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Pure Pwnage
26-year-old video game enthusiast and
dedicated narcissist Jeremy (Jarrett Cale) doesn’t have time for
trivialities such as getting a job, finding a girlfriend or moving out
of his mother’s basement. Under his gaming guise of ‘teh pwnerer’ (the
owner) he’s too busy destroying the ‘n00bs’, or novices, he so
disdains, talking endlessly about how much he pwns and hanging out with
his First Person Shooter-obsessed best buddy Doug (Joel Gardiner).
The pair’s misadventures are filmed by
Jeremy’s younger brother Kyle (the show’s co-creator Geoff Lapaire), an
aspiring filmmaker who both disdains and is seemingly enchanted by his
older sibling’s misguided arrogance, lack of ambition and knowledge of
the real world. Also along for the ride are October (Melanie Scrofano)
the beautiful employee of the Mouse and Pad, the computer cafe where
Jeremy and Doug do much of their gaming, and Tyrel (Eli Goree), a cool,
socially aware gamer who attempts with limited success to introduce
Jeremy to girls and teach him how to behave in the wider world outside
his basement.
This thoroughly enjoyable tech-head
mockumentary started life as a series of Internet-distributed webisodes,
and the ethos of the original web series has been kept very much intact
in the TV adaptation. Over the course of the season’s eight 20-minutes
episodes we see Jeremy get kicked out of his house, attempt
unsuccessfully to get laid, begrudgingly learn the value of a hard day’s
work and prepare himself for ‘Pwnageddon,’ the biggest videogame
tournament of the year, all the while bragging about his amazing skills
and ever oblivious to any real opportunity for self-improvement.
Though the acting from leads Cale and
Lapaire is a little patchy, they are ably backed by the uniformly
excellent supporting trio of Scrofano, Goree and Gardiner, as well as a
slew of well-cast minor characters and the odd celebrity cameo from the
likes of Kenny vs Spenny’s Kenny Hotz. At one point Jeremy,
October, Doug and Tyrel even form a (Guitar Hero) band, briefly
recruiting Anvil axeman Steve Kudrow and rocking the crowd at the Mouse
and Pad with such ditties as ‘Master of Sandman’, ‘Green Yellow Orange
Orange Red Blue’ and the classic ‘Tilt Your Guitar,’ which garners its
own hilariously overwrought music video. As ever though, Jeremy’s
insistence on ruining every good thing in his life and, to a lesser
extent, Dean’s penchant for smashing things, threaten to derail the
entire project before the band has a chance to get off the ground.
Though each episode essentially follows a
similar premise there’s still plenty of variety stylistically, and
Pure Pwnage remains a cleverly scripted and one-of-a-kind
celebration of slacker subculture. It hasn’t been renewed for a second
season and it’s been a long time between webisodes, so this DVD release
appears pretty much to be the culmination of the Pure Pwnage
universe and its farewell – web-savvy gamers, fans of the online series
and those who like their comedy irreverent shouldn’t miss it.
Special Features
27-minutes of Production Featurettes,
essentially a series of in-character behind the scenes mockumentaries
within a mockumentary. It’s very meta... and very funny. Also included
is 35 minutes worth of ‘Jeremy’s Mail Sac’ featurettes, in which Jeremy
answers fan mail, mouths off about gaming and, unsurprisingly, pwns a
few n00bs in the process. |
