By Christopher Holland

The Glove is a movie that will be appreciated and understood by a select few, and it’s easy to see that the opinions of the rest of the population didn’t figure highly into the calculations of the film’s creators. This is probably as it should be; the resulting 11-minute short wouldn’t be nearly as endearing if the pop culture references weren’t so thick, or if concessions had been made to allow access for a wider audience. The Glove is a child of geek culture, and its people will embrace it. (Except for those who will get more pleasure from spending hours bitching about it on obscure online forums – but such is the price of geekdom.) Others need not apply.

The plot is based on a piece of short fiction masquerading as a gaming column on the web site gamespy.com. Wisecracking Gabe (Jeremy Young) is the sort of person who, despite his gaunt physique, one imagines would always smell faintly of pizza and burgers, the scent of which his clothes have absorbed during marathon sessions of videogaming. His perpetual bedhead and glazed expression belie hours spent in darkened dorm rooms, sniping fellow Quake competitors or seeking pieces of the Triforce. If you understood those last two references, or if the thought that one of Gabe’s friends has overclocked his floppy disk drive makes you chuckle, then you may be part of the target audience for The Glove. Certainly, Gabe would be a part of that audience.

Our hero’s receipt of a mysterious gaming peripheral (a thinly disguised Nintendo Power Glove, which is itself a sly reference) leads him to question its origins – sure, it improves his aim, but it also has a taste for human blood. The crazy guy down at the videogame emporium assures him that it is a “device of diabolicism.” Gabe, unconvinced, turns to his friend Tim (Dave Miller), who belongs more to the tribe of hackers than of gamers, but it’s OK – the two groups are allowed to socialize, especially when fulfilling their symbiotic relationship. (In other words, when the gamers need a piece of technology repaired or improved that they might play more efficiently.)

Tim recognizes the glove as a piece of advanced technology and quickly begins tinkering with it, adding a camera and microphone so that the glove might see and hear. The logic of these actions needs no explanation; like the mad scientists before him, the hacker god makes these improvements simply because he can. With the added abilities of sight and hearing, however, the glove becomes even more powerful, its aims more grandiose. Gabe finds that his very life may be at stake.

The original GameSpy column by David Kosak is a clever bit of writing, and it does seem a natural for adaptation to film, especially for a group of independents like director Mark Walling and his crew. The script adaptation seems solid enough, never straying far from the source material, with the exception of a framing sequence. One of the places where The Glove stumbles, however, is in the fact that many of the convoluted sentences that made the column such entertaining reading sound terrible when spoken by actual actors. And the gents who appear in The Glove, though they likely donated their services, are only approximations of actual actors. Young is pretty appealing when he’s given convincing things to say, but as many a cast member in a Kevin Smith picture has discovered, it takes a particular kind of thespian to pull off some of the anfractuous conversations that sound so good in the wiseass screenwriter’s head.

The remaining bits of of atmosphere provided by Kosak’s prose were translated to stage directions, and are handled by Walling with aplomb. One suspects that Walling’s familiarity with the personality types in question helped him to recreate the milieu so succesfully, but in any case the film reeks with authenticity.

Whether such geeky genuineness strikes you as a good or bad thing is a matter of taste. Those in the know will enjoy the layers of in-jokes (both visual and in the dialogue), true, but there isn’t enough original material to support all of the references and homages. It’s not so much a full-fledged movie as it is pop-culture “Where’s Waldo.”

Laid on with similar thickness are the special effects. Computer effects, the likes of which would have made George Lucas turn green in 1977, are now available to anyone with the know-how, a few thousand dollars and a lot of patience. Aaron Nanto of NantoFX wrings every dollar out of his expensive setup – nearly everything on screen glows, pulsates, or shimmers at one time or another. Most of the effects are well-placed and there’s no doubt The Glove benefits from them tremendously as opposed to, say, the practical effects that might have been achieved for the same price. Excising about ten percent of what made it on screen, however, might have made it feel less like the original footage had been assaulted by a video toaster.

Walling and company are to be commended, at least, in their choice of subject matter. So many independent filmmakers glom onto existing works that it seems the DV revolution was created simply to churn out Star Wars fan flicks and Blair Witch parodies. Original pieces of short film, even those as steeped in media worship as this one, feel like victories against the hordes of camcorder hounds hoping to attract attention with yet more footage of Jedi-clad nerds with makeshift lightsabers.

As a geek and fellow disciple of the movies, I admire the efforts that went into the making of The Glove. The movie is an effective demo reel for Walling’s company, Beer and Smokes Films – it definitely makes you want to see what he comes up with next. But as a satisfying film in an of itself, well, let’s just say this: The Glove is the cinematic equivalent of a bag of Doritos – full of flavor and finished quickly, but hardly nutritious – and then of course, there’s the cheesy residue with which to contend.

The Glove is available on an extras-packed DVD directly from Beer and Smokes Films, www.beerandsmokesfilms.com.

If you liked this article, please order B-Movies Quarterly #2.