Game on

Massive video game expo blasts into Irving with free play, celebs, and retro fun

One of the most interactive video game conventions in the country, the Let’s Play Gaming Expo, blasts back into Dallas-Fort Worth for an action-packed weekend of alien invading, dot munching, and pixel blasting. The all-ages event will take place August 9-11 at the Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas.

If you’ve never been to Let’s Play, here’s the deal: you can get your game on with console and arcade games all weekend long, leaving your quarters at home as all games are set on free play, including such classics as Pac-Man, Q*bert, and Space Invaders.

Convention organizers team with some of the premiere collectors in Texas, so there will be rarities to check out, as well. If you haven’t played the Atari 2600 or ColecoVision in decades, the console area will send you back in time to your childhood.

Tournaments will be held throughout the weekend; most are free with admission, but you will need to pony up $10 to take part in the Southern Regional Qualifier for the Classic Tetris World Championship, which will be held at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo in Oregon.

For collectors, Let’s Play features a sprawling vendor’s area with more than 85 booths filled to the brim with cartridges, consoles, and collectibles. There'll be boxed rarities, complete game systems, toys and related items, and much more for sale.

Celebrity guest speaker
Of course, no world-class video game con is complete without special guests. This year's featured guest speaker is Brian F. Colin, who designed and created the art for Rampage, the 1986 coin-op classic from Bally/Midway. The game, which featured giant, Godzilla-type monsters crushing buildings, was made into a feature film last year starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Colin, who lives just outside of Chicago, was invited to the set during the production of the movie, part of which was filmed in Chicago.

“Someone from the Chicago casting company called me and said they’d love to have me down since I created Rampage,” he says. “I was an extra running through the streets of Chicago a couple of weekends, and then someone called me over and said, ‘Hey, this is the second unit director and the assistant director, would you like to do a cameo?’, and I said ‘Sure.’ I spent an entire afternoon running away from an imaginary building, running behind cars, cameras mounted on huge trains. It was fun and wonderful, but exhausting — It was 90 degrees, and I thought I was gonna have a heart attack.” [Laughs]

A couple of weeks later, Colin got a call from John Rickard, who produced the film. He invited Colin out to Hollywood for the final week of shooting.

“I got to hang out and meet The Rock,” he says. “He was as nice as everybody says he is. He was in the middle of filming one of the final scenes of the movie while I was taking pictures with the producers. He was like, ‘Stop, stop I’ve got to be a part of this.’ He came down, and I found out later he was a big fan of Rampage as a child, so I’m geeking out over him, and he’s geeking out over me. It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. I was treated like royalty and got to go to the premiere.”

Colin says he's looking forward to coming out to Let’s Play and meeting and greeting fans.

“Some of the nicest fans and collectors are in Texas,” he says. “I don’t think I get embraced anywhere as much as I do in Texas. They are so welcoming, and they tell me great places to go after the show.”

Other special guests will include voice actor John St. John (Duke Nukem), voice actor Dameon Clarke (Borderlands), cosplayer Dee Rich, YouTuber The 8-Bit Guy, and voice actor Jeff Baker (Star Trek: Legacy), among others. A 30th anniversary celebration of The Wizard video game movie will take place, featuring actor Luke Edwards, who played Jimmy Woods in the film. The Wizard writer David Chisholm and producer Ken Topolsky will be there, as well.

---

Let’s Play Gaming Expo takes place from noon to 8 pm August 9, and 10 am to 6 pm August 10-11. Tickets are $20-$35. For more information, visit the website.

Let's Play Gaming Expo comes to Irving August 9-11.

Photo courtesy of Let's Play

Let's Play Gaming Expo comes to Irving August 9-11.

families movies technology celebrities interview

Movie Review

Faces of Death returns with modern twist on cult horror film

Photo courtesy of of IFC Films

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death.

True horror fans will likely be familiar with the 1978 cult film Faces of Death, which purported to be a documentary showing real-life killings in gory detail. It didn’t, of course, but that didn’t stop rumors from continuing to spread for decades. Now, almost 50 years and multiple sequels later, comes a new version of Faces of Death, an actual movie that pays homage to the original in interesting ways.

Margot (Barbie Ferreira) works at a YouTube-like company called Kino as a content moderator, flagging videos that violate the company’s policies. This means her job often involves seeing some truly despicable things from all manner of depraved people. One day, though, she comes across a video that seems a little too real, and after seeing more similar videos, she starts to believe they’re genuine murders.

Going against her company NDA, she starts to investigate the videos on her own, which puts her on the radar of Arthur (Dacre Montgomery), who is actually kidnapping people and killing them on camera through methods seen in the original Faces of Death film. It’s not long before Arthur tracks her down, with a plan to make her one of his next victims.

Written and directed by Daniel Goldhaber (How to Blow Up a Pipeline) and co-written by Isa Mazzei, the film is not so much scary as it is creepy, with the occasional gross-out sequence. The idea of having someone emulate the killings in the cult film is a good idea, and pairing it with the modern-day attention economy - in which content creators go to increasing lengths for clicks - is a clever twist on a concept that other films have done.

The film as a whole is a commentary on how social media and video sharing sites have often decided to prioritize profits over the well-being of their users. Margot is shown allowing videos involving violence and sexual assault to stay on the site while nixing ones depicting how to use Narcan or demonstrating putting on a condom on a banana. Josh (Jermaine Fowler), Margot’s boss, is even explicit in the company mandate that outrageous videos drive views.

While Arthur has the makings of a good villain, there are few attempts to make him seem truly diabolical. His kidnappings often seem more spur-of-the-moment than calculated, and even though he has a well thought-out dungeon at home, the house’s location in the suburbs seems to make him vulnerable to easy discovery. Goldhaber and Mazzei leave more than a few unanswered questions along the way that take away from the intensity of the story.

Ferreira is yet another actor from Euphoria who’s capitalizing on her exposure from that show. She plays Margot’s increasing anxiety well, and when the action ratchets up in the final act, she meets the moment in a satisfying way. Montgomery returns to the vibe he had while playing the evil Billy on Stranger Things, and even though his character doesn’t fully live up to his potential, Montgomery sells his evil for all it’s worth.

The new Faces of Death may not be what some are expecting given the reputation of the previous films, but it’s a solid horror/thriller that uses the brand as a launching pad into something different. It doesn’t make much of a dent in the scare department, but it does give its violence and gore a degree of relevance in today’s often desensitized world.

---

Faces of Death is now playing in theaters.

movies film