Before I saw this movie, if you’d asked me to guess what LARPing is, I’d have assumed that it was a sex act that could get you arrested in thirty-seven countries.
I would have been close.
LARPing is “live action role-playing”. It’s adults who dress up like Gary Gygax visions and pretend to be wizards and fight each other with plastic swords out in the woods. It’s a real thing, I guess, and there are obvious jokes to make about these people and this movie makes every single one of those jokes at least twice. It’s about what happens when a pack of turbo-geeks go LARPing away and accidentally raise an evil demon who likes to tear off arms, jaws and heads and eat hearts. It’s a simple story onto which the film hangs lots of broad comedy, no big deal. It’s a film aimed squarely at the sci-fi/fantasy nerds who will get the references. They also won’t mind the heaping helpings of gore and will get tingly in funny parts of their bodies over the casting of Summer Glau (from Firefly) as the love interest.
It took a few years for the makers to get this released, all the while Nerd Nation chomped at the bit on the Facebook page. There’s a digital release happening in February 2014. The month before, the film saw one-off engagements in a few theaters. That’s where I caught it with a crowd who took valuable time away from their video games to come out. They laughed and clapped through the whole thing. Me, I didn’t do much of that, but it was a fun atmosphere.