How a 2013 Mark Hamill video game comedy finally earned a 2023 release

For savvy film fans who think they know Mark Hamill’s career backward and forward, watching a clip from the lost film Virtually all HeroesIt can sometimes be quite jarring. Here’s one of fandom’s favorite actors, dressed in Jedi-brown monk robes, dispensing terrible lemonade and questionable wisdom to a confused man who promptly calls him a pussy. The film feels like it’s a parody on Star Wars from late-era. Hamill is the wise Jedi, and the crude wannabe warrior needs his counsel.

G.J. Echternkamp’s movie about a Call of Duty/Far Cry-style video game protagonist who hates his life was made years before Luke Skywalker grossed out his would-be student Rey with an equally unpleasant beverage in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Virtually all HeroesIt’s been on the shelves for over ten years. It’ll finally get its long-stalled digital release on Jan. 17.

Echternkamp’s movie opened at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, then promptly disappeared. Festival-goers might be tempted to blame the film’s few reviews, which weren’t kind. It is a strange film. A shoestring budget project built on old war-movie footage. The movie features snarky referential gaming gags about anything from MMORPG raid cultures to. Guitar Hero Minesweeper. But in an interview with Polygon, Echternkamp explains that the film’s invisibility had more to do with notorious B-movie producer Roger Corman.

Echternkamp was originally going to be a developer for Corman at New Horizons Picture Corp.. But he wanted to try directing a pilot project. “[Corman] kind of gives people projects that are low-stakes, just ‘I’ll toss him this idea, see what he can do with it,’” Echternkamp says. “So there were all these Cirio Santiago-directed Vietnam War movies from the late ’80s and early ’90s that were straight to video. This was probably a passing fad. They would shoot them in the Philippines, and do crazy stunts there.”

Echternkamp says the biggest action sequences shot for Santiago’s films would get repurposed over and over — a helicopter explosion or train derailment was expensive, so Santiago kept reusing the same shots. Corman had the footage available and suggested writing something about it. “It was like the kind of stuff I did in film school,” Echternkamp says. “We’d cut up old movies and make new stuff out of them.”

He and screenwriter Matt Yamashita cataloged every action shot in Santiago’s movies and wrote a script around them, playing with the idea of characters in a war game, shooting their way through an increasingly tedious series of jungle battles. Supergirl’s Robert Baker plays Sgt. Books, a weary grunt who just wants to get some alone time with war reporter Jennifer (Katie Savoy), the constantly-in-peril hostage he’s chasing from skirmish to skirmish. (In one of the film’s best running gags, every time Books and Jennifer are alone, they try to snatch a little authentic flirting for themselves, before she either starts spouting overwrought cutscene dialogue, or new enemies pop out of nowhere to kidnap her yet again and set her up as the end goal for the next level.)

Meanwhile, Books’ constant companion, Lt. Nova (Brent Chase), is having all the fun in the game: charging into a gunfight with a baseball bat equipped to see how far he can get, exulting when he scores a rare prestige weapon, and inevitably, teabagging his fallen foes.

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The majority of the combat sequences they create are based on that footage. Baker and Chase show off their guns and fire. Echternkamp then cuts to a Santiago shot showing a VietCong encampment or weapons cache and a vehicle blowing up. The effect is campy and corny, but the conceit makes it all fit together: Every time Books and Nova die in battle, they have to go back to the beginning of the game, revisiting the same fights — and the same stock footage, to Books’ disgust. At least until Mark Hamill’s mysterious monk shows up to suggest another path through the game.

“So we put this thing together as best I could,” Echternkamp says. “I poured my heart and soul into it, even though the thing about a super-low-budget movie is, everyone’s gonna be like [sighs, shrugs, dismissive tone] ‘It’s OK. Yeah. It’sIntelligent.’ And then New Horizons submitted it to Sundance.”

Echternkamp states that there were offers made by distributors for the film during Sundance. However, nothing came up that was satisfactory to Corman. “I think it was just one of these weird times,” he says. “Ten years ago, streaming was taking over, and I think Roger was not happy with the money that all the different platforms were offering. It just wasn’t that lucrative. Syfy had employed him for 10 years. He did, as an example, SharktopusThese deals are a lot better than the ones that pay more upfront. And I think he was just waiting for something better to come along.”

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“And I was helpless — I didn’t fund it, so I couldn’t just say, ‘I want it out there. Take whatever, I want people to see it!’ And then I moved on, we all moved on. Every once in a while, someone would come back around and make an offer on it, and I would encourage it, but it wasn’t enough money. After 10 years of trying, I finally convinced him. Finally, after 10 years, he was like, ‘Okay, fine.’”

As far as getting Hamill involved in the film, Echternkamp says “even a low-budget Corman production” needs a known star. “It’s one thing to be struggling with your production value in terms of action scenes and car races and explosions and helicopters, but [Corman] always definitely wants there to be somebody that lends some validity to it, where you’d be like, ‘Well, this person isn’t going to be in something that’s totally crap.’”

Hamill’s camp was dubious about the movie’s satirical, in-jokey tone, he says, but they were persuaded by a short film Echternkamp and Yamashita had made together: Captain Fork, an “incredibly dark comedy” about a resentful dad who un-childproofs his house, hoping his 5-year-old will have an accident.

“I was like, ‘Well, [Hamill is] either gonna love this, or think I’m the worst person on Earth. And he called me and was like, ‘That was so well done. It actually had a heart, it toed this amazing line between bleak and sweet.’ And it was just a miracle, because it could have gone either way.”

Echternkamp describes Hamill as “a good sport” about the project, including its quick shoot and low budget. “He was super great. Really sweet, posed for pictures with everyone, talked about Star Wars, and he wasn’t like, ‘Don’t fucking ask me about Luke.’ It was a pretty ragtag thing, so I was very flattered that he thought it was good enough for him.”

Over the past 10 years, technology in cinematography has advanced a lot. This is especially true for low-budget effects as well as digital filming. Virtually all Heroes’ After Effects animations, which give its video game characters health bars, pop-up achievements, and other visual gags throughout the story, are showing their age. Books and Nova could be seen casually killing NPCs from Asia, just as Yamashita’s parody games. The self-aware humor of gamer culture is sharply observed and relevant regardless of whether characters are laughing while trying on unlikely costumes in virtual stores or remembering the key combination to activate a NPC.

“It’s so much better than I thought it had any right to be,” Echternkamp says. “I was super proud of it. But I always had this sense, like, ‘Well, this isn’t really for everybody. I feel like this is the kind of thing that a very specific group of people are gonna love, and a lot of people are gonna be like, ‘What the fuck did I just watch?’”

Virtually all HeroesJanuary 17th, digital platform debuts