into the game you figure he's gonna crawl into a hole and die but he turns out to be the perfect guy for the job. Once he's in the game world full time the movie really starts to move. My only problem with it is it could have made more of his relationship with his girlfriend in the beginning. Maybe more flashbacks or something so we see what she's like compared to PRincess. They show her in an old video but she doesn't say anything.

Gamebox 1.0 has nobody in that you've seen before except Danielle Fishel and no one I know has heard about it except me. I saw a sneak screening in Hollywood with people off the street who also didn't know it existed. All that said, it's the best movie I've seen this year. The lead actor is a guy whose girlfriend got killed by a crooked cop. He's a miserable wreck doing nothing with his life except mope and watch old videos of her. Then he ends up with a video game that somehow sucks you into another world. (I'm not clear on how or why he gets the game. That could have been made clearer.) He ends up meeting his dead ex in the other world and the cop who killed her is now an evil gangster trying to kill him. Everything is clever and well thought out and people were crying at the end. I don't know if it's going into the theaters or coming out in blockbuster but you're getting your money's worth either way.