Street Fighter

English as a second language never
made bad lines sound so... bad I guess.

Well, I threatened to do it, and I like to think if nothing else I'm as good as my awful words, so here it is, a full length review of Street Fighter. Released in 1994, this film was a monument to bad script, poor acting, ridiculous plotting, lame effects, and other general tom-foolery. Jean-Claude Van Damme, renowned around the world for being in stupid action movies where he acts poorly, plays Colonel William Guile, who is heading a task force of Allied Nation soldiers as they attempt to wrest control of the fictional, and EXTREMELY stupid sounding Shadaloo (which granted is Capcom's fault but whatever it's still contributing to the dumb) from the grip of drug lord turned dictator M. Bison (Raul Julia, best known to the current generation as Gomez Addams) who has kidnapped AN relief workers in the hopes of extorting an insane amount of money out of them. Guile has a personal vendetta against Bison, as does news anchor/actually a secret ninja Chun-Li (Ming Na) Also there are like a million other characters from the street fighter franchise, thrown in for good measure and serving only a passing purpose in the film's plot, which outside of the central Bison vs. most everyone else, doesn't make much of anything remotely resembling sense.

Silent Hill

Look at the time...

"Welcome to Silent Hill"

Happy Thursday everyone! We're still in the thick of October, and a new Silent Hill movie, Silent Hill: Revelation, is hitting theaters this Friday, so I thought now would be an appropriate time to talk about the original Silent Hill movie, a movie which surprised me by not sucking ass. You might recall that I did a two part list of the shittiest game movies ever made (here and here) and mentioned that there was a short list of movies that fell into that category and were not absolutely awful. Among those was this movie, released in 2006. Based loosely on the games of the same name, Silent Hill starred Radha Mitchell (you might remember her from the science fiction/horror film Pitch Black), Sean Bean (to a lesser extent than Radha Mitchell, we don't see as much of him) and also Laurie Holden (most recently she has portrayed Andrea on the AMC original series The Walking Dead) portrays the police officer Cybil Bennet. Jodelle Ferland (she appeared in the Twilight sequel Eclipse as Bree Tanner) portrays the requisite creepy little girl.

The Worst Of Videogame Movies: Part 2

I just couldn't let this priceless shot go to waste.

Ah, weekend at last! As promised, I return to the table for another helping of movie adaptations of video game franchises that make me want to throw up. Having exposed the most repulsive examples of this category from the 1990s, we now move into the 21st century, to find that, while attitudes may be changing, and effects may be improving, the situation is ultimately no better. To the contrary, I am firm in my belief that the top of this list is actually the absolute worst that the genre has to offer (other than Double Dragon, that movie was fucking awful). It's worth mentioning that I will not be including the resident evil movies on this list. I've already talked about them in the past and... frankly I don't trust myself to talk about them without having some sort of rage blackout. Back to the subject! I give you, with increasing horror:

Game Movies: A Retrospective (Part 1)

It's Saturday, and you know what that means! It's time for a special post, and as promised today I will be discussing movies based on games! I was originally going to do the top 7 worst movies based on video games, but there were just so many bad movies that I decided I would break it up by decade. There are so few examples of good video game movies that I will probably do a post devoted just to those at some point in the future. So here is in order, the top 5 worst video game movies of the 1990s.

THE WORST 90s VIDEO GAME MOVIES

The Craft

Prepare to travel back in time.

"Welcome to the witching hour."

The witching hour to be more specific, was early May, 1996. I promised to spend the whole week reviewing movies without explosions, and technically this follows that. Mostly. Shut up.

When I think about the '90s, no movie to me more embodies the very middle of the era than The Craft. The craft centers around the new girl coming to a catholic high school, where she falls in with three weirdos who practice witchcraft, they all start practicing witchcraft, and then they use it to do really petty, nasty things to all the people who they feel have wronged them in some way. They each represent their own archetype of 'disenfranchised high-schooler who wants to get even. Robin Tunney, following her performance the previous year in Empire Records (though you may better know her today as Special Agent Lisbon on TNT's The Mentalist) portrays Sarah Bailey, a 16 year old girl with suicidal tendencies in her past, along with a history of hallucinations. Neve Campbell, probably best remembered as Julia Salinger on Party of Five or Sidney from the Scream franchise, portrays Bonnie, a girl with severe burns that make her the subject of bullying. Rachel True, who honestly never went to do much of anything (she has since had a handful of bit parts on tv shows and tv movies) plays Rochelle, a girl picked on mercilessly by the popular crowd because they are great big racists, and Rochelle is the only African-American student in the whole school.

Resident FUCKING Evil

I'm going to try and stay calm. Try.

"A secret experiment. A deadly virus. A fatal mistake."

Yeah, that's the God's honest truth man. Let me clear those things the FUCK up.

"George Romero writes a script to Resident Evil. Paul W.S. Anderson writes one too. They scrap Romero's script and go with the much more idiotic one."

So let's talk about that. We can assume, from the title, that Resident Evil is a movie based on a long lived, and relatively acclaimed game series of the same name, which basically started the survival horror genre of video games. Sounds ok so far. Video game movies aren't exactly known for being... less than the worst crap ever, but still, we can be hopeful. Then, something that is similar to God reaching down and slapping Hitler in the face happened. Capcom and Sony Greenlit a Resident Evil movie with GEORGE FUCKING ROMERO writing the script. For those of you just joining us on the planet earth, George Romero is the man responsible for Night of the Living Dead, and the subsequent movies. That's right, the guy who gave us the modern zombie movie, and also the premise around which THE ORIGINAL RESIDENT EVIL GAME WAS BASED. This could still go bad if the script didn't really follow the game. I mean, Romero is known for his movies having strong social commentary in the undertones, maybe he'd go overboard with that? No kid, he wrote a script based around the Arklay Mansion incident, which was the basis of the first game. It included Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine as the main characters (same as the game) and such characters as Barry Burton, Ada Wong, Rebecca Chambers and Albert Wesker (All of whom were present during these events in the game). This sounds great from where I'm sitting. But no. That movie never did, and never will happen. Why? According to the Capcom producer, "Romero's script wasn't good. So Romero was fired".

Well la dee fucking da. I'm not ruling out that possibility, but if the final movie directed by Anderson is a reflection of what they think is good well maybe Romero's script was the best script ever written. Let's talk about that. Instead of the earlier mentioned script, we get that world viewed through the lens of a TOTAL MORON. There's still a mansion, only it has a ABSURD JOKE CITY UNDERNEATH IT. Ok Resident Evil is replete with shit like that, so we can forgive it. Umbrella still controls this facility. Fair enough. All the original characters are axed.

um... ok.

Instead we have Alice. Milla Jovovich is Alice, a lady who wakes up in said mansion, which is not actually all that big. She has no memory and everything is dreeeaammlike. She accompanies a team of the Umbrella Corporation's Commandos into their compromised facility, along with some other guy who also doesn't remember who he is. The facility is controlled by a evil little girl hologram computer... thing, called Red Queen. You guys following this clever subtext? ALICE IN WONDERLAND IF YOU ARENT GETTING IT. So the team enters, seemingly totally oblivious to what the hell is going on in this place, and they meet some zombies. Like 8 million of them. In the ensuing sequences, some of the dumbest crap happens. These guys suffer from the standard 'no one in a zombie movie ever saw a zombie movie' problem.

"hey Im rough and tumble latina michelle rodriguez. Theres a survivor!"

-obvious zombie-

"Fuck she bit me!"

-surrounded by zombies-

"Im the stupid team captain, AIM FOR THEIR KNEESSS"

I'm not kidding he really gives that suicide order. Way to go champ. Then plot twist WOO Alice and other Amnesia Guy were both working for Umbrella! Only Alice was gonna betray evil Umbrella, and Other Guy was going to kill her. Slowly they remember, and then he tries to screw everyone over. Only he dies cause he's a jerk. Everyone slowly dies over the course of the movie, except for Alice, and cop Matt Anderson, who's looking for his sister in some demented inverse Ada Wong situation. The one guy who almost survives, struggling all the way, BAM killed by a licker right at the end of the movie. Super time guys, glad we were waiting for the end of the movie so he could be killed like a punk. That's how I felt at the end of the movie to be honest. sort of like this:

Ouch.

     Thanks a lot fot the awesome movie guys. I had a great time, and an even better time imagining the great movie that could have not involved half an alice in wonderland allegory, part of a 2001: a Space Odyssey reference, and a lot of supremely dumb plot. A+ assholes.