Top critical review
2.0 out of 5 starsSeen it all before
Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2019
I was hoping for something like Gamers: Dorkness Rising which was fun and had some good bits. What I got was some simple mechanical humor like bodily functions and lots of stolen jokes.
I did watch through and then the next 3 eps. It is almost all stuff you have already seen done to death in other people's works. This leaves it incredibly predictable and sad.
Where Dorkness gave you characters that were somewhat cliche but likable this series is just card board cutouts who have been used in "comedies" so many times it is cringe worthy. Remember if you want to make a parody you skewer something that is cliche, you do not just copy some other comedy's cliche. This is like someone copying Airplane! only putting it in a submarine. Submarine! not a parody, just a knock off.
Is it a parody? Well the idea of a parody is that you parody something and not that you just decide to dump someone's jokes into your copy of someone's parody. So after you have seen Dorkness, The Guild, and many other Fantasy comedies this just comes off as a pile of plagiarism. It is predictable because you have seen it all before and you have seen it before because it was plagiarized. While most of the garbage you see on TV/Streaming is mostly plagiarism, comedy has to live by a higher standard. A stand up comedian who steals gets smoked, with comedy people (hopefully) expect fresh and funny and not other people's jokes told by a thief. When they did the 3 stooges I wanted to puke and after Duke Nukem ripping off Army of Darkness/Bruce Campbell that pretty much put reusing Ash lines off limits unless Bruce Campbell does them himself, so I cringed when they did that. The "reality TV" side interviews? How long ago was Drawn Together? The inserted flash/cartoon bits? That was played out years ago.
The unfortunate thing with comedy is when people ask me how to write comedy I have to explain "You are funny or you are not and most people are not. If you can keep crowds cracking up and enthralled, go write that. If you cannot, then please do not try and NEVER do someone else's jokes.". Being funny is usually something the comedian paid a heavy price for over their life and has developed as a defensive mechanism.
I would give it 1 star because Amazon showed commercials at the beginning (judging the entire product here) but I like small teams trying. This may be their first attempt and their next may be better if they decide to do their own stuff. So they get an extra star. They may not have know that "Hey, remember in that show and that other movie and that other movie, oh and that other show, when the guy though he was invisible but wasn't? Lets use that!" is not OK.
Shows like this show that any group of friends has a shot at making their own feature and that is a good thing.
