‘Fallout’ Is Secretly a Great Splatstick Film

Going into Amazon’s new Fallout series, I was fully prepared for it to be a thorough attempt at a Prestige Video Game Show. Something chasing The Last of Us’ commercial and critical success. Which is to say, an intolerably beige show about survivor’s guilt and trauma with a capital T. 

To be clear, I loved The Last of Us, but I wasn’t sure I could take some guy in a suit of armor that looked straight out of Warhammer 40,000 tossing and turning while he had a dream about his dead wife or whatever. What I didn’t expect was for the first episode to be a hilariously over-the-top gorefest straight out of James Gunn’s pre-Marvel playbook. Right around the point where a lady with a fork in her eye was rattling off machine gun fire like a Restaurant Nightmares version of Rambo, I realized I was in for something different, and better, than I expected.

Last of Us is a horror game. Fallout is not. Sure, it’s got survival elements and skeletons in creepy underground bunkers, but I don’t think there’s anybody who was ever scared to play it with the lights off. So it’s funny that Fallout is the one that ended up feeling like it could easily be half of a grindhouse double-feature. It charges right past even your Saving Private Ryan-style stomach entrails and into the kind of kills Michael Myers would tip his mask to. 

Showing an accurate estimation of what someone’s face would look like after having a glass blender smashed into it? That is an intentional choice and a flag-plant. Even most violent action movies still pretend that would result in not much more than a cloud of sugar-glass and a headache instead of the absolute waterworks thick jagged glass on a visage would actually create.

As long as you don’t have a weak stomach, it works absolutely perfectly. Partly because it taps into a part of the video-game experience that people tend to shy away from in pursuit of proving these are Real Stories: the outlandishly over-the-top violence. 

Take to YouTube and look up gameplay clips and you’re going to be treated to someone ragdolling into the side of a panel truck, or someone methodically exploding every chicken on some virtual farm. Skate 3's “Hall of Meat” mode is legendary, and I’m shocked at how much Saturday afternoon nostalgia watching a 3D-modeled skateboarder’s spine crunch to the sound of Q. Lazarus' “Goodbye Horses” awakens in me. Even in family-friendly Nintendo fare like Zelda, there’s entire meme templates built around Link getting absolutely bodied. 

Combine that with the fact that probably the second best known attribute of games by Bethesda Software, outside of their massive worlds, is their random, catastrophic glitches, and it feels like they’ve not only done right in honoring the game, but also honoring some of its secondary, user-fueled content. It’s a good instinct, since, in the minds of many, the clips of a Deathclaw making pink mist out of a settler mid-sentence is part of the Fallout world in their own way. 

Of course, you don’t need to get nearly that intellectual about it to enjoy the absurdity of Kyle MacLachlan drowning a man in a barrel of pickles.

One thing’s for sure, though: If we ever get a live-action version of Splatterhouse, we know exactly who to call.