They're absolutely right. This seems far more like a bowel obstruction than a game.

Donkey: There is no shortage of things from my childhood that were blatant examples of rampant merchandizing, and I never really had a problem with that. After all, as I have previously mentioned, I grew up loving Transformers and Star Wars. The former being little more than a twenty minute advertisement for toys, so much so that I actually got just as excited seeing a Transformers commercial as I did watching an episode of the cartoon, and the latter quite possibly being the king of merchandising. Hell, I remember the days of getting out of my Return Of The Jedi bed sheets just to eat my C3P0’s cereal before brushing my teeth with my Chewbacca toothbrush. However, there’s one other company from my past that not only rivals George Lucas when it comes to whoring out their intellectual property, but was also the first company to burn me with its indiscriminate cash grabs, and that’s Nintendo. Super Mario Bros was one of the most beloved games from my and damn near everyone’s childhood, and Mario has truly become a cultural icon. When the first Nintendo-based movie, The Wizard, hit the theaters in 1989, I happily sat through it because even though it was little more than a ninety minute commercial for Super Mario Bros 3, it at least had the thin veneer of a semi-coherent plot. I even watched Captain N: The Game Master on television every Saturday morning, forgiving it of the fact that all of its characters resembled their video game counterparts about as closely as a they did the defensive line of the 1974 Chicago Bears. But in 1993, Nintendo released something that not even the baby Jesus could forgive: the live action version of Super Mario Bros. And this is how you make even the most forgiving of nerds cry…

The Plot:

Donkey: Before watching Super Mario Bros, it’s helpful to stop and reflect on the video game on which it was based. A game that involved a plumber, and to a lesser extent his brother, running or swimming across a series of locales while stomping on mushrooms and turtles, repeatedly attempting to save a princess from a dragon whose deadly arsenal including breathing tiny balls of fire and jumping. That’s it. Now compare that to what you’re faced with: a pair of washed up Italian plumbers meet a secret princess from an alternate dimension inhabited by dinosaurs whose leader, King Koopa, plots to merge the two dimensions and enslave the Earth using technology that’s as laughably ridiculous as it is nonthreatening. If you’re wondering how those two are even remotely connected, the answer is Nintendo giving you a giant middle finger. Suck on that.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: To lube us all up for the clusterfuck that we’re about to grope our way through, the original music from Super Mario Bros chimes in while showing the production company logos, which is probably as close to the game as you’re going to get. But you can almost hear them begging: Remember that game? It was a good game, right? A true classic? Try to remember that for the next hour and a half while we take a piping hot piss in your mouth.

Apparently the special effects deparment of this movie was forced to use Mario Paint.

With that initial soothing throwback out of the way, the movie wastes no time in disregarding every other impression of Super Mario Bros you’ve ever had and replacing it with something that a backwater hillbilly who was sired by an irregular can of Spam would call retarded. It jumps right into a prologue that looks astoundingly bad, bad enough that it could have been made out of rejected programming code snippets from Keith Courage in Alpha Zones for the TurboGrafx 16, which theorizes that when a meteor struck the Earth 65 million years ago, it didn’t actually trigger the extinction of the dinosaurs but instead opened a portal to a different dimension where dinosaurs were banished and continued to evolve. Wow. An inter-dimensional portal was created simply from a large impact? What a great theory. I guess the moral of the story here, kids, is that if you’re ever on trial for hitting someone in the head with a hammer, you should just argue that you weren’t killing that person so much as just opening a mystical portal to another dimension inside their brain, allowing their consciousness to be sucked into it. But once that iron-clad hypothesis is stated, the story’s setup takes us back to Brooklyn, 20 years in the past, where a woman drops an egg off at a convent before fleeing back down into a sewer, presumably to deliver pizza to four men in green rubber outfits and a muppet rat. And her timing is spectacular as within of few minutes of the nuns pulling the bundle inside, the egg hatches to reveal a baby girl. But just as you ask yourself how anyone could bring themselves to abandon their fucked up lizard baby abomination, our answer comes when the woman is grabbed by Dennis Hopper, playing the evil Koopa, as she makes her way through the dark sewer. That’s right; the dragon that kidnapped Peach and had you drop its ass into lava repeatedly is being played by Dennis Hopper.

World 1-1: Less Jumping And Coin Blocks, More Crushing Consumer Debt And Corporate Sabotage.

With that bit of exposition done, we arrive in modern day Brooklyn where we are introduced to the stars of the picture, Mario and Luigi, played by Bob Hoskins of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Unleashed fame, and the irrepressible John Leguizamo, or Johnny Legs. Much like the game, they are a pair of struggling Italian plumbers. Only instead of struggling to make it through an onslaught of Bullet Bills while jumping across tiny platforms, they’re struggling with creditors, constantly losing jobs to the ruthless Scapelli Company, what I guess is a large corporation of plumbers. While bumbling their way through a day and just generally being Italian, they meet a college student named Daisy, who instantly gives Luigi tingly feelings in his trousers that he’s never had before. She takes them up on their offer to give her a ride, disclosing to them that she’s the head of an archeological dig that’s being done on a construction site, which the evil Scapelli Company is trying to intimidate into leaving early so that it can get on with its development. Of course, she doesn’t realize that a far bigger threat is lurking in the shadows, as she’s being watched by two of Koopa’s men. But since none of this is as interesting as burying his little bread stick and two meatballs into her pasta boat, Luigi isn’t nearly as concerned with that as asking her to dinner that night. Finding his greasy awkwardness charming, she accepts.

Say lady, do you want to join me and my creepy molester uncle for dinner?

I'm doing some research into whether the meteor killed the dinosaurs as fast as this movie is going to kill my career.

We flash forward to later that night to see that Luigi and Daisy decide that the best way to get to know one another is to go on a double date with Mario and a call girl. Over the course of dinner, which is Italian of course, Daisy reveals that the purpose of the archeological dig at that particular site is to find the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. Since a concept like that is clearly about 52 IQ points out of Luigi’s league, they instead bond over the fact that they were both abandoned as children, her being an orphan and him having only Mario to raise him. But as their dinner comes to an end and Mario realizes that buying shitty pasta for a pro isn’t going to get him a back alley handjob, he leaves Luigi to walk Daisy home as he runs his call girl back to the brothel. As Daisy offers to show Luigi around her worksite, so to speak, Mario drops off his trick only for her to be promptly nabbed by Koopa’s goons, whom mistake her for Daisy.

Once the awkward virgins arrive at the dig site, which much to Luigi’s disappointment is not in her panties, they wander down into a tunnel where she shows him a dinosaur skeleton that’s formed perfectly in the ground, pointing out its opposable thumb and speculating that it’s like they were monsters trying to be human beings. But just as she’s delivering her doctorate level thesis, two of Scapelli’s evil plumbers burst out of a side room, running like hell as a sabotaged water pipe erupts. In a clear show of competence that proves why Mario was always the star of the games, Luigi runs back to find his brother at home and cries for help rather than attempting to fix anything himself. But once they get back to the site, Koopa’s goons finally realize that they have mistakenly grabbed yet another innocent girl and finally return to nab Daisy after clubbing the Italian duo over the head.

Save me, Luigi! And for the love of God, bring moisturizer!

Not ready to give up on the one woman who might have been willing to scrape the cheese off his tortellini, Luigi and his brother run after them, only to find themselves faced with a narrow but exceptionally deep cavern and an image of Daisy yelling for help at them through a wall and some bad special effects. As Luigi reaches forward to help the sandy image of her face, he grabs an amulet from around her neck, which she had previously mentioned that she has worn since birth. Once she disappears back into the rock, Luigi sees his chance for glory and jumps into the wall himself, disappearing into it, and leaving Mario to eventually follow after some silent film era comedic apprehension. At this point I was quietly hoping that they had found the secret entrance to World -1, where they would find themselves doomed to swim through the same area over and over until you just want to kill yourself. And in a way, that’s not far from the truth.

World 1-2: Down The Warp Pipe Of Abject Failure

A sneak preview of Super Mario Bros XXI: Mario Goes To Hell For Touching Children

After a considerably asstastic warp scene that could have only been improved if they had passed Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and a phone booth, the brothers find themselves in another cave where they again hear Daisy being hauled off by the goons. But when they run after her, they emerge from the tunnels and find themselves in a crowded city that is clearly not New York. After a lot of frustrating and pointless yelling, Daisy is finally taken away in a cab, leaving the brothers stop and notice that they are surrounded by lizard people. Cheer up, boys. Maybe you just warped to Miami.

Now that our fish-out-of-water-and-into-perpetual-stupidity tale has been set up, the movie returns to King Koopa himself, Dennis Hopper, as he bleats on to a female companion named Lena about how horrible the world that they have been exiled to since the great meteor strike is while complaining that the humans have it too good. He laments that once he gets his hands on Daisy and the rock fragment hanging around her neck, which is a small missing fragment from the original meteor needed to “activate” the meteor again, he’ll finally be able to merge the two worlds together and rule for all time. Just as he finishes his oratory masturbation and searches for a mental tube sock to clean it up with, his two thugs arrive, reporting that they’ve brought back Daisy only to then realize that they lost the rock. When they report that it’s in the possession of “the plumbers”, like that should mean a goddamn thing in an entirely different dimension, Koopa puts out a public bulletin declaring that he needs all plumbers.

Despite seeming gloriously moronic, this is actually brilliant casting. I find Dennis Hopper far more disturbing than a dragon.

Back in the streets, Mario and Luigi do a fine job of returning to form, swiftly losing the valuable stone in their possession when it is first stolen by an old lady mugger only to then be confiscated by a big chick in absurd red suit who takes off in ridiculous rocket boots. And their luck doesn’t improve as moments later the cops show up to arrest a busker named Toad for singing an anti-Koopa song on a street corner, only to notice that Mario is a plumber and arrest the two brothers as well. As they’re processed back at police headquarters, the single moment of shining glory that breaks through the monotony comes when they state their names for the record: Mario Mario and Luigi Mario. You read that correctly. According to this movie, one of the most beloved mascots of all time, has the moniker of Mario Mario. But after a brief stay in an overcrowded jail where Toad conveniently explains that they are in an “alternate dimension”, Mario and Luigi are taken to an interrogation room where they find Koopa waiting for them.

If you thought this was a bizarre way to see one of America's most beloved mascots, just wait for the "tossing the salad" scene.

Goombas: in the game, they're turtles, but in the movie, they're an insult to even the intelligence of a four year old.

Posing as a lawyer, Koopa demands to know where the meteorite piece is only to be met by faces every bit as stupid as you would imagine. Tired of his own ruse after keeping it up for a massive 37 seconds, Koopa then reveals his true identity and sentences them to be taken to the de-evolution chamber. The sentence is to be carried out immediately, but as they trot into the facility, they discover that their fellow criminal, Toad, is already there. As a convenient way of showing how the device works without actually using it on either of them first, the brothers watch as Toad is de-evolved, a process which essentially expands his overall body size while simultaneously shrinking his head and reverting it to reptilian a form, thus making him a ‘goomba’. But rather than face their fate, the brothers take advantage of an apparent severe lack of security and rather easily trap King Koopa in his own machine, sending him in to be de-evolved himself while they escape. While basic logic may dictate otherwise, the movie decides at that point that turning its principal villain into a Pez dispenser in a jacket might kill the infinitely small amount of tension in the story, so when the de-evolution process complete, Koopa simply has slightly more reptilian eyes. Maybe the brothers accidentally turned the machine to its “annoying Goth kid contact lens” mode. Running free and virtually without opposition, the brothers manage to escape on a zip line that runs the length of the prison ceiling before hijacking a police car and embarking on a coma-inducing car chase scene that we have seen far too many times by this point. Once they lose the massive fleet of two cop cars chasing them, Mario and Luigi dart down a tunnel where they end up spit out into a desert. And just in case driving out a tunnel that ends in a sudden drop off down a mountain wasn’t enough of a kick to the balls, the car ends up being gently caught by a cluster of fungus before hitting the ground.

Back at the palace, Koopa’s goons interrupt his mud bath to report their continued failure. Well, I think that’s supposed to be a mud bath. Either that or he took one hell of a shit in that tub. Hearing that the brothers have managed to escape into the desert, Koopa takes his two thugs for yet another visit to the evolution machine, choosing to evolve them instead of de-evolving them, which basically just makes them smart. There’s no physical transformation that goes along with the change though. The two thugs just talk like they’re auditioning for an episode of Frasier. Of course this begs the question of why he waited all this time to perform that procedure on these dunces, but this movie manages to dodge the bullet since nobody gives enough of a shit to bother asking.

Lady, you've got to get me outta here. You have no idea where Koopa makes me lick peanut butter from.

The assault of wackiness stops for a moment at this point, instead turning to creepy affairs of the boner variety. After Lena helps Daisy freshen up for a meeting with Koopa, revealing for no particular reason that it was Daisy’s mother who sacrificed her own life to hide her on Earth at the beginning of the movie, Daisy awaits her royal visit in a chamber where a little dinosaur named Yoshi, the pet of the royal family and a character that servers absolutely no purpose in this movie other than to remind you of the game series that this movie otherwise ignores, appears with Koopa following soon after. He rambles briefly about how the planet consists of the one city and endless desert, before trying to seduce her. When she puts up mild resistance to his ham-fisted advances, Koopa applies as much conviction to finishing that task as he has every other one up to this point, backing off and ordering goombas to take her away.

World 1-3: Wait…What The Fuck Is Going On?

You wouldn't hurt the delightfully stereotypical East Indian guy from Short Circuit, would you?

As the movie shifts focus back to the desert, the new and improved goon geniuses manage to fuck up their apprehension of the brothers once again, leaving themselves stuck in mud in the process. And once restrained by Mario and Luigi, they make the completely unmotivated and unexplained decision of switching allegiance. They explain Koopa’s plan to invade the Earth in its entirety before agreeing to exchange the meteorite fragment for Daisy. When the plumbers explain the fucktarded rocket boot circumstances of losing the stone, the two goons immediately identify the woman who took it as Big Bertha, the bouncer of a nightclub. With their powers of brilliant uselessness and inexplicably fortunate idiocy combined, the four of them manage to steal a nearby garbage truck before dressing the brothers up like two like two pastel colored poster children for roofie awareness and heading to the Big Bertha’s bar. But just as they walk inside and see all the bar’s patrons doing a god awful dinosaur dance that makes the Macarena looking as elegant as the Waltz, the coat check girl recognizes the plumbing duo from nearby wanted posters and calls them in. Once they spot Bertha, whom apparently only owns one outfit which I’m imagining smells like a combination of barbeque sauce and loneliness, Mario tries applying his famed Super Greaseball Charms to her only to get the punch in the face he sorely deserves. Taking a new approach, he goes back just to ask to be hit again, and somehow ends up dancing with her to a slow song clearly from the early 90′s. Apparently Color Me Badd is from another dimension, but then that would explain a lot. As they dance, he steals the necklace back from around her neck and sneaks away, leaving her to wonder why the hell anyone would ever trust an Italian. As our heroes try to make a hasty exit from the club, I damn near have a seizure as the club’s DJ starts spinning Walk The Dinosaur, the greatest song to blow its load into human ears since Spin Doctor’s Cleopatra’s Cat, and Lena arrives with a squad of goombas and manages to steal the rock from Mario. In a completely unexplainable change of character, which is beginning to become a staple of this shitty film, Bertha decides to help the brothers escape, giving them a pair of her rocket boots before laying a smooch on Mario that I’m fairly sure just gave her pepperoni flavored herpes. Armed with equipment as shitheaded as they are, Mario and Luigi jump through the roof of the club and land on the street before jumping again into the back of a passing garbage truck to avoid arrest.

Trust me, lady, unless you have a mushroom power-up handy, he'll bring you nothing but disappointment.

Just to spit Tabasco sauce in our eyes after punching us in the sack, the movie shifts our attention back to Koopa, who visits Daisy’s father to gloat over his self-assumed victory. It turns out that her father is the King of the Mushroom Kingdom, and in this case quite literally as he is the fungus that’s swept out all over the city. I’ll say that again. Daisy’s father is fucking fungus, somehow getting that way after he was put into Koopa’s de-evolution machine. If you’d like to know how a goddamn fungus could be sentient, don’t bother asking because any answer would undoubtedly make you mad enough to punch the nearest baby in the face. After that brief and pointless visit, Koopa then orders pizza. Yes, pizza. But not just any pizza; this is pizza with all kinds of crazy shit on it that a lizard would want, which I guess is supposed to be funny, but just makes me question how they honestly expected anyone to watch this.

I could not have guessed that this was the Mushroom King even if I were actually on mushrooms at the time.

Bro, we look like crippled riders of the slow bus. High five!

Prepared for the final conflict, Mario and Luigi arrive at Koopa’s high rise. As they break in and begin to make their ascent, they open a series of pipes to shut down the building’s heating system. They don’t actually sneak up the heating pipes, though, so I’m not really sure what goddamn purpose that served other than saving King Koopa on some utility costs. As they journey through the building from that point, they find and change into outfits which are supposed to match their outfits from the game, although at this point I’m not really sure why they bother. In case no one involved in the costume department of this production noticed, plumbers and other tradesmen wear overalls all the damn time, and it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to have these two assholes in red and green overalls from the beginning of the movie. Finally having them kind of look like their video game inspirations at this point adds less to the movie’s credibility than a cameo by Steve Urkle. To get up the building as quickly as possible, the brothers naturally take an elevator, realizing moments later that even a dying fern would have the common sense to be more discreet as a squad of goombas piles after them. As the elevator climbs, either traveling six hundred stories or set to elderly motorist speed because they’re in it for far too long, Luigi gets a random idea and begins to rock the goombas standing in front of him from side to side, forcing him to sway to the elevator’s musak. Once all the goombas in front of them are doing likewise, the bothers escape out the elevator’s top hatch, leaving the squad to dance with one another. As they flee the scene, Mario asks why the hell Luigi did that. His brother’s response is simply, ” because everyone loves to dance”, leaving me both speechless and wondering what the statute of limitations is for charging a movie company with raping my will to live.

While the brothers continue to approach the ultimate showdown, Lena reports back to Koopa with his two favored goons in custody, explaining that they have swapped allegiance. But after Koopa sentences them both to death, he indignantly storms off, dismissing Lena before she has a change to explain that she managed to obtain the meteorite shard that he has been so desperately looking for. She decides that his slighting of her is enough to justify her betrayal as well, running off to find Daisy before planning to continue on to activate the meteorite herself. Of course, she may as well have just skipped the visit and gone straight to the meteorite, as upon approaching Daisy in her cell, Lena decides to kill her, making a half-hearted attempt before being stopped by Yoshi and allowing Daisy to flee from captivity.

Whoa...does anyone else smell burning turd?

Free from captivity in a building and world that she’s never been in before, Daisy’s emancipation would be assuredly short lived if she had not come across expected and, as always, loosely motivated help. She runs down a hall only to find Toad as well as the two rocket scientist goons being taken away to their execution by a couple of goombas. Through a series of wacky hi-jinks that somehow involve Toad being set on fire without any consequence or even sign of discomfort, Daisy and her three new companions manage to escape together as the goons explain they’ve always been loyal supporters of her father. To make that point clear, they take her to visit him for the first time and discover his primordial state. They leave her to admire the wad of indistinguishable slop that for some reason is dripping slime. After realizing that a mass of dried horse sperm that we’re supposed to believe is fungus isn’t much for conversation, Daisy finds a nearby surveillance system and manages to locate the brothers floundering around in another part of the building, trying and failing to jump across a shaft, only to be saved by the fungus. She gets on the intercom and manages to guide them to her, where she introduces them to the fungal mass that’s been helping them all this time. Once pleasantries are exchanged, she lets Mario know that his call girl, Daniella, and the other missing Brooklyn girls were in a cell somewhere in the building. Hoping to get a quick rimjob out of the deal, Mario takes off to find them, leaving Luigi and Daisy to be arrested by Koopa and his men moments later.

World 1-4: Thank You Mario! But Our Princess Has No Interest In Leaving The Castle With Your Chubby, Dim-Witted Ass!

It may look like fun, but it smells even better. That's actually the building's sewage line.

At this point, the movie starts to break down entirely, collapsing under the weight of its own idiocy. I’ll try my best to guide you through it without blacking out from the pain, so bear with me. Having a special talent when it comes to finding rent-a-vag, Mario breaks into the room where Daniella and the other women are being held. Searching for a way out, he opens a vent, grabs a mattress, and takes the women for frozen waterslide voyage with goombas in hot pursuit. And as much as conventional wisdom or even basic common sense would lead you to believe that the magical pipe that they’re sliding down would likely end abruptly at a grate or sudden turn, what actually happens is far more ridiculous. Mario and his whore-flavored mattress burst out the end of the pipe into mid air and find themselves falling, continuing to fall for about three stories before conveniently landing exactly where Luigi and Daisy happen to be, even though I have no fucking idea how those two got there. Koopa, having recovered the meteorite piece after Lena was recovered trying to use it, is also on the scene and tries to hold our heroes at gunpoint, only to be knocked back by a rocket boot courtesy of Mario. This leads to a minor showdown between the two infamous archrivals, resulting in Mario kicking the meteorite fragment out of Koopa’s hand. This falls down to where Lena is for some goddamn reason, and she catches it just before falling into power lines. You’d think this would kill her, but instead it results in nothing more than a Bride Of Frankenstein make-over. With the rock back in her possession, she takes off to try to use it for the second goddamn time. Luigi, Daisy and the gaggle of Brooklyn girls run after her, leaving Mario to run like hell as he continues to battle King Koopa.

Don't play with power lines, kids, our you may end up with some split ends.

The sequence of events then gets even more preposterous, as Lena makes it all the way back to the meteorite and inserts the fragment, attempting to activate it and merge the two dimensions as Luigi and the women arrive to try to stop her. Seeing that he’s too late, Luigi stead feeds the girls back through to portal to Earth, telling them to warn everyone of the trouble that might come, as if these girls have the slightest fucking idea what’s going on. Moments later Lena is killed by the process that she started, being tossed against a wall by a bolt of energy, which manages to instantly turn her into a perfectly white skeleton embedded in the rock. But the reaction of what she’s done reaches farther than that, as Mario and Koopa, still fighting in the streets where we left them, begin to dissolve and warp across to the Earth. They appear at the archeological dig site, surrounded by a crowd of awaiting media and construction workers. In a show of strength to establish his dominance over the humans in his presence, Koopa fires a de-evolution gun into the crowd, conveniently hitting Scapelli and turning him into a monkey. But rather than being horrified, everyone there just finds this pretty much hilarious. But before the police can show up and prove to Koopa that a monkey gun is a fucking ridiculous threat when faced with much more painful bullets, Luigi and Daisy manage to pry the piece of rock out which reverses the process and causes Mario and Koopa to warp back.

Yep. Dennis Hopper was definitely scarier.

By this point we’re screaming at the television screen for this rectal-shredding bowl movement to end, and the movie finally looks to be obliging as Toad gives Luigi and Daisy de-evolution guns of their own as they run back to find Mario. With a horde of goombas around him, Koopa orders to kill the three heroes when the movie delivers one last roundhouse to our heads. Toad begins to play a song, reaching back to his busker days, and all the goombas ignore Koopa’s order and instead begin to dance. That’s right…the mild swaying that Luigi had a small group of them doing in an elevator somehow translated to all of them having an insatiable love for dance. FUCK ME. Seeing an opportunity to counter, Luigi gets another pair of rocket boots from a nearby Big Bertha, jumping in to join Mario as the two of them now face off against Dennis Hopper. They waste no time in using their guns to de-evolve Koopa, just as a random Bob-omb goes off beneath him, rocketing him up in the air and then back down into a random hanging metal bin. He hides in there for a moment while the brothers wait in anticipation before finally bursting out as a dragon that looks so shitty that it should be fighting Shao Kahn at the end of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, before the plumbers simply blast him again, de-evolving him further until he finally becomes little more than a pile of dog snot. As all on-lookers erupt in applause, Luigi and Mario jump away in rocket boots, rejoining Daisy as the city celebrates. As a brief aside, Back in the room where the Mushroom King was, he drops from the ceiling and instantly evolves back into…Lance Henrickson. WHAT? If anyone can explain to me not only how defeating Koopa resulted in a complete reversal of his de-evolution, but how you can be reverted to a fucking fungus and back without any discernable side effects, I’d love to hear it.

It's your kids, Mario. Something had got to be done about your kids.

With the day finally saved, Luigi and Mario return to the meteorite cave with Daisy, who tells them that she can’t go while she’s got so much work to do here. Luigi kisses her, realizing that many more nights of sexual frustration lay ahead, and the brothers finally go through the portal, warping back to the Earth. Some time later, back in the real world, we return to the apartment of Italian mediocrity, where Mario and his favorite call girl are preparing dinner for Luigi when Daisy bursts through their front door dressed like Rambo and declares to the stunned brothers that she needs their help, adding that they’ll never believe this. As the boys grab their tool belts, apparently thinking that she has come all the way back to ask them to help unclog a shitter, Mario declares that he does believe and the movie ends. Trust me, Mario, if you’re hinting that you believe there’s going to be a sequel, then I’ve got some rather obvious news to break to you.

The Verdict:

Donkey: To say that this movie is terrible is an understatement. To say that this movie is worse than trying to teach your ninety year old grandmother to fight off dementia long enough to learn how to play the game is close, but still doesn’t quite truly express the pain that awaits you. Not only does this movie’s story have nothing to do with the game franchise on which it was based, but it absolutely reeks of the time period that it was made, which drags it even further into irrelevance. This can be seen in the completely inappropriate dark tone and appearance of the movie, because apparently the popularity of grunge music translated into kids liking absolutely everything in the early 90’s to remind them of cutting their wrists, but also in the soundtrack which they tout so proudly. The very first credit at the end of the movie is for the song Almost Unreal by Roxette. And beyond that gem, the album also features Marky fucking Mark (remember that the next time you actually think to take him seriously), Extreme, and Megadeth. Seriously…Megadeth. That just goes to show how far the makers of this movie went to find ways to cater to the masses while forgetting to make it even remotely enjoyable to watch. I give this movie half an Italian plumber out of five portals to unimaginable boredom.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Had dinosaurs continued to evolve, they would have ended up looking like Dennis Hopper. Who knew?

Don’t forget to check back every Sunday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: another journey into the madhouse that is The Asylum, courtesy of…DEATH RACERS.

Back To The Main Page.

Even though Malcolm McDowell was only in the movie for about 30 seconds, they need at least one face you'll recognize.

Donkey: This week, we wrestle with one of the toughest opponents we’ve faced yet. No, not a cybernetic manatee that shoots lasers from it’s eyes and belches acid. I’m talking about nostalgia. Nostalgia is one of the most powerful forces in the world, and yet no one seems to give it the credit it deserves. It allows us to look back at those things that we once loved with so much passion and ignore their obvious flaws. But if you can see it for what it is, nostalgia can free you to love things that you have no other business loving. For example, I love the 80′s Transformers cartoon, while at the same time would describe the new movies as pointless drivel. And that’s not to say that I think the old cartoon is the pinnacle of storytelling. Far from it. If you watch them now, the majority of them are pretty goddamn stupid, as is pretty much anything aimed at children. They have to be. After all, their target demographic consists of people who believe that a cheeseburger is delicious just because a clown and pile of purple discharge tell them it is. But when I watch those cartoons even today, I can still remember running home from the corner store with exactly one dollar worth of candy and suffering through He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe just to watch it. And for just over twenty minutes, everything in the world seems so much simpler again. The new movies, on the other hand, just remind me that I’m watching a film created by a man who thinks that a series of explosions are a good substitute for a story, and that the more unnecessarily spinning shots you can fit into a film, the more likely you are to win an Oscar. And for just over two hours, the entire world seems like one massive intestinal cramp. I’ll take the candy over the diarrhea any day.

When I first suggested that we watch Fist Of The North Star, I had no idea how much history it had behind it. I remembered seeing the movie cover in the video store I worked at years earlier, and remembered the old NES game that it took its name from. But when Milobar went looking for the movie, he found that there was an older animated version of it as well, which I soon discovered was based on an old series of Japanese comics. It turns out that there’s quite the following behind these films. So while I realize that there are many Kenshiro-maniacs out there that will violently disagree with the description of their beloved movies that’s about to follow, I would simply suggest to them that they stop for one moment and ask themselves one question: Do you really think this stuff is actually good, or are you just defending something from your childhood because you loved it back when you weren’t smart enough to know better? Because after watching both versions of the film, I think I know what the answer is going to be.

The Plot:

Donkey: Depending on which version of the film you’re watching, the plot of Fist Of The North Star can vary rather significantly. It can either be the tale of Kenshiro, a deadly martial artist with the mantle of Fist of the North Star, who wanders the wastelands in an attempt to waste his life rather than simply take it himself, while his nemesis Shin plots to take over the world an bring about a new utopia while holding Kenshiro’s love interest as his own. Or the movie can also be about Kenshiro, a deadly martial artist with the mantle of First of the North Star who wanders the wastelands while Shin tries his best to accomplish little to nothing and his two brothers exert their unspeakable powers to provide confusing sidetracks. All I know is, a lot of goddamn heads explode. Little else past that makes much of any sense.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Part I: When The Bombs Fall, Only The Mediocre Will Survive

Donkey: We begin our cosmic adventure through space and time with the live action version of Fist Of The North Star, starring…Gary Daniels? Oh, that’s right: THE Gary Daniels. For those of you who don’t know who that is, fear not, you still won’t know when this movie is over.

Those scars look like they'd go well with green peppers and mushrooms on a pizza.

The movie opens with the narration of Ryuken, played by Malcolm McDowell, as he introduces the film and its main character, THE Gary Daniels as Kenshiro, Ryuken’s pupil and son. As the scene opens to a barren hellscape, Malcolm claims that all the predictions were true. The world has fallen into chaos and the flag of the Southern Cross is the flag of the new order. Now sweet, delicious freedom’s only hope is the symbol of the North Star. As we hear this, we see Kenshiro walking through the desert wastelands, just doing random karate routines while he walks that in no way make it look like humanity’s last hope is an insane drifter. Kenshiro is The Fist of the North Star, which is both obviously and very poorly represented on him physically in a series of scars across his chest that form the Big Dipper constellation. As bizarre as that might sound, keep in mind that looks these ‘scars’ look like someone tried to paste pepperoni to him using a combination of bile and mayonnaise, so it’s far worse that you think. Malcolm continues to set the scene, reaffirming with us that Kenshiro’s is in fact wandering in the wastelands while the world waits for him to fight their oppressors. I don’t want to nitpick here, but maybe someone should go fucking find him then. As the scene fades away from that uninteresting sojourn, Malcolm then changes pace and gives us the details of his own death at the hand of Shin, the Master of Southern Cross and Kenshiro’s nemesis. The scene comes back up and we finally see Malcolm sitting in a dojo, wearing an awesome satin robe that says, “I might be forced to dress like a traditional Japanese man, but I’m going to do it while looking FABULOUS!” Once the evil Shin, played by Costas Madylor (or the poor man’s Michael Paré, if you will), enters and his intention to kill Ryuken is made clear, Malcolm says that he’s ready to die and gives a speech about how the North Star and the Southern Cross are never supposed to fight. In response, Shin assures him that it’s not a fight so much as an execution, pulls out a gun and blows him away.

I've been expecting you, Fashion Police.

At this point I’d like to take a quick moment to reflect. The Southern Cross and the North Star, if I’m getting this right, are schools of martial arts. So the harsh future is ruled by the Southern Cross, a goddamn karate club. Are you kidding me? Close your eyes for a minute, picture the world as you know it coming to an end, and then tell me who you would guess would rise from the ashes to rule us all. If you can honestly say that you think it would be a fucking karate club, then I thank you for reading this movie review, Ralph Macchio.

Don't worry, when we take over this town, dancing will definitely not be made illegal.

Malcolm’s narration continues and takes us two hundred miles north, as we see the people of the ironically named Paradise Valley and their ample water supply, which is apparently a precious commodity. As an expedition returns to the village and begins handing out cans of Pepsi and various other beverages, we’re introduced to an annoying little shit named Bat, who has bleached blonde hair. So in the bleak and post-apocalyptic future, tweens still have access to hair dye, huh? This Eminem wannabe slaps at a complete stranger, annoying him by extolling the virtues of martial arts just long enough to pickpocket a can of food. He takes that food back to a small blind girl named Lynn, but before then can share in the radioactive goodness, a group of future motorcycles, led by Clint Howard, suddenly invades the town and starts setting random fires. Just behind Clint arrives Chris Penn, who sports a helmet of straps. We’ll discover why later, and trust me when I say that it’s not worth the wait, but for now we’ll just think of him as a future thug who is likely into some really fucked up S&M stuff. I know that if you’re anything like me, then right now you’re asking yourself, “two not-quite-as-good brothers of famous people…how much more awesome can this movie pack in?” That’s a fine observation, smart and excessively handsome reader. I swore when I first watched this that if Frank Stallone walked into frame, my brain would probably rip a fart so loud that I’d be rendered both deaf and insane on the spot. But fear not, as this is strictly a two brother affair. Just as it appears that all hope is lost for the hamlet of Paradise Valley, the invasion ends as quickly as it started, and with just as much motivation (read: none) for stopping as it had in the first place. The villagers all seem to forget that only seconds ago they were being run over by B-list stars, their greasy henchmen, and a notable lack of attention from the paparazzi as everyone seeks shelter as the “bad rain” starts to come down. “Bad rain” in this context is acid rain, and by acid, this movie’s not fucking around. It eats through everything like it was goddamn molten lava.

Out in the wastelands, Kenshiro halts his pointless wandering for a moment and shows up at a couple’s door, demanding shelter in a way that I’m sure is meant to be polite, but sounds more like an outright threat. They begrudgingly give it to him, and later that night he has a wet dream/flashback sequence, which shows scattered moments of Julia, the woman he loves, being forced to watch as Shin tickles his belly. Or something like that, I don’t know. The next morning he wakes in wet pants to discover that a gang is outside the shack, molesting the couple who had taken him in. The three men muscle the couple around like idiot jocks in a high school change room before one of them holds the man while the other two take the girl back towards the shack, preparing to make her colon into a clown car. But as they get close to the door, Kenshiro kicks a leg through and breaks one dude’s jaw in a way that wouldn’t be physically possible if he had one as long as a goddamn alligator. The next dude doesn’t fare much better, as Kenshiro punches him in the back and causes his chest to burst out like he was caught trying to smuggle a watermelon in his shirt. With two men down, Kenshiro engages the last man standing, first cutting his gun in half with a single strike of his hand, then punching him with a series of light taps to the chest, and ending the assault with a single tap on the forehead. The dude asks if he’s trying to tickle him to death, only to have Kenshiro walk away and proclaim that he’s already dead. As he ponders what that could possibly mean, the dude’s head starts to bulge and expand until it finally explodes. AWESOME.

Three faces of painfully stupid death.

Sometimes dudes with mullets get what's coming.

While his rival spends his days exploding heads in the desert, Shin keeps himself busy battling random blonde dudes with mullets. As his latest victim comes to his chambers, Shin says that this glorious mullet’s, “secret soul has been revealed to him”. If I’m not mistaken, especially considering that this line is being delivered in a candle filled room, I believe that’s might just be a come on. It turns out that this generic victim used to practice the Southern Cross martial arts style, which Shin has deemed that only he is allowed to know anything of. The guy swears that he abandoned that path long ago, probably because he realized that practicing your roundhouse is kind of ridiculous when you’ve got to fight through every moment of the day to survive, and tries to leave. But Shin refuses his attempts to exit, instead insisting that the dude must attack while he has the chance. The miscellaneous fodder finally relents and delivers five full strength hits to Shin’s face, as Shin calmly tells him to do it again after each strike. And not only does he ask for more, but he doesn’t as much as flinch while absorbing attacks that should have dropped a normal man. As is the case with so many movies, I don’t think the people who made this realize exactly how much a direct punch to the face hurts. After giving his prey a sporting chance, Shin proves that Kenshiro isn’t the only one with ridiculous attacks, as he assails the dude and finishes him with strikes to the chest that cause massive holes to explode out in a spray of blood. Fuck, this is insane. The only way to top this would be if you could cause someone to implode with a mere hip thrust.

Now that our two rivals have been properly introduced, the movie takes a moment to remind us of the primary object of their competition, as Julia stands looking out a window, pining for the return of what little dignity that she had before she was cast in this movie. Since all of our players have now been examined, I think we should take a moment to bask in the casting choices this movie made. They have two Englishmen and an American in the lead roles, all three of whom are obviously not Japanese, and yet they have Japanese names. The one woman in this movie who happens to be the only person of Asian descent is playing the only character that DOES NOT have a Japanese name. Well done. You couldn’t have gotten that any more fucking backwards if they were all replaced by sassy Puerto Rican robots.

To remind us as to whom she is actually supposed to be pining for, the scene fades back to Kenshiro walking, as he makes his way to the hovel that the two kids from Paradise Valley use for shelter. After they encounter one another, Eminem explains that Lynn, the young girl, is blind because her parents were killed by the Southern Cross right before her and she hasn’t seen since. Yeah, that’s shitty and all, but you guys realize that something like that can’t make you physically blind, right? After all, if seeing something truly horrendous could destroy your sense of sight, they would have needed to pass out seeing-eye dogs at the theater to people who paid to watch this bullshit. Taking pity on the girl and realizing that pretty much anything could cure her faux-ailment, Kenshiro waves his hands around her head and then presses on her temples, not quite miraculously returning Lynn’s vision to her. With his work done, Kenshiro wanders off again, as the two children notice that he’s impervious to the effects of the “bad rain”. He might be, but his clothes shouldn’t be, assholes. So why aren’t they melting off of him?

Part II: Take Me Down To Paradise Valley

Once Chris Penn is back in the presence of Shin, having returned from his impromptu invasion that he gave up on without reason, he assures Shin that their army can take the town of Paradise Valley and their water supply without a fight. Disinterested in the details, Shin tells him to just get it done. Wait, what? If Chris Penn knew that they weren’t going to fight back, why didn’t they just take over the town when they were invading it moments ago in the movie? Does this army determine whether or not they can invade a city by first invading it? That makes as much sense as testing to see if a gun is deadly by shooting yourself in the fucking head.

Karate AND zombies? Throw in pirates and this might be the greatest movie ever made.

Back in Paradise Valley, they prepare for invasion with such intelligence that they may as well be listening to John Tesh albums to inspire them. Eminem leads a shitty karate class for teenagers in the street as a random black dude throws out random proverbs that make no sense. The balance is tilted! Nature’s rejecting us! Our only hope is a man…the First of the North Star! If he’s unavailable, Jeremy Irons will suffice! I love nacho cheese! As they all occupy themselves with this idiocy, a strange kid walks up to the blind girl and tells her, in Malcolm McDowell’s voice, that she must turn Kenshiro’s heart. Elsewhere at the same time, this triggers a dream of Kenshiro’s where he envisions his father, Malcolm. After a brief talk, a random fucking zombie pops out of the ground, again speaking with Malcolm’s voice, telling Kenshiro that he’s denying his destiny. Kenshiro screams no, and then proceeds to start punching the metal roof of a car that’s standing on its roof next to him until the phantom zombie goes away. Um…okay. Like a home-schooled Mormon child seeing a Mexican donkey show for the first time, I have no idea what just happened, but I suddenly have the urge to take a shower.

The next day, the three head citizens of Paradise Valley argue about their fate. One of them continues the preparations to fight while another exclaims that diplomacy must be there strategy, and to unsuccessfully show that he’s not bat shit crazy, he’s drawn up a proposal to share equal water rights with the city of Southern Cross. With little resolved, the scene fades back to Kenshiro as he begins a training routine that would have to be considered insane if we hadn’t seen Van Damme’s performance in Double Team. He begins by punching more random metal structures as he has flashbacks again of the beating that he received at Shin’s hands. Then he steps it up a notch and makes us once again think lovingly back to Van Damme, as he does the splits just to show that he can. But just to put the cherry on top, he then picks up a large rock nearly the size of his torso and squeezes it in a screaming hug until it explodes. Yes, it fucking EXPLODES. Just then he hears some commotion and turns to see two dudes hassling Eminem about twenty feet away. Apparently they didn’t hear him screaming and shattering rocks only seconds ago, as they pay him no mind. He walks over and beats them without question, even though they could have just caught Eminem molesting their kids for all he knows. As Kenshiro begins to walk away, Eminem asks him to return to Paradise Valley to help defend it from the Southern Cross. As he’s in the middle of refusing the request, Kenshiro sees that one of the dude’s is wearing a jacket that has Julia’s picture on the back of it. What the fuck is that? How was this cat issued a goddamn jacket with her picture on it? Suddenly enraged, Kenshiro beats the guy some more to prove no point whatsoever and then turns to head off to the south. Eager to continue his role of annoying the shit out of me, Eminem follows behind him, but runs out of steam and falls to the ground. I guess a lot of time has passed only seconds later, as it shows Eminem lying in the same spot, almost completely buried in dirt. How the fuck long was he lying there? Giving the only response that is reasonable in this situation, Kenshiro comes back to find the kid half buried and laughs.

Seriously, how tired was this kid?

As the invading army of the Southern Cross stands on the edge of Paradise Valley, ready to engage in a little deja vu, Chris Penn gives his men a pre-invasion speech. “Let’s kill some people. Let’s kill them, and let’s enjoy it.” Well done. That speech is so inspirational that I could swear that William Wallace and Tony Robbins had sex and then aborted that speech to avoid having to cancel their plans to go to college. But somehow he doesn’t damper the mood too badly, and they proceed to invade the same damn town again, raping and burning as they go. At one point, Chris Penn turns to the camera and quips, “It ain’t easy being sleazy.” Again, that’s fucking amazing. You have a joke that’s a reference to a goddamn Cheetos ad in your movie? That’s fucking classy. But again the invasion continues in a flood of mass death and carnal sin, all shown in slow motion with dramatic music so that you hopefully won’t notice how unimpressive it is. Witnessing the poorly produced horror, Lynn screams. I’d like to think that she’s thanking Kenshiro for giving her back her vision just in time to see this. Meanwhile, Kenshiro hears that cry from the wastelands and realizing that he has no choice, he turns back in that direction to rescue her.

With the complete domination of the city over faster than you can back a Pizza Pop, the three leaders of Paradise Valley once again meet, this time on their knees in front of Chris Penn. The two of them that had been for fighting still choose to resist, while the third guy who was pushing for diplomacy earlier is once again begging to negotiate. In a swift and decisive response, Chris Penn has the third leader killed, declaring that there will be no negotiation, no hope for the future. Trying to manufacture another dramatic moment, he then looks at the camera and says, “Welcome to the future.” This movie is about as good at subtlety as it is, well pretty much everything else, but I have to admit that’s the most horrifying thing I’ve ever heard. The next morning Lynn is put into a guillotine for defending an old woman trying to get water, but just as the blade begins to fall, declares that Kenshiro will come to destroy them. Chris Penn, of course, recognizes the name and saves her at the last moment. Apparently only he, Chairy, Jambi, Conky, and perhaps the King Of Cartoons know that Kenshiro just happens to be the Word of the Day.

Back in the Murdering Heights suburb of Eviltown, also known as Southern Cross, the movie shows a brief scene of Shin in his office. He cuts his finger and allows the blood to drip out on blueprints a set of blueprints before him. As each drop hits the paper, it immediately bursts into a small flame. With that poignant yet meaningless concept relayed, the scene ends. Goddamn, what can’t these people do?

The next time we see Shin, he makes grand proclamations about his future to Julia as she lays in bed, bored and high as a kite from sniffing glue. He begs her to see that he’s saving the world with modern technology like – get ready for it – aqueducts. But still in the face of such brilliant technology, she somehow manages to stay cold to him. Frustrated and ready to stroke it to a Sears catalogue, Shin departs, leaving Julia to sniff a lot more glue. Instead she cracks open a chest that has armor in it and a small bag of seeds. With that little bit of nostalgia searching her brain for a sign of basic functionality, it is finally time for a full blown flashback that shows us the origin of the conflict:

The glorious vision of the past starts with Julia and Kenshiro having a moment alone somewhere when he gives her the seeds in hopes that it will get her in the mood to also take his obvious virginity. He tells her that the seeds that he’s giving her are the future and that she now holds the future in her hands. Underwhelmed, Julia says that she’ll protect them, but that Kenshiro must now protect himself. He looks over his shoulder just then to see Shin and Chris Penn strolling up with a small group of soldiers. After a brief exchange that couldn’t be more pointless if they had instead sung the first half of Steve Perry’s smash hit Oh Sherrie, Shin gives Chris Penn permission to attack, only to have him fall victim to Kenshiro’s head exploding technique. But just as his skull goes “Sloth love Chunk” on his ass, Chris Penn straps his head down to prevent it from exploding. Awesome. Kenshiru then pleads with Shin to show restraint, reminding him of the old rule declaring that Southern Cross and North Star must never fight. Shin says that rule is true, but does not apply in this case as there is no North Star. With their destinies apparently set, they have no choice but to engage in talentless-to-talentless combat. The battle begins with them jump kicking at each other simultaneously. And just as their legs collide in the air, the impact produces a flash of lightning. That’s right. Lightning. After a lot of unimpressive fighting, capped by an axe kick directly to Kenshiro’s balls, his men hold Kenshiro in place while Shin plunges his finger into Kenshiru’s chest, which has to be the oddest attack seen yet in this movie. Shin tells Julia to say that she loves him or he won’t stop. She relents, just as Shin hits Kenshiro with a four finger assault that drops him like an unsuccessful sit-com pilot. Shin then leaves Kenshiro to die with the parting knowledge that he also killed his father, Ryuken, before leaving with his Asian prize, leaving us to wonder if he mean to have the wounds form the Big Dipper, or is that just a horrible coincidence.

Hold still you pussy, so I can finish drawing this unicorn.

With the memory coming to an end, Julia comes back to the present just as Shin knocks the seeds out of her hands and tells her to stop living in the past. One falls into a crack in the marble floor where it will undoubtedly become significant at a later point.

Having likely wasted enough time at every tourist trap on the way, Kenshiro and Eminem finally make their way into the tunnel system below Paradise Valley where they come across a girl that’s been thoroughly abused. Kenshiru leaves Eminen to care for the strange girl while he proceeds on to find Lynn as she’s being tormented by a massive jailer. Eager to show off unimpressive skills, he busts in and gives the dude the business. Seeing her chance for escape while the two of them are engaged, Lynn runs down the tunnels trying to find her way out, making it only a short distance before Chris Penn comes out of the darkness and grabs her. But just as he’s about to take her back, Eminem steps in to fight. While it looks like this may turn out to be one of the most hilariously awesome fights of the movie, it ends quickly when Chris Penn pulls a knife, stabs Eminem, and yells, “Look out, he’s got a knife!” Damn. Here I was hoping that Chris Penn would have a flashback to the time that Kevin Bacon taught him how to dance, only to then reveal that he also taught him the mystic art of Kung Fu. But alas, it will have to wait for Footloose II since it’s not the case here. Back in town, Kenshiro fights his way out into the town square where he defeats the giant jailor in front of the gathered populace and then takes on a whole slew of soldiers. Just as one of them is about to surrender to Kenshiro for no reason, Chris Penn takes aim at Kenshiro with a sniper rifle. Just as he’s about to fire, Eminem hits him in the back, causing him to miss and hit the surrendering soldier instead. Kenshiro races back to the scene just in time to see Eminem die. He steps over to Chris Penn to kill him, just as Lynn floats into the air an illuminates, speaking in his father’s voice, telling him that revenge is beneath him. He must face Shin, not to avenge the past, but to shape the future. That’s a pretty flimsy argument, don’t you think? He could say that killing Chris Penn would prevent him from hurting anyone else from that point on. In fact, he could say that any shitty thing that he did was in an effort to shape the future. Instead they send Chris Penn on his way, telling him to tell Shin that the flag of the North Star flies over Paradise Valley. I’m guessing that flag involves the Big Dipper and blistering inexperience at the art of pleasing woman.

Part III: And I Thought The Face-off Between Cage And Travolta Was Shitty…

There's only room for one fabulous mane in this world, and this unfortunate vest says it's me.

Chris Penn relays the message a moment later, and Shin declares that Julia must never know that Kenshiro’s still alive. To prevent this, naturally, he moves her down into a fucking boiler room alone with Chris Penn to watch over her. Yeah, she won’t think anything strange is going on at all. Of course, once the two of them are alone together, Chris Penn tries to seduce her with his literal throbbing head and she obviously resists. At the same time, Kenshiro enters the city of Sothern Cross and then a building where he lays waste to a couple dozen guys before he poses for a random, unnecessary zooming close up. But with that, it’s time for the final boss fight! Kenshiro makes his way into Shin’s personal quarters, which he seemed to accomplish a little too easily. Seeing his enemy, Shin removes his jacket to reveal one of the most unfortunate vests I’ve ever seen. They begin to fight, stopping only to primp their mullets. Of course, if we were to examine the developments of the movie thus far, we’d see that this entire battle is pointless. If Shin’s blood is flammable, why isn’t he spitting it in Kenshiro’s face? And if Kenshiro can make a man’s head explode with a series of punches, why not do that right away? Regardless, to get the upper hand, Shin tells Kenshiru that Julia is already dead. Distracted, Kenshiro pretty much stops fighting altogether, instead trying to hold off Shin with pouty looks and silent poetry. To finish him off, Shin hits Kenshiro with a special flaming attack that causes veins in his arms and chest to burst, spraying blood everywhere. This idiocy would kill an ordinary man. So I guess it’s a good thing that he’s THE Gary Daniels. As he falls to the ground, about as hurt as he would have been if he had slammed his finger in a car door, he sees a plant growing through the floor where Julia had dropped them. He then gets up, as if he’s fucking fine, and kicks Shin’s ass. At the same time downstairs, Julia manages to fight off Chris Penn by getting his straps caught in moving, arbitrary cogs. Once his head is released, his fate is sealed as his head explodes.

Any martial artist can tell you that losing three pints of blood is only a flesh wound.

Back upstairs, just as Kenshiro is putting the final moves on Shin, Shin once again reminds us that the Southern Cross and the North Star should never have fought. Kenshiro says that’s true, but there is no Southern Cross. OH SNAP! I know that’s supposed to be some profound reflection of the movie’s opening, but that just doesn’t make any sense. That’s just fucking stupid. You’ve now both ignored some ancient rules without any reprisal. Kenshiro finally drops Shin, who then once again tells him that Julia’s dead before he dies himself. But just before we leave this shit, I’d like to point out that Kenshiro just had major arteries explode and somehow he’s fine, and at the same time managed to hit Shin with nothing more dramatic than a series of ordinary punches and kicks, and that motherfucker’s dead. Go figure.

As Kenshiro steps out to face the rest of Shin’s men who are conveniently waiting outside, they all stop and bow as Julia steps into the room. She and Kenshiro share a rather underwhelming moment together, with the men all continuing to bow as they embrace. And with that, the movie ends as confusingly as it began.

Part IV: The Apocalypse In Technicolor

The original animated movie of Fist Of The North Star obviously shares many of the same idiocies as the live action one, so for the sake of your sanity and ours, we’ll only detail the aspects of the movie that are different.

The movie opens with a nuclear holocaust and its quite graphically bloody results, as Ryuken once again describes the situation. After the fallout, existence has became about finding uncontaminated food and water, where only the strong survive. So at least the set up in this movie makes a little more goddamn sense. It also explains that Shin and Kenshiro used to be close friends until he brought Julia into the picture. That also might have been handy to know.

They show the origin scene of Kenshiro’s scars right away, which is quite similar to the live action version. Once again Shin dives his finger into Kenshiro’s chest while Julia is forced to watch, and it’s just as stupid seeing it a second time. The biggest difference is that once the fight is over, an unnamed character picks Kenshiro up off the ground, takes him over to a giant crevasse, and tosses him over. Kenshiro slams into rock precipices all the way down before he eventually disappears into the darkness. Hmmmm….he really should be dead in this one, then. Finger stabs are one thing, but falling about four hundred feet should make for a pretty bad day.

Having just seen them in action, the most immediate difference that you’ll notice between the animated and live action movies, of course, is the characters’ appearance. Shin’s got a sweet blonde mane that would make him the perfect drummer for Skid Row or perhaps Slaughter, and he’s wearing an outfit with the greatest shoulder pads ever conceived by man. Meanwhile, Kenshiro’s eyebrows look like he stapled dead beagles to his forehead. And everyone in this movie has some of the most bizarre proportions imaginable. It’s like they’re an upside down triangle, as they have really skinny legs and a gradually thickening torso that ends with shoulders the size of a Buick, topped with remarkably tiny heads.

In the future, personal grooming takes a backseat to shoulder pad size.

Another difference with this version is the way the movie introduces Bat and Lynn, and the way they first meet Kenshiro. The two kids start by tearing across an open plain, then through the ruins of a city in a massive hot rod that Bat apparently built himself for his seventh birthday, being followed by thugs on motorcycles. The chase concludes with them crashing their car out the windows of an abandoned building, falling from the forty third floor before landing on the ground and crashing into debris. And though the thugs catch up to them after the fall, they’re quite unhurt. Apparently gravity is everyone’s best friend in this movie. As they’re being hassled by the thugs, we that not only does Lynn have seeds as well, but she has the power to stop a full grown man from stomping on her. As he steps down on her harder, she lets out a scream that causes some dude made out of stone to come to life in the distance. The thing starts smashing down buildings with single punches as it slowly walks over to them and as he approaches, the rock falls away from the figure to reveal that it’s actually a man. Would you know it, it’s KENSHIRO! Wow, that makes the whole ‘smashing down buildings’ thing even fucking dumber. He walks over, takes an arrow to the chest without flinching, and then picks up the dude who was standing on Lynn by the head with one hand, crushing his skull. The others attack, only for the entire gang to be killed by head exploding hilarity.

After the slaughter is complete, Bat and Kenshiro are hanging out in a random shack where Kenshiro is relaxing on a cot while Bat explains that Lynne is a mute, and that she hasn’t spoken a word since watching her parents burn alive during the war. Meanwhile, more cyberpunks attack outside and somehow get their hands on Lynn. Again it’s time for Kenshiro to show how ridiculously powerful he is in this movie. Sensing the danger, he gets off his bed and it explodes. He the opens the door to the shack and it fucking explodes. Goddamn. At this rate, the entire world would shatter if this dude farted. Slowly walking towards the thug holding Lynn, Kenshiro disposes of the rest of the gang as they all charge him only to have their heads explode after a single punch. Keep in mind, he doesn’t even do that shitty punching combo in this version. It’s literally every single goddamn punch that causes it. Finally reaching the dude holding Lynn, who for some reason becomes more than twice Kenshiru’s size in one shot, then five times bigger in the next, Kenshiro unleashes the punching combination of awesomeness. After being knocked down by the assault, the thug gets back up and just as Kenshiru gives the “you’re already dead” line. For some reason at this point the dude is now easily ten times the size of Kenshiro. And of course, the dude’s head explodes. With another battle completed, Kenshiro celebrates by shaving his beard off and curing Lynn of her muteness before wandering off.

Left to right: big, bigger, retarded.

Part V: O Brother, Where Art Thou? Probably Exploding Shit.

The Sub-Zero to Shin's Scorpion: Ray.

Another one of the major differences with the animated version of the film is the number of extra characters, starting with a random dude named Ray. We first see him as he is faced off against a single man out in the middle of nowhere. He rips the dude’s arms off with his bare hands as he asks for information on the whereabouts of the Fist of the North Star. He then walks into the village that Kenshiro just left, only to find yet another group of bandits there, this time claiming to be followers of the Fist of the North Star as they torture and kill the villagers. He kills them all by cutting them to pieces with slow moving karate chops, just before Kenshiro shows up at the last minute and takes the last punk out with a head explosion of his own. Trying to discover why a group of cyberpunks are oppressing people in his name, at this point they introduce us to yet another new character, when it’s revealed that Kenshiro has a brother named Jagi. Through a random flashback, we see that Jagi is an older brother who was jealous of Kenshiro’s success. He tried to kill Kenshiro only to end up on the receiving end of Kenshiro’s famed head explosion technique. Fortunately, he was able to stop it by stabbing his thumbs into his neck to relieve the pressure. But it left him horribly disfigured, which is why he now wears an iron mask.

Don't kick much further, Kenshiro, or your foot will end up covered in Twinkies and Chili Dogs.

Kenshiro and Ray decide to work together and stop the Jagi menace, traveling to his hideout only to run into a giant fat man guarding the entrance. And I do mean giant, as once again this dude is over ten times the size of Kenshiro. Undaunted, Kenshiro screams and kicks a hole into the dude’s stomach. It doesn’t finish him at first, but soon the fat bastard falls on his back and instead of just his head, his entire fucking body explodes. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? After they make their way inside, Kenshiro and Ray finally come face to face with Jagi. It turns out that Jagi is holding Ray’s sister hostage, and he demands that Ray fight Kenshiro to the death while holding a gun to her head. After some preteen taunting, Jagi finally agrees to put the girl aside and fight Kenshiro himself, which somehow moves them up to a fucking rooftop. Jagi takes off his helmet and we see that it was actually him at the beginning of the movie that threw Kenshiro over the cliff. He also reveals that it was him who convinced Shin that Julia actually loved him, not Kenshiro, and caused the fight between them. Hearing the news, Kenshiro becomes alight with flames that burn off his shirt, but strangely not his pants, and he destroys the rooftop with a single punch. They fall to the base of the building where Kenshiro let’s Jagi break several huge chunks of rock over him before hitting him once again with a head exploding attack that finishes the job he started years ago. Meanwhile, Ray literally cuts Jagi’s men to pieces with his hands and finally saves his sister.

You two will re-enact the Mr. Plow episode of The Simpsons for my pleasure.

The last important figure that’s missing from the live action movie is a man named Raoh, who is apparently yet another brother of Kenshiro. We first meet him after Kenshiro was defeated and tossed to his presumed demise at the beginning of the film, when he visits Ryuken to demand that he be named the new Fist of the North Star. Ryuken refuses, saying that Raoh lacks perception. In response, Raoh has a hissy fit and punches to giant stone statues, causing them to explode. He catches their massive stone heads in his suddenly huge arms, only to flex and shatter them. Fuck, everyone in this movie is super badass. Still not impressed, however, Ryuken expels him, telling Raoh to never return to the dojo again.

This movie laughs at the idea of proportion almost as much as it does consistency.

No one can resist the searing power of my urinary tract infection!

The next time we see Raoh, he is leading a massive army, for reasons we don’t know, as it faces off against a barbarian horde, whose giant fucking general somehow turns his skin to metal. Sure, why not. An orgy of violence then ensues as the two armies clash. Once the barbarian general makes his way to him, Raoh hits the dude with energy beams that come out his chest and hand. Energy beams, huh? Yeah, I guess that’s plausible. At this point it’s no fucking dumber than anything else this movie throws at us. These beams cause the barbarian general to, naturally, explode as columns of skin burst out through the steal coating. After the brief battle, Raoh and his men them move on face their next target: Shin’s army. The scene transitions to Shin as he gets the news of the coming invasion, and also about Kenshiro killing his brother Jagi. Julia is of course present at the time, and for some reason when she hears this news, reacts by ripping her clothes off. All of them. With one hand. And yet, she doesn’t have nipples. Fuck, I just can’t keep up with this madness. She then escapes down secret tunnels to try to find Kenshiro, only to run into Raoh. Raoh and Shin face off soon after. We don’t see what happens, but moments later Kenshiro arrives and finds Shin on his throne. They face off in a battle even faster than the one at the end of the live action film, as Kenshiro finishes him with one set of punches. Before he dies, Shin explains that Raoh has taken Julia, just after he shows off the wedding dress that she was supposed to wear, which took ten seamstresses a year to make. What? One dress and it took a year? I hope he didn’t pay by the hour.

Part VI: The End, Again.

Sure you can fly, Kenshiro, but so can my horse! Suck on that!

The movie comes to a climax as we see Julia being held by Raoh and his army. He puts her on a fifty foot crucifix for the crime of having a flower, which had been smuggled to her in her jail cell by Bat and Lynn. Way to go, kids. The first person on the scene is Ray, who ends up fighting Raoh’s second in command. As you can probably guess by now, this dude is once again fucking massive compared to Ray, but still ends up being cut to pieces by Ray’s special karate chops of power. Knowing that he can’t win but that he needs to buy some time, Ray then faces Raoh only to have his predictions come true and end up being slapped down like a little girl. Kenshiro, who takes his fucking time wandering over, finally arrives just as the killing blow is landed. With the stage set, the two combatants face off, fighting with the expected ton of magical bullshit, which absolutely destroys the landscape around them. First they engage while floating about a hundred feet off the ground, so I guess that means these assholes can fly too. They continue to fight back on land, causing each other’s arteries to explode, making for one massive human fountain as blood sprays out of both of them. The battle ends when they drive their hands into each other’s chest and fall to the ground together. Raoh is the first to get back up, but just as he is about to stomp Kenshiro one last time and put an end to all our suffering, Lynn walks up and asks to talk. Feeling particularly and unexplainably charitable for some reason, Raoh listens. She asks him to spare Kenshiro’s life and he does, claiming that he’s got a new purpose in life: to protect her. WHAT?! How the fuck did that come about? But just to make it extra hilarious, as he walks away assuring her that Kenshiro and everything else will be alright, another artery in his shoulder erupts for no reason and sprays blood everywhere.

Aaarrrgggghhhh! I need insulin!

The movie then ends with the two kids finding flowers growing in the dirt in the middle of the city, then with Kenshiro walking through a stormy desert where he hallucinates that he finds a lush forest oasis looming up before him with Julia inside it. Neither of which are real, it turns out. And that’s it, that’s where it ends. WHAT?!

The Verdict:

Donkey: After watching the live action version of Fist Of The North Star, we honestly didn’t think that it would be possible for the animated original movie to make less sense. But then, I wasn’t prepared to see random dudes become more and more inexplicably massive with each glance, people explode like it was a bodily function, and plot twists that make less sense than P-Puff-Puffy Diddy-Daddy giving a lecture on artistic integrity. I know that most fans of the original movie and comic books consider THE Gary Daniels and the movie version that he starred in to be a missive letdown in comparison. And while I will grant you that movie is a steaming turd, the original animated feature is no prize pig either. As with any Japanimation cartoon, the illustration was extremely well done. But that’s about as nice a thing as I can bring myself to say about it. At the very least, THE Gary Daniels and company took a meandering, non-sensical story and simplified it so that you could almost tell what the hell was going on. I award both movies 4 exploding heads out of 5 mullets of power.

What We Learned:

Donkey: If you’re going to make a movie based on an old Japanese comic book, hire Japanese actors. Or at least Asian actors, for Christ’s sake. It’s not like THE Gary Daniels brought some kind of legitimacy or box office clout that any random person off the streets of Tokyo couldn’t have matched. Watching a movie filled with white people named Kenshiro, Ryuken, and Shin is about as fucking stupid as watching a movie where Japanese people are named Montgomery, Winston, or Ted. It just insults us all.

Don’t forget to check back every Saturday for a new fresh review! Next week shittymovienight.com presents: Sylvester Stallone arm wrestles for love of his son and the right to keep on trucking in…OVER THE TOP.

Back To The Main Page.

Ummm...have any of you noticed that you're being engulfed in flames?

Donkey: There are some choices in life that are obvious. Coke is better than Pepsi, boxers are better than tighty whities, and anything is better than spending even ten minutes listening to Glenn Beck. So even though there were endless bounties of garbage before us, there was one obvious last stop we had to make before we left the green pastures of videogame inspired cinema to explore the distant plains of unadulterated bullshit. For those of you not familiar with it, the movie DOA: Dead Or Alive is an adaptation of a fighting game that is based solely around the premise of pitting a bunch of woman with massive breasts against one another and enjoying the rather creepy level of attention put into the physics engine that makes those boobies bounce. This is the videogame equivalent of the casting couch, only the stains on the cushions are from Mountain Dew and scorching inexperience rather than a palpable lack of self esteem. The only way the game could possibly be more immature is if every stage consisted of a series of trampolines. It’s perfect for anyone that likes to giggle and get a small erection, but hates having to actually play decent games. Really, how can you fuck that up? Pretty easily, it turns out.

The Plot:

Donkey: What passes for a plot in DOA: Dead Or Alive is centered around three women (natch) participating in the ultimate fighting contest for the prize of ten million dollars. Now, I know what you’re saying: wait, really? Just money? After witnessing valiant struggles against an invading army from another dimension and a power mad dictator bent on world domination, we’re supposed to take it seriously when it’s only about the cheddar? First thing’s first…punch yourself square in the face. Now don’t ever interrupt me again. Second, if you’re suggesting that a substantially less spectacular premise for the tournament is going to be linked to a substantially worse movie, you’re absolutely right. Now punch yourself in the face again for being so goddamn smart, Brainiac. Shitty Movie Night is no place for thinkers.

Our three heroines are from dramatically different, yet similarly retarded backgrounds. There’s Kasumi, the renegade shinobi ninja princess who abandons her clan to discover either the fate of her missing brother, Hayate, or the Colonel’s secret blend of eleven herbs and spices (whichever comes first). There’s Tina, the American wrestler who’s out to prove that she’s more than just daddy’s little steroid farm in hot pants. And then there’s Christie, the thief who’s looking for the big score, one can only assume so that she can buy some goddamn clothing since she spends most of this movie in either her underwear or a bikini. The rest of the cast is rounded out by characters that range from modestly underdeveloped to blink-and-you’ll-miss-them wallflowers.

Once everyone is invited to the tournament in one of the most spectacular methods ever seen on celluloid, they are flown to a remote tropical island where they lounge at a five star resort that includes all the amenities; suites with Jacuzzi tubs, volleyball courts, and the chance to kick the ever living shit out of the other guests for cash prizes. But once there, our heroines come to realize that the host of the tournament, Dr Donovan, may be after more than the mere chance to hand someone a small fortune in his hard earned cash. Apparently they weren’t immediately tipped off by the complete physicals, computer scans, and nanobot injections that they were subjected to upon their arrival. Incidentally, Dr Donovan is played by Eric Roberts, which leads one to conclude that Dr Donovan must have gone into postgraduate studies and earned a doctorate in the discipline of rad.

After Hayabusa, Kasumi’s protector and fellow contestant, is captured while trying to investigate Dr Donovan’s secret laboratory, our three ladies set off in search of answers and end up trapped in the same nefarious web. But luckily for them, Helena, the daughter of Donovan’s former partner whom he had killed, conveniently learns the truth of her father’s fate at that exact moment and comes to the rescue. However, this is not before Donovan is able to carry out his diabolical plan and create the ultimate weapon.

Donovan then uses the greatest weapon ever created to battle Kasumi’s missing older brother, Hayate, whom Donovan has been kicking around for a full year just for this occasion, as an online demonstration that serves as a sales promotion for the technology. But just as he’s collecting funds from a group of men who are willing to spend a fortune just to get back at everyone that ever made fun of their Visionaries t-shirt, Helena and the über-nerd trying desperately to lose his virginity with her manage to stop the transfer and alert the CIA.

Rather than taking a moment to see whether or not there is any real threat of government intervention, Donovan immediately decides to gather up his money, collect the necessary data to recreate the most spectacular weapon ever devised, and set a self-destruct sequence for the entire island. But unbeknownst to him, our heroes have all been freed and are more than a little bit cranky. Working together, they are able to defeat Donovan and dive safely into the ocean before everything goes up into a blazing inferno.

Seems straight forward enough, right? How bad can it be? Let’s just find out, shall we…

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Donkey: Like a lot of shitty movies, this one starts out on the complete wrong foot with the title screen alone. I love how the title isn’t DOA or Dead Or Alive…it’s both.

Milobar: It’s literally the same thing twice. I’m glad they put what the letters mean underneath the letters, so that I know that DOA means Dead Or Alive.

Donkey: Hell yeah. Otherwise you might think it stands for Divergent Oscillating Affluence, so it’s a perfectly reasonable precaution.

Milobar: After the exciting intro graphics we are very quickly introduced to the main character Wawajumi (or whatever) and discover that her destiny is to lead her clan of ninjas, and as a result she’s never allowed to leave her temple. Wait, what?

Donkey: Apparently they’re looking for a leader to guide them through their afternoon calisthenics, but little else. Kasumi is trying to set out to find her missing brother. But Hayabusa, her brother’s best friend, is warning her against wandering off, lest she be immediately deemed an outcast.

Milobar: If she leaves she will become a shinobi. Sweet…Shinobi. I love that videogame. Throwing the ninja stars at the ninjas as they were jumping on the catwalks and trying to get to you for some unknown reason.

Donkey: That game proved two universal truths about ninjas; they can only exist on two levels, where one is slightly higher than the other, and that their greatest attack is to simply trample you to death. Master assassins, indeed. Kasumi rejects Hayabusa’s initial pleas and proceeds out into the castle’s courtyard, where she’s greeted by her entire clan.

Milobar: Uh oh…they’ve got flags and they aren’t afraid to use them. Wait, maybe they are. I find this part of the movie very confusing as Kasumi’s walking through the crowd when she’s inexplicably attacked by Ayane, her protector who is apparently the only white person here. Well, I guess maybe she looks kind of Asian. Maybe a half-breed?

Donkey: How many traditional Japanese temples have chicks with purple goddamn hair?

Milobar: All of them, I hope.

Donkey: We’re following very strict traditions here, you cursed heathens. Now pardon me while I go Kool-Aid up my goddamn hair.

Milobar: Hang on, Hayabusa who was talking to her all normal in the temple a minute ago, now has to kneel down and beg forgiveness whenever he speaks to Wawajumi?

Donkey: Why did the rest of them kneel down? Hayabusa makes one last appeal for her to stay, but Kasumi will have none of it and uses the distraction to run along everyone’s back to escape.

Milobar: Ok, now the kneeling makes sense. It’s not a shitty kung fu action movie without some wire running on dudes’ shoulders.

Donkey: She then uses her sword to vault over the castle wall and off a massive cliff. Apparently it just wouldn’t have been impressive enough if it was just a ten foot drop and she hit the ground running.

Milobar: I love how she had on some type of sports training suit and a portable hang glider backpack under her ceremonial robe.

Donkey: And goddamn Nikes, apparently. I don’t know where a ninja that’s not allowed to leave her clan gets any of that stuff. As she’s gliding along, she gets the first invitation. At this point we discover that the invitations to the DOA tournament are sent out via shuriken.

Milobar: With a fucking LCD display screen in the middle of it that says “You’re Invited’.

Someone tried to kill me with...an invitation? Well that's not alarming in the slightest.

Donkey: Clearly you want your invitations to be as lethal as possible. I’m surprised they’re not on nuclear warheads. I love how she’s flying on a goddamn hang glider, the shuriken comes ripping straight at her face, and she catches it at the last minute.

Milobar: Who threw that?

Donkey: Where the fuck did they throw that from?

Milobar: An airplane?

Donkey: And what would have happened if she was looking slightly the other way?

Milobar: What would have happened if she had been paying attention to flying her hang glider? Our heroine acknowledges the invitation and we quickly cut to a scene on a yacht somewhere in the ocean. This scene features Tina, the wrestler who also happens to be a martial artist. Uh-oh, it looks like she is about to be attacked by a bunch of greasy Koreans.

Donkey: Led by Robin Shou, whom we all know and love as Liu Kang. That’s awesome.

Milobar: What a fall from grace. He once was the star.

Donkey: And now he’s relegated to greasy pirate. Apparently nobody truly appreciated the genius of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, apart from us.

Milobar: A greasy pirate with a gun. They all have guns. Well at least they all HAD guns in the previous shot but they somehow conveniently didn’t bring them onto the boat.

Donkey: Liu Kang tells his band they have to leave them behind because he doesn’t want so much as a single hole put in the magnificent vessel that he’s about to steal. But wouldn’t you just bring them for the intimidation factor, if nothing else? Leave the safety on, for god’s sake. It’s not like you have to swiss cheese everything in sight the moment somebody moves. Instead they just come onboard and threaten her, then wait for her to get up and kick their asses. Yeah, that’s a much better plan. Well done, chaps.

Milobar: I love how her kicks basically just slap people across the face and knock them into the water. That’s not really what kicks are supposed to do. They are supposed to fucking hurt you. I do, however, definitely like the sound effects they have going on while she’s kicking people.

Donkey: Every kick sounds quite literally to be a bone-crunching impact.

Milobar: Yeah and as she’s soaring through the air, jumping and kicking people, there are aircraft engine sounds…because she’s like a 747. Uh-oh, here comes the “shurikenvitation”.

Donkey: At least her shuriken hit the boat a good ten feet away from her, so she wasn’t in immediate danger of a horrible death.

Milobar: What I don’t understand is she sees the invitation and already knows what it’s about. She’s not confused, not even for a moment. If this tournament is supposed to be super secret, why does everyone already know about it?

At this point we are introduced to our third (and final, if I had it my way) Extreme Challenge 5000 contestant. Clothed in nothing but a towel, and being held at gunpoint by the police.

Donkey: Christie’s interrupted in a Hong Kong hotel shower by cops that have showed up in her room, as apparently her partner Max ratted her out for a heist that they had pulled together. But before they can arrest her, she asks if she can get dressed.

Milobar: Tricky Dicky. The cop plays it safe by handing over her bra with his gun.

Donkey: Seems cautious enough, and yet somehow he’s still not ready for it when she punches him in the face and takes the gun away from him.

Milobar: So why aren’t the other dudes with guns doing anything?

Donkey: They’re respectfully following the bad action movie rule of “one neutered opponent per protagonist” rule, apparently. Although I really love it once she starts taking the rest of the guys out with her towel. Yeah, being snapped by a wet towel sucks, but it’s not a fucking bullwhip, for god’s sake. It’s a minor inconvenience at best.

Milobar: Once she finishes with them, she runs out of the room in her underwear and joins a man in the hotel elevator. I feel really bad for this dude because she beats the shit out of him and steals his clothes. And he’s, like, seventy five.

Donkey: That’s probably the most excitement that he’s had in the last forty seven years. A second later it cuts to her walking out of the elevator in a trench coat and the old man is found stuffed into his own suitcase.

Milobar: “I’m in the suitcase! Help me!” *sniff* childhood memories…

Donkey: How the hell did she fold up a seventy five year old man and stuff him into a suitcase?

Milobar: Um, I’m going to say with her vagina.

Donkey: It’s not like that’s a fucking trunk that guy was carrying around. It’s just a regular goddamn suitcase. It gets better when we see Christie leaving the hotel and speeding away on a motorcycle when she’s given her invitation.

Milobar: This is probably the best invitation though, because this combines the first two. The shuriken slams into her vehicle, right into the glass windshield about an inch beneath her face.

Donkey: Beyond the ridiculously high risk of killing her, I enjoy the physics involved. The one shot shows her speeding away on the bike and the shuriken flying after her from behind. The very next shot shows it smashing into the windshield in front of her. Was that a fucking boomerang shuriken? How the hell does that work?

Milobar: All I want to know is how a person manages to throw a shuriken fast enough to catch a speeding motorcycle. However I do like her description of “Assassin and Master Thief”. That’s not a title you throw around lightly, kind of like “Analrapist”. The next scene where they’re all flying to the island is awesome. Aw yeah, enter my favorite character, Zak, the black dude with the crazy hair.

Donkey: He’s completely bald with the exception of a little horn of hair just above his forehead that, like his facial hair, is dyed green. You know, some things you just don’t bother to translate across from the game. And we also see Bass for the first time, the wrestler who is Tina’s father. We all know that role should have been played by Jesse Ventura.

Milobar: That would be awesome, even better would be Macho Man Randy Savage. I love the old Asian dude who clearly looks like he’s about twenty two, wearing old Asian dude makeup. Gen Fu. I think he should have won the whole competition just based on that outfit alone.

Donkey: Right as everyone is getting comfortable, the introductory video featuring one of their hosts, Helena, tells them to make sure they reach the gates of the island by sundown or else they’re disqualified. And to make sure that’s not easy, they throw an extra wrinkle in there…

Milobar: Oh hey, we know that you guys are martial artists but put on the fucking parachutes beneath your seats and sky dive out of this plane because that’s the only way you can really prove how tough you are. What? How do these people know how to sky dive?

Donkey: What happens if none of these people have ever had skydiving training? They’re literally gathering the world’s greatest fighters just so that they can unnecessarily and arbitrarily pitch them out of a plane to potentially plummet to their death.

Milobar: Exactly. “Today in the news, Liu Kang and his shitty pirates discovered twelve bodies of the world’s most renowned martial artists washed up on the shore of a small Asian island.”

Donkey: And the DOA tournament was cancelled. Leaving its organizers to spend the money on hookers, blow, and cases of Crystal Pepsi. Wait, maybe that’s actually kind of brilliant…

Milobar: Screw that, they need to spend that money on some Diet Pepsi Jazz. Our three martial arts chicks survive their plummet earthward and stand ready to face their first major challenge on the island: climbing some scaffolding to make it to the gates by sundown. How do we do it? I don’t know…climb up the ropes that are hanging down the middle of the fucking thing?

Donkey: Why are just these three chicks together? Where is everyone else?

Milobar: Apparently they managed to get lost, even though everybody else jumped out of the plane at the exact same time as them.

Donkey: And now the “climbing the tower” scene kicks into high gear. I just love the combination of unrealistic physical action with mild dance music to create a thrilling scene of…climbing. They’re just fucking climbing. That’s it. Now I can’t wait for the laundry scene.

Milobar: With all this climbing it’s like watching Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins all over again.

Donkey: It’s just ridiculous shit for something so unnecessary. For god’s sake, at one point the two of them toss the third one about thirty feet into the air.

Milobar: And Kasumi manages to jump about twenty feet on her own. So why didn’t she jump about twenty feet a couple of times and make it to the top by herself?

Donkey: But once they make it to the top, the drama isn’t quite over. That railing that Kasumi is hanging onto breaks away and the other two both dive after her, catching her as she starts to fall. So as they’re all hanging there in the typical human chain fashion, Christie yells down at Kasumi, asking her what she’s doing down there. What is she doing down there? She’s hanging upside down, being held by the ankles! She’s obviously crocheting an afghan for her nephew. What the fuck do you think she’s doing?

So once they reach the top, Helena enters the scene on rollerblades, wearing elbow pads, to guide them from there. Because when you’re rollerblading around an ancient temple where the baddest motherfuckers are about to compete in a martial arts tournament…

Milobar: You better not have scraped up elbows.

Listen up, people: eat all that you want, but keep your goddamn hands off my Mane & Tail.

Donkey: Elbow safety on rollerblades has to be priority one, people. She guides all of them into the formal greeting area for the official beginning of the tournament.

Milobar: And now the contestants are introduced to their host…ERIC ROBERTS!

Donkey: Sweet. The legitimacy of this movie just jumped up about seventeen notches.

Milobar: So we’re at about minus fifty three now.

Donkey: It’s in this scene that we finally, and very briefly, get to see all the characters. It would probably be a lot more impressive and mean a lot more if I had ever played the game and knew who any of these people were. But that’s the great thing about any movie based on a fighting game if you’ve never played said fighting game: they all just end up looking like a series of goddamn clowns.

I've seen this movie multiple times and I still have no idea who half of these people are.

Milobar: Correction: Goddamn ASS Clowns.

Donkey: Once they’re all together, they’re all subjected to a rigorous physical, computer scan, and injection of nanobots into their bloodstreams. The purpose of all of this will become clear later, but I love how nobody seems the least bit bothered by this. And then to top it off, I love the DOA wipe from one scene to another.

Milobar: It’s just like the 1980′s Transformers fucking sweep from the Decepticon face to the Autobot face bullshit scene transition.

Donkey: Next up is a quiet montage of all the fighters training in various places throughout the compound, just to show off that they are, in fact, fighters and not just a massive collection of bad stereotypes.

Milobar: This includes Agumibumi. She’s so powerful, yet so serious. They need to show a dude just jerking off. Everyone else is training and he’s just tweaking himself…a montage of jerking off for hours.

Donkey: That would be exceptional, but we get something almost as good. In amongst the shots of everyone training is footage of Helena just rollerblading around the premises. She’s literally the only one not practicing her fighting techniques. That’s a great training regiment that she’s got there. My money’s on her in this competition.

Milobar: There are all these shots with crowds of people in them. I don’t understand who all these other people are who are just hanging out on the island. They’re not fighters, they’re not contestants…they’re just there.

Donkey: Apparently Eric Roberts thought that flying in spectators would serve a purpose, though I can’t imagine what. Now that the tournament has officially started, the fighters are given bracelets that show them who their next opponent is going to be. Match-ups are supposed to be chosen using advanced computer algorithms, although it’s usually just Eric Roberts throwing people together for shits and giggles. And apparently the fight can start at any time.

Milobar: Gen Fu is your next opponent! Get ready, fight! And of course, these people just happen to be in a room with meat hooks. Not a refrigerated room where you would store meat. Just a normal room, with FUCKING meat hooks hanging from the ceiling. And after winning the fight Christie ends up hanging from one of the hooks by one hand for no reason. EXTREME!

Donkey: Once that battle starts, we see that spectators can watch the fight on TVs that have overlays so that it looks exactly like the videogame. Wow, that’s spectacularly redundant.

Milobar: With health bars, which they’re obviously generating based on the nanobots that they’ve injected into all of their contestants, to monitor and record all of their muscle movements.

This just serves as a grim reminder that no game is more fun to watch than to play.

Donkey: Another fight scene is going on at the same time where I have no idea who the two people fighting are, and it really highlights something that movies based on fighting games all have a tendency to do. Most people who play fighting games pick one favorite character and do their best to master that one person. But rather than concentrating on all characters equally, these movies pick a handful that they decide are the important characters and focus on them. So this basically amounts to punishing you if you picked one of the “other” characters to master, because you only get to see your character on screen for about thirty seconds in montage scenes where they get their ass beaten.

Milobar: And in some cases killed.

Donkey: Or if you’re watching Street Fighter: The Movie, in some cases they’re not even fighters. They’re scientists.

Milobar: Or they’re Nerf ping-pong ball gun smugglers.

Donkey: Random flashback time! So Kasumi thinks back to a time where she has been taken captive. Hayate comes to rescue her by throwing a cup of tiny pins into air, leaping towards them, and picking the pins out of the air one by one to stab into each of the captors. Those pins get some fucking wicked hang time, apparently. Most mortals couldn’t throw feathers into the air and get that done before they touch the ground.

Milobar: What’s great is that in that little flashback she didn’t look like she was much younger than she is now. In fact, the movie quite quickly reveals that it was only last year. One year ago she was captured by four drunken shitty fisherman and now she’s here to compete and kick everyone’s ass.

Donkey: She must have wandered out into the desert and learned her Animality. It’s the only explanation that doesn’t involve the director of this movie twisting off a steaming pile on our chests.

Milobar: Now is it just me or does Agumibumiwumi seem to have problems speaking? When she speaks and her mouth moves, it looks awkward, like she’s not used to using her mouth for speaking. She’s used to using it for other things that require saliva, a camera, a couple of lighting dudes, a sound professional, and a heroin addiction.

Donkey: Or just a webcam, deep rooted angst aimed at her father, and a festering case of gonorrhea.

Milobar: And a heroin addiction. We soon see Christie talking to Max, her fellow thief and partner in crime and he’s explaining that he’s here to rob the place and that he made it through the first round by feigning an injury. Which means somebody else had to take his place in the fight, but you would think that they would have an even number of combatants, so that’s not really a way out of it altogether.

Donkey: No, you wouldn’t think that would automatically get you to the second round, you’d just have to fight somebody else. Even if you’re left with two dudes crying about hangnails, you’d think they’re going to have to fight each other eventually.

Milobar: Exactly. So technically, he didn’t make it to the second round unless someone was just really dumb and didn’t understand how numbers work. While this is going on, we see Zak, the black dude, hitting on Tina, the southern white woman. That sounds like a match made in heaven.

Donkey: Undoubtedly a recipe for success. But while that awkward tango is unfolding, things really heat up as Leon discovers that his next opponent will be Kasumi. Apparently he was just sitting by himself somewhere, flexing.

Finally, all those years of beating the shit out of my girlfriend are about to pay off.

Milobar: And Kasumi was staring longingly at her reflection in the mirror when she was then suddenly attacked by her bodyguard.

Donkey: After a brief altercation that only serves to warn Kasumi that Ayane was there hunting for her, they’re interrupted as Leon smashes his way into the room to start the fight. To show his strength, Leon catches a piece of IKEA furniture that Kasumi throws at him and rips it apart.

Milobar: And then stands there while she full on kicks him in the face.

Donkey: That might be impressive if you’ve never touched IKEA furniture before, but I’m pretty sure that a limbless torso wrapped in cellophane could tear it apart.

Milobar: I’m fairly certain IKEA furniture pulls itself apart in a drunken rage.

Donkey: If you really want to absolutely decimate an IKEA end table, just try putting a drink on it.

Milobar: Or just looking at it real hard.

Donkey: Even better is that Leon’s response right after letting Kasumi kick him in the face is to flex his biceps, which literally makes the sound of guns cocking. Holy shit. And a bunch of steroid lads out there just came in their pants. That’s ridiculous.

Milobar: Eventually, Kasumigumi throws Leon out a window into the hot tub where our friend DJ Jazzypants is still hitting on the wrestling woman and we almost get to see some black man jimmy, some side dick if you will. Maybe this is a Uwe Boll movie after all. After all the excitement we get to see our next match up, it’s a father daughter grudge match! Sound like the basis for a lot of pornos.

Donkey: After finding out that he’s to fight his daughter, Bass breaks the door down to Tina’s room, prepared for a battle royale. What he isn’t prepared for is his daughter in bed with another woman (Christie is staying there after her room was just destroyed by Kasumi and Leon). And even though Tina’s explaining that they’re not having sex, this father seems far too happy to discover that his daughter is in bed with another woman. That’s a little goddamn creepy.

Milobar: He shares some traits with some people we know, who should never have female children because I’m scared of what they might do. Those names shall remain unsaid.

Donkey: Tina berates her father for interrupting her sleep and they agree to meet the next day for their fight. That’s pretty fucking random as it shows how bizarrely cordial this whole tournament is, but the movie doesn’t rest on its laurels with that. The movie then interjects with a quick scene involving Max, Christie’s thief partner, finding out that he’s been matched up with Bayman, the military fighter who kicks down his door. In a matter of twenty seconds, Max accidentally kicks a shoe at him and ends up knocking Bayman out by tipping over a statue onto him. Good god. At this rate Mr. Bean could be a finalist in this goddamn tournament.

Milobar: Why do shitty action movies always have to include shitty slapstick comedy?

Donkey: This movie feels like it was written using a message board on the DOA website, where everyone got to post their idea for a scene and they just mashed it together from there.

Milobar: Nah, unless they completely ignored my suggestion to have everyone fight each other on the backs of Harrier jets while flying if front of a Time Tunnel inspired hypnotic back drop. Finally, daddy and daughter get to fight, so obviously we need some hillbilly music.

Donkey: How appropriate. Tina declares to her father that it’s her rules for their fight and therefore whoever falls off their raft first is going to lose. COME ON! This is just getting to be too much. I didn’t think you could make up your own rules in a martial arts tournament like this, otherwise couldn’t the combatants just decide to settle the match with a goddamn rousing game of…

Milobar: Checkers?

Donkey: … or thumb wrestling? Why not whip out a deck of cards and play War, for fuck’s sake?

No, the water isn't that cold. That's just shrinkage caused by years and years of steroid abuse. HA HA!!!

Milobar: And she wins by knocking her father into the water.

Donkey: Afterward he stands there in the water, giving her the thumbs up as she celebrates her victory. Seriously, this has got to be the most cheerful fighting tournament that I’ve ever seen. There’s more tension at a preschool kickball game.

Milobar: Everybody is so happy to be fighting to each other.

Donkey: Normally a tournament like this requires them to fight each other to the death, not until one of them has closed their eyes for two seconds or got their hair wet.

Milobar: Maybe in this tournament they are only supposed to fight until their opponent is just really happy and laughing and giggling.

Donkey: But now we come to recreation time and all the girls get together to play some beach volleyball.

Milobar: In their bikinis, of course.

Donkey: A pointless nod to the DOA beach volleyball games.

Milobar: Yet another excuse to watch realistic titty bouncing action. Ok, what the fuck? Who let the black guy have a microphone?

Who's ready for some Celine Dion?

Donkey: Did someone force Zak to be the party’s DJ just because he’s black?

Milobar: Look on the bright side; at least they didn’t name him DJ.

Donkey: They play volleyball with a volleyball that has DOA written all over it, and a net with DOA written all over it. That’s a lot of money that someone put into product placement here, which seems kind of unnecessary. You’re advertising to people who are already there and participating in the tournament.

Milobar: Apparently they really wanted to do some merchandizing off of this movie. I guess we better order up a pair of DOA jumpsuits for the next Shitty Movie Night.

While everyone is distracted by the lame ass volleyball game, Hayabusa decides to find out what is really going down on this island. So we get to see Hayabusa sneaking into the secret laboratory which is probably the most violent part of the whole movie. It’s the only part where you see somebody actually beating the crap out of other people and them not getting up and giggling, and I believe the first guard even gets his neck broken. This scene has really taken on a different tone than the rest of the movie. Scratch that last comment because apparently it’s time for some breakdance fighting.

Donkey: It is very odd to see legitimate brutality in an otherwise cock dumpster of a movie.

Milobar: What I think is awesome is that Hayabusa’s way of sneaking into the secret lab to gather information is to fight his way in. He fights his way into a secret laboratory that has cameras everywhere, leaving a bunch of guards lying around. Given they’re unconscious, but eventually they’re going to get up and then be able to identify who broke into the lab.

Donkey: Even if he didn’t leave them unconscious, he was, at best, leaving behind a pile of dead bodies.

Milobar: Where someone will find them and realize that somebody broke in.

Donkey: There’s definitely nothing subtle about walking very slowly into the front door of a place and killing everyone you see. Once Hayabusa is inevitably captured in the lab, the next point of interest comes when Zak and Tina were unsurprisingly paired off to fight one another. But seeing as they’re at a party and don’t want to spoil it for everyone, they again choose to hold off until the next day. Why would that ruin the party? Aren’t people there to either fight or see a fight? Or did I miss some part of the movie where they explain that they wanted to save money by having the tournament at the same time as they film a Corona commercial?

Milobar: Fine, we’ll fight tomorrow in “The Forbidden Square”, which is technically forbidden. Damn, I didn’t think this through very good.

Donkey: Apparently they should have chosen Permissible Plaza. Tina and Zak meet the next morning in Forbidden Square and are randomly surrounded by a group of spectators. Who are these people and why the hell are they there?

Milobar: A bunch of people who apparently weren’t forbidden to be there. I’m guessing they were waiting for the black guy to start rapping again.

Donkey: Perhaps they were his back up dancers. During the fight, Tina pulls what is most likely one of her super moves from the game and it makes the sound of a gun being fired. That is awesome. Just keep pouring on those ridiculous sound effects. Zak then kicks her through a stone railing. Through it. And she gets right back up and continues fighting.

Milobar: Tina then puts him through the same stone railing and apparently knocks him the fuck out. But does that really surprise you from a dude wearing flaming pants?

Donkey: Seriously, how hard do you have to kick someone to put them through a stone railing?

Milobar: Next is the Helena and Christie showdown. I like how these are the only two women in the entire tournament who decide to fight in bikinis.

I've seen more challenging puzzles on the back of a Shreddies box.

Donkey: In the rain, at that. As they’re fighting Christie notices that on the back of Helena’s neck there is a tattoo, and she manages to memorize it well enough to draw it on paper later so that she can figure out that it is the secret code for her father’s old safe, where Donovan is currently keeping his fortune. That’s pretty remarkable. If I was in a fighting tournament, I don’t know if I would be that observant of such a minor detail. I’d probably be concentrating too hard on not having my sphincter kicked up into my goddamn throat.

Milobar: What’s bizarre is that Christie beats the crap out of Helena and then leaves her passed out on the ground in the rain. Christie could have just looked at the back of her neck at that point.

Donkey: That was pretty idiotic, but then that matches a pretty goddamn stupid tattoo. It’s incredibly obvious as to what it is. It’s just a bunch of numbers close enough to be touching. They don’t even overlap enough to obscure what they are.

Milobar: I don’t understand why you would need to tattoo the code of a safe onto the back of your daughter’s neck. There’s no better place to write that down? You can’t just memorize it? Next we get to see the three titty twins breaking in to Eric Roberts’ office to look for Hayabusa. Christie, Tina, and Agumi-Ayumi-Abumi-whatever-her-name-is, then find Eric Roberts’ secret laboratory where he’s been downloading everyone’s fighting techniques and information. The movie will soon reveal what he wanted all that information for, and it will be glorious.

Donkey: It seems a little strange that they found the ultra secret laboratory just by wandering into his office. They didn’t have to sneak past anything or anyone. If I had a secret lab in my office, I might just lock the fucking door. Close it, at least.

Milobar: Or maybe just not have an entrance to the secret laboratory in my office. Because do you really want all your staff going through your office to get to the secret laboratory? Meanwhile, Helena is apparently very upset about losing the tournament and the creepy lab technician tries to cheer her up by telling her a secret… “I’ve never had sex.”

Donkey: Weatherby chooses that incredibly convenient moment to reveal incredibly important information: “Eric Roberts was arguing with your father and then your father mysteriously disappeared that night. I don’t see how that could be related, but I just thought I’d pass that bit of random trivia on. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to jerking off into a sock while looking at pictures of Dame Edna playing Q-Bert.” Seriously? That didn’t strike him as important, or something that Helena might want to know before this exact moment?

Milobar: Now here we go. The ladies have been chained up. They are in holding cells about to find out what Eric Roberts has been up to. And it’s nothing but good news. He’s about to reveal the ultimate weapon: the word of Jesus Christ, their lord and savior.

Donkey: If I’m not mistaken, he’s about to introduce them to Jesus Christ while they’re locked in tanning booths. You better have a sweet base tan when you meet the messiah, bitches.

Milobar: But no! It’s a pair of sunglasses! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, he introduces them to “the future”: a pair of sunglasses.

More powerful than a thousand exploding suns. More deadly than a viper riding a tiger. More chic than a Prada handbag.

Donkey: Those sunglasses will allow him to become the greatest fighter the world has ever seen.

Milobar: Because those sunglasses are going to allow him to use the downloaded fighting powers of every fighter in DOA. Donovan begins to download everyone’s martial arts abilities and alarms start going off throughout the entire complex. That doesn’t seem like the best set up.

Donkey: Why the fuck would you automate a process where the moment you go to use your top secret technology, a series of loud and obnoxious alarms go off all over the island? Someone please name one reasonable purpose for that, or at least point out how it isn’t just another example of the movie pissing in my mouth.

Milobar: Now that Eric Roberts has downloaded their abilities, he somehow has not only all of their knowledge and martial arts skills, but all of their speed and agility as well, which is why he truly is the best of the best. Someone should make a movie about Eric Roberts’ life. I think it would be awesome.

Donkey: That would be the greatest story that nobody ever wanted to be told. I’m not really sure how these sunglasses could possibly work, though. They show Donovan their prediction of all of his opponent’s moves, since they already have a complete set of data from following that fighter’s history. It also points out potential weak spots at any given moment. That’s all well and good, but how the fuck do they freeze time to allow him to process this information and act on it before his opponent simply kicks him in the vagina? Donovan then trots out Hayate to show off his technology to potential buyers.

Yes, we'll fight in a minute, just...hold on...no, no....wait...okay. Got it. Let's do this.

Milobar: I love how Hayate is finished off by being kicked through a cement wall (which in and of itself would kill a human being). He flies outside, and is plummeting to his death when at the last moment he is rescued by Ayane, who just happens to be in the exact right place in the exact right moment. There’s no other reason for her to be there other than to catch him and save his life. She’s just there.

Donkey: We know he won’t be killed by this, anyways. I think we’ve established by now that damage from smashing through a brick wall is lesser than damage from being kicked in the face, as the latter has knocked out far more people than the former. If we follow that logic even further down this road, a lust-filled hip thrust should kill the entire cast of this film at once.

Milobar: Now it’s time for Max to break into the safe holding all of the island’s money. I hope Donovan’s got some sweet porno mags in there.

Donkey: That would be awesome, if Eric Roberts didn’t have a dime in there, just a stack of Swank magazines from the 70′s and a bottle of Lubriderm. But almost as awesome, Max broke into the safe by playing a shitty sliding tile game that serves as its combination lock. The tile game forms a picture that wouldn’t make sense any other way than the way he solved it. The tile game might as well have been a picture of a goddamn happy face or even of Eric Roberts.

Those characters actually translate to "pointless busywork".

Milobar: It might as well have been a sliding tile game that makes you form any image. If it’s a picture of someone’s face, a picture of a dog, or a picture of somebody’s house…there’s only one combination that makes sense. So you don’t have to guess at anything. It just takes a while to figure it out. Meanwhile the geeky scientist guy tries to stop Eric Roberts from uploading his design specs to what I can only suspect are international terrorists. With a few quick keystrokes we get to see “Transmission Terminated”. Open web address CIA.org? CIA alerted!

Donkey: I love the buyers that you see on the monitor. None of them look like either terrorists or fighters looking to improve their skills. It looks more like Bill Gates deciding he wants to buy his way into a UFC title belt. And something tells me that it’s not that easy to get an instant pipeline into the CIA, let alone then get their attention that quickly.

Milobar: Scientist: “Hey guys, there’s crime going on.” CIA: “We’re on the way! Look out! Eric Roberts is jogging towards you like an old man. Be careful!”

Donkey: So now that Eric Roberts has got his fantastic glasses of fighting awesomeness and the money out of his vault, he’s engaging a self-destruct sequence for his entire island. I’m not exactly a financial advisor, but that seems to me like it’s a net loss.

Milobar: The thing I find bizarre is that he just had a whole bunch of money in his safe on his island. He doesn’t have bank accounts anywhere?

Donkey: I just don’t understand how applicable he thinks fighting prowess is to the rest of life. This is a man who had a giant fortress on his own island and a ton of cash, and he appears to be trading that all in for the fighting abilities…of four people.

Milobar: And somehow either he or the corporation that he inherited from his business partner developed the technology to create nanobots that could go inside a human body and record all of the physical information about them. That seems like a technology that you could sell very legitimately on the open market and make a lot more money than you could possibly get illegitimately selling it on the black market. In fact, I’m sure if you went to the American military and just gave them a really good PowerPoint presentation suggesting that you might be able to develop that technology in the future, they’d probably give you a bunch of money just to work on it. So if you’ve already got it ready to go, you could probably get even more.

Donkey: But once again, it’s obviously a better idea to trade all that away to be able to fight like three chicks and one dude. There’s a lot of douchebags in bars out there who need to be taught a lesson.

Milobar: Isn’t that every man’s secret dream; to fight like three women at once? I don’t think Eric Roberts thought this plan through too well.

Donkey: All of our heroes have escaped from their holding cells and they’re trying to stop Donovan. And there’s thirty seconds left in the self-destruct countdown. Unless the self-destruct consists of an explosion of potato salad, I’d say they’re all pretty fucked.

Milobar: Let me tell you something about my plan for the future. My five year plan, if you will. My house is going to be built on a self-destruct system of potato salad.

Donkey: So after all that, after his downloading all of their fighting skills which allows them to severely beat them without reprieve, they manage to defeat him by punching him in the bottom of the goddamn foot while he’s running away?

Milobar: You ever been punched in the bottom of the foot? That shit hurts.

Donkey: And then Kasumi stabs him the back of the neck with one of her little darts and paralyzes him.

Milobar: Keep in mind that he has lost his sunglasses at this point…his super ninja sunglasses.

Donkey: And then they’re all diving away from the explosion as the island self-destructs, even though it is clearly about five minutes later and the countdown was last seen to be at thirty seconds. Even worse, they all jump down what appears to be about fifty stories into the ocean, and of course, they’re all perfectly fine.

Apparently not one of them notices that they're headed directly towards the fifty feet of beach between the building and the ocean.

Milobar: Everybody lives, everybody’s happy. And then the same pirates from the beginning of the movie, Liu Kang’s pirates, show up at the DOA island. Why would they be in this area? How did they get there?

Donkey: Our heroes steal the pirates’ boat and sail off into the sunset. That’s it?!

Milobar: Not quite. We need a quick recap of the movie.

Donkey: Yes, the movie then decides that what we need now is a random montage of the events of the movie we just fucking saw.

Milobar: No, only the events of the female characters of the movie. It’s mostly titty and panty shots, with some kicks and punches thrown in for good measure.

Donkey: But wait, just when you think it can’t be any fucking dumber, the movie’s not quite finished. There’s one last scene which consists of the five women back at Kasumi’s temple, about to face off against the entire clan of ninjas. But in the face of this horde that should by all rights kill them easily and mercilessly, the women strike a random pose. End of movie.

Milobar: That was truly beautiful, but nothing beats the pose at the end of Street Fighter: The Movie.

Wait, why are we here to kill your entire clan? Aw, fuck it.

Donkey: At least they followed the guidelines established by Street Fighter: The Movie as the plot made no sense, it missed a large component of the entire point of the videogame, and ended with a completely random and unnecessary pose.

Milobar: Yes, it’s almost as if they wanted to suggest that they might make a sequel. They might make a DOA II. Although keeping in line with the naming convention for this movie it would probably be something more like: DOA: Dead or Alive: II: 2: Two.

Donkey: I don’t know how you’d follow up a movie about Eric Roberts stealing fighters’ abilities to put into a goddamn pair of sunglasses. Maybe Tony Danza designing sport sandals that paralyze his opponents with rainbows?

Milobar: It is a difficult act to follow. Perhaps if your main character was blind and his walking stick secretly had a sword hidden inside of it, which he uses quite liberally to cut opponents in half at the waist. Someone get Rutger Hauer on the phone!

Donkey: If they try, I hope they come up with something that has a longer running time than this movie: eighty one minutes. With few exceptions, if you’re movie can’t break the ninety minute barrier, it’s probably going to be shit. You’ve got a TV movie at that point, so you probably just shouldn’t bother. Unless it’s a touching drama about teenage drinking starring Kirk Cameron, presuming that he’s willing to take five minutes away from blowing his bizarre traveling buddy and putting out the DUMBEST fucking arguments for religion known to humanity (seriously, look up their banana argument…it will punch your brain right in the face and wipe its ass with your necktie). Then you’ll have yourself a hit.

The Verdict:

Milobar: I don’t understand why videogame movies always have to be so goddamn goofy. Every character acts like they are twelve years old. Every concept in the plot feels like it was conceived at 4 AM, after a hard night of drinking. And every action scene is so over-sensationalized I feel like I am watching an episode of TMZ. Once again, another movie that leaves me with nothing but well earned complaints, unanswerable questions, and a half mast stiffy. I give it 9 shoes to the face out of 11 shoes to the groin.

Donkey: Yet another hilarious failure in the attempt to bring videogames to the big screen. But at least they followed rule number one in the book of American cinema: if your script looks like it could earn just as much respect being performed by sock puppets, you need Eric Roberts. That man is the balls. I give this movie four bouncing breasts out of five gamers who will never know the touch of a woman.

What We Learned:

Donkey: Some people are willing to sell their soul to get a Ray-Bans endorsement. Had I known that Eric Roberts was that hungry, I would have sent him some cash. Or at the very least, a hug and a coupon for a free Happy Meal.

Milobar: Apparently the average screenwriter has no idea how martial arts actually work, or how much it hurts to get punched in the fucking face. I’m going to make it my personal mission in life to rectify the latter.

Back To The Main Page.

If your expectations were for a good film, then indeed destroy them.

Donkey: A week had passed. The throbbing of our colons was beginning to subside. Our stomachs were finally beginning to heal from the scorching vengeance known as Diet Vanilla Cherry Pepsi Jazz. The stagnant smell of shame had nearly cleared the room. There could be no doubt that the official premier of Shitty Movie Night had been an unbridled success.

Being inspired by videogames, we decided to follow the natural progression that was laid out before us. Street Fighter II was undeniably the greatest fighting game of its generation, and it inspired a movie that proved to be equally outstanding. But as any former cast member of Perfect Strangers can tell you, one rarely achieves the highest levels of excellence without amassing a fair amount of nemeses. And just as Batman clashes with Calendarman, Hall battles Oates, and Larry the Cable Guy wages a holy war against comedy, Street Fighter is locked in an eternal struggle for fighting game supremacy with Mortal Kombat. Respect must be paid. And wouldn’t you know it, Mortal Kombat just happened to have a couple movies of its own. But as one out of the three or four people reading this may notice, we didn’t actually start with the first film (good catch, mom). No, the first film wasn’t actually all that bad, so it just didn’t make the grade. For the truly shitty experience, we skipped straight to chapter two.

As a side note, anyone out there who is a fan of the SNK fighting games (Fatal Fury, King Of Fighters, World Heroes, etc) who would claim the mantle of official rival to Street Fighter II and argue against giving this much credit to Mortal Kombat, you may just be right. After all, Mortal Kombat games were about as much fun as trying to drag a player piano up five flights of stairs using only your scrotum and an intense love of salsa dancing. We were all there for the fatalities and nothing more. But I refuse to recognize any of the SNK games until a major Hollywood studio picks up my script for World Heroes 2: Pirate Vs Football Guy.

The Plot:

MORTAL KOMBAT!!!!!!!!*

* Our apologies for that, but as demonstrated quite literally in the first 2 seconds of this film, it’s actually a legal obligation to begin anything related to Mortal Kombat with that trademarked scream, whether it’s a movie, article, or simply bringing it up in casual conversation.

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation does all that you could ask any truly great sequel to do. Rather than trying to improve on the film that came before it, this movie makes the first one better by being infinitely worse in every way. Mortal Kombat consisted of some mildly entertaining fight scenes set to techno music and strung together with an average, albeit random, storyline. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is a string of exceptionally tedious and entirely unmotivated fight scenes, barely strung together by a plot that seems like it was taken directly from the journal of a fourth grader (so much so that it would have been entirely appropriate if Liu Kang stopped in the middle of the movie and gave a twenty minute long monologue on how girls are gross and homework sucks). But hey, they’ve still got techno music. I suppose that’s…something. Trying to explain this movie’s plot is kind of like trying to sift through your toilet after passing a quarter that you accidentally swallowed; it’s equal parts humiliation and disgust, and no matter what you find along the way, you somehow always end up poorer in the end. But that’s the kind of masochism we’re here for, so let’s just jump right in and plow through this shit heap…

Liu Kang and his troupe of Cirque De Soleil rejects, including Sonya Blade, Johnny Cage, and Princess Kitana were sauntering back to the Temple of Light after just having defeated Shang Tsung, an evil wizard from the land of Outworld, in a once-in-a-generation tournament that determines the fate of the entire world. Snow cones and freshly pressed slacks for all! Of course, we’re not supposed to wonder why there is only one temple of monks who knew about this rather routine threat to our entire world, and why our world’s one hope of survival is conveniently a member of said temple. You’d think something that important would warrant a little more searching than just glancing around at those within a fifty foot radius. But regardless, the orgy of jubilation and rusty trombones was quickly doused in the cold shower of an Outworld invasion.

Shao Kahn, the ruler of Outworld, and his Elder God father unleash their fiendishly confusing attack on our planet by ignoring the results of aforementioned Mortal Kombat tournament and attempting to complete a merger with the realm of Outworld. The portal between the two realms that serves as the vehicle for this plot somehow draws its power from the fact that Shao Kahn raised Queen Sindel, the mother of Princess Kitana, back from the dead. How, you ask, does raising someone from the dead have anything to do with creating or maintaining a portal between realms? Fucked if I know. Growing a fine mustache would be more goddamn relevant, for as we all know it opens the fabled, mystical portal to awesomeness.

In the face of this grave threat to us all, our intrepid heroes decide to split up to achieve vastly different, but equally useless objectives. Sonya travels to find her partner, Jax, to use her passive/aggressive skills to get the help that she refuses to ask for. Lord Rayden visits the temple of the Elder Gods to ask them how any just deities could allow this movie to happen. Liu Kang travels to the middle of the desert so that he can learn how to transform into a GC dragon worthy of a mail order technical institute or art school infomercial. Princess Kitana is immediately captured and rendered useless for the remainder of the film. And Johnny Cage proves to be the smartest character in this entire goddamn movie by dying in the first scene.

After somehow managing to accomplish these tasks in between the aerobic exercise routines that someone thought would serve as fight scenes, our heroes then gather together and travel to the realm of Outworld for the dramatic final confrontation. First they reunite Princess Kitana with her resurrected mother, which is supposed to close the portal between the two worlds. But as it turns out…not so much. You see, if that reunion had actually managed to accomplish what they thought it would, then the invasion would be stopped and the movie would be over. This is fucking Mortal Kombat, people. If they ended the movie with anything but a grand yet mediocre fight scene, then the movie-going public would have left the theater wholly unsatisfied. The slow-witted jocks that came to see the movie for the mildly homoerotic imagery of sweaty, scantily clad men wrestling one another would have had to find their own satisfaction by turning on the pasty, socially inept videogame geeks among them, leaving the other six people that saw this film to flee in terror. The slaughter would have been epic in proportion. And by the way, the explanation as to why the reunion doesn’t close to the portal is explained just as well as the whole idea was detailed in the first place. So by now, this is just another of many reasons why the audience has no idea what the fuck is going on.

The grossly predictable grand finale, therefore, comes when our heroes challenge Shao Kahn and his minions to what is essentially a winner-take-all game of Dance Dance Revolution, interrupted only by a brief and pointless beast battle, where Liu Kang and Shao Kahn morph into creatures that look like they were ripped directly from the Clash of the Titans cutting room floor. Once Shao Kahn is defeated, the portal between the two worlds closes, and our heroes are left to frolic in the sun.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

I think we can now understand the agonizing disappointment of so many women in the world, as the first thing this movie does is threaten to prematurely blow its load all over its audience’s collective faces. Seriously, there is so much awesomeness packed into the eight minutes that comprise the opening scene that it is hard to believe that what is to follow could possibly be anything but a let down. After it summarized the events of the first movie quite literally in forty seconds, the story picked up right where the open ending of that film left off. It’s so seamless that you’d think that instead of years having passed between the two films, there was merely a commercial break. Of course, if you actually watched the two movies back to back as this implies you should, the first thing you’d be struck by is how few of the cast members from the first film were actually willing to participate in the second one. If you, like any other person with an IQ above that of a particularly salty wad of ham, think that’s a hint as to the severe drop in quality that you’re about to witness, you still have no idea what kind of flaming wreckage you’re about stumble into.

Shit, we really should have budgeted for parachutes.

Having spent what has been scientifically proven to be the exact amount of time required to summarize the events of the first movie, the opening scene rolled right along into the invasion of the Outworld forces. But this invasion wasn’t carried out in a way that any defending force could anticipate and counter. After all, waves of tanks or battalions of foot soldiers can’t compare tumbling generic ninjas! That’s right; the invasion consists of an army of shirtless, hooded, greased-up men somersaulting down from fiery portals opened in the heavens above. And as I watched this flood of ridiculousness, all I could think to myself was, “man, this invasion is going to be awesome when half of their forces shatter their legs and spines after falling from that height”. The scene then kicked it up a notch by hitting us with a barrage of outstanding dialogue, which left us reeling like a 12 year old girl mercilessly beaten by a champion prize fighter. Behold.

Shao Kahn’s announcing his intention after spinning down to the ground:

And yet, this guy has a tremendous singing voice.

Shao Kahn: “The Earth was created in six days. So too, shall it be destroyed. And on the seventh day, mankind shall rest…IN PEACE!”

That’s just fucking outstanding. Although frankly, I’m somewhat surprised that the leader of an invading force from another dimension would have enough knowledge of Christianity to make a failed attempt at a clever reference.

Liu Kang and Rayden’s reaction to the invasion:

Liu Kang: “I thought our victory closed those portals?!”

Rayden: “What closes can also open again.”

Wow. That’s fucking it?! That’s the most broad, nonsensical explanation for the basis of the entire plot of this film that you could possibly come up with. And Rayden is supposed to be a fucking god?!

I said pull my finger!

Princess Kitana and Queen Sindel, upon seeing each other for the first time:

Kitana: “Mother…you’re alive.”

Sindel: “Too bad you…WILL DIE!”

Fucking genius. Whoever wrote this screenplay should have been immediately inducted into Mensa the moment that shit was heard by human ears (before the oceans of blood started pouring out of them, that is).

Once our combatants had all met in the field of battle and the invaders had voiced their exceptionally comical intentions, it was time for the two leaders to draw a line in the sand. And how else would this be done than Rayden and Shao Kahn each flipping through the air for about fifty feet to meet one another face to face for some brief, amazingly calm and pointless banter? The scene was then finished with the death of Johnny Cage. He leapt in to save Sonya, was who grabbed by Shao Kahn, only to allow his neck to be snapped after being hit all of twice. All that in eight minutes. We were off to a pretty shitty start, gang.

But as much as that opening scene felt like the face full of hot man-chowder that it threatened to be, there was no shortage of staggeringly shitty moments to come. The next being a scene involved the greatest mode of transportation that humanity has ever scene. When our heroes decided to split up to try to counter the invasion, they traveled to their different locations using steel cage balls that travel through a series of tunnels that lead through the center of the Earth. That’s right, you heard me correctly. They traveled through tunnels using the steel cage balls from American fucking Gladiators, only these were powered by hot air coming up from the Earth’s core. But if that wasn’t ridiculous enough for you, they added two finer points to this concept that felt like a two uppercuts directly to the left testicle. First, Princess Kitana explained not only that the balls moved so fast that you reach any destination across the Earth in mere hours, but that they moved so fast that it would appear that they were barely moving at all. Now that’s pretty goddamn fast. So when you’re filming it from the perspective of the people inside those balls, it might make sense that it didn’t seem like they were moving very quickly. But when you’re filming one of the balls moving down the tunnels from an outside perspective, it should have looked like it was moving faster than a shopping cart rolling down a slight embankment. It should have, but it didn’t.

Who built this shit? And why does a woman from a different dimension know all about it?

But then one of the balls came to what they called an “interchange” and that second shot to the crotch hit home. The “interchange” in this case was a massive chasm where the ball flew out of its tunnel, sailed through the open air, and attempted to land in the entrance of another tunnel on the other side. Insane, yes, but what made it even better was that in order to land in the appropriate tunnel, they had to steer the ball themselves by leaning in the direction of the tunnel that they were aiming for. Keep in mind that the tunnels weren’t much bigger than the actual balls themselves, so the margin of error here was small enough that you have to believe that the mortality rate of this mode of travel makes it completely worthless. We couldn’t find a better way to create an intersection, especially considering all this takes place directly over a river of molten fucking lava?

Lean left. No, wait...I mean right! Shit!

Behold Smoke or Cyrax or Sektor or...ah, who gives a shit?

A couple of scenes later when we returned to our stalwart travelers, this assault on the audience’s most basic level of intelligence continued. Once Princess Kitana and Liu Kang reached their destination and got out of their American Gladiator hamsterball, they attempted to share a tender moment when they were interrupted by Smoke (also known as Generic-Black-Robot-Ninja) and a handful of standard hooded henchmen, and the first full martial arts fight scene of the film began. And while this fight scene warmed up with the basic problem that Liu Kang attempting hand to hand combat with a metal opponent should have resulted in him breaking his hands, feet, or whatever else he attempted to use, this wouldn’t be the true classic that it is if it stopped there. About half way through the fight, Smoke produced a smaller rocket launcher from his chest and fired on his opponent. This begs the question, if he had a goddamn rocket launcher, why the fuck didn’t he just use that in the first place? Why would you even bother taking to time to program a robot to utilize martial arts when it has a goddamn rocket launcher? And then we got the final coup de grace: as Smoke was about to fire on both Liu Kang and Princess Kitana, in what was sure to be a spectacularly lethal and hilarious explosive death for both of them, Sub-Zero (also known as Generic-Blue-Ninja) quite literally flew into the scene and froze Smoke before the rocket could leave his chest, causing him to blow himself up.

Just don't mention shrinkage around this guy.

That’s right, he flew in. Flew. When the fuck did it become standard practice for ninjas to fly? And in order to picture how utterly retarded this looked, try to imagine someone flying into a scene like Superman, as Superman would look if the production team was a group of grade nine drama students with ADD. It was absolutely staggering to behold. After that trash and some more pointless dialogue that followed, Scorpion (also known as Generic-Yellow-Ninja) showed up, slapped Sub-Zero around for a little while, and then stole Princess Kitana away when everyone’s back was turned. But really, none of that matters. At that point, the damage was already done and anyone still watching should barely see through the stream of tears.

Why exactly is he clamped to the table?

The cavalcade continued soon after as Sonya reached her destination and looked for her partner, Jax. Sonya ended up finding Jax lying on a table alone in the middle of an abandoned medical research facility, having just had his new cybernetic enhancements attached to his arms. It seemed a little odd to me that he would by there by himself, as you would think that whoever was there with him at the time of the apparent evacuation would have taken a moment to wake him, especially since they had just finished enhancing his strength. Even if you didn’t just rouse him out of basic human decency, he would seem to be a handy guy to have around at that point. No sooner had Sonya and Jax reunited then they were interrupted by Cyrax (also known as Generic-Yellow-Robot-Ninja) and another cadre of hooded warriors. Is this starting to sound familiar yet? This all blended into yet another monotonous fighting scene set to unremarkable rave music. But it was the way that the scene ended that really tickled the prostate into mouth-watering delight. After Sonya and Jax defeated Cyrax, they noticed that his corpse had begun a self-destruct countdown and showed the unprecedented level of brain stem activity that led them to conclude that running away might be a good idea. Once the countdown reached its end, the bomb exploded and we get a very typical action movie shot of the heroes leaping towards the camera, away from the explosion. The problem with this case was that they were leaping in front of what was painfully obviously stock footage of a random explosion of nothing. Not an exploding building, car, or even liquor-filled hobo. This is the Microsoft clip art equivalent of an action scene. A fucking paperclip should have popped up in the corner of the screen and asked us if we’d like to reconsider watching this goddamn film.

This just speaks for itself.

Do us all a service and embed that in his fucking skull. Please.

The film’s next notable moment of greatness came when Liu Kang made it to the middle of the desert and found Nightwolf, the sort-of-maybe-possibly Native American who was supposed to teach Liu Kang how to achieve his “Animality”, which was basically helping him to become a very bad CG dragon that looked about as dangerous and effective as a dirty hippie going into battle brandishing a pastrami on rye. This sounded like a fairly daunting task, and an accomplishment that would take years to attain…or perhaps a snappy montage scene at the very least. Instead, Nightwolf knocked Liu Kang unconscious with his tomahawk, which in turn caused Liu Kang to have a dream about people telling him he’s a disappointment, doubting himself, and becoming the fabled dragon. Shit, throw in getting caught masturbating and that’s a dream that I’ve had more times than I care to admit…so why the hell can’t I become goddamn mythical creature? During this dream, Nightwolf offered such helpful tips to Liu Kang’s unconscious body as “find that power inside you” and “feel your Animality”. And that’s it. That’s all he did. No shit. Liu Kang traveled half way across the globe to get knocked the fuck out and told two lines of encouragement while he has a bad dream.

Not my hip! That's the source of all my power! And where I keep my wallet!

Another gem in this bowl of bile came a few scenes later, when we caught up with Sonya and Jax wandering through a barren wasteland. Sonya then wondered off and was attacked by Milena in a scene that was painfully tacked on for the sake of simply introducing another character from the game that served no purpose to the overall plot whatsoever. But at least it was entertaining, right? Nope. There are certainly men out there whom would be stupid enough to find merit in the scene just because it’s essentially just two chicks wrestling around in the mud. But those men can go fuck themselves, and I feel very secure in saying that since most of them are too busy out buying “supplements” for the gym to have taken the time to learn what a computer is, so they’ll never read this anyways. But as arduous as that was to sit through, the scene really ladled out an extra heap of random when Sonya had just finished killing Milena and a terrible looking CG demon burst out of an old statue behind her, only to be beaten back down into the ground by Jax, who came to Sonya’s rescue as he quite literally punched it in the hip repeatedly and finished it off with a single punch to the top of the head. What the hell was that? Why did we witness any of that? What the fuck is even going on anymore? Whoever wrote this deserves a punch in the goddamn face.

And on the 8th day, God got a make-over.

By far, one of the finest moments of the film occurred shortly thereafter, once Liu Kang, Sonya, and Jax all met up again and began arguing over whose outfit made them look the most like a backup dancer from Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation video (or something like that, but nobody really cared by this point). Suddenly, Rayden flipped into the scene from out of thin air, which looked about as good as every other special effect in this movie (interpretation: like ass). He proceeded to chastise them for arguing and extolled the virtues of hugs and daisies, but not before he stopped and pointed out his new haircut. It’s a very little thing, but this was perhaps one of the greatest things ever to happen in cinema. Say it out loud with me, kids: the Chinese God of Thunder got a fucking haircut. Roll that around on your palette for a while and see how that tastes. If you can’t quite place the flavor, then trust me, it’s a mix of ball sweat and week-old raisin bagels. And on a brief side note, I’d love to get my hands on the memo that specifically states that the role of Rayden must be filled by the worst actor available that’s willing to work for AA batteries. Christopher Lambert put his amazingly confusing stamp on the role in the first movie, leaving anyone who witnessed it to wonder why the hell an underwhelming French actor was playing the role of a Chinese god. Who the hell decided to follow that up by giving the role to James Remar, an American actor whom it would be generous to call the height of mediocrity?

That's it...cradle the balls, work the shaft...Shazam!

As the movie began with a bang, it was fitting that it should end with a clusterfuck-level explosion, and it did not disappoint. The scene began with the death of Rayden, as he had apparently given up his immortality for the sake of humanity. Not really sure why, but we’ll just go with it. And the moment was handled with an incredible amount of grace, really. I’ve felt more emotion accidentally snapping the tip off my pencil than I did witnessing Rayden’s demise. It was about as remarkable as a tepid bowl of plain oatmeal.

But once the movie had finished tugging on the heartstrings, it was time to get down to the real action. First, our heroes squared off against their adversaries and laid claim to who would be their opponent, trying to make it seem like establishing this was somehow significant. But just like handing a toddler a loaded pistol, the movie then negated its own efforts by turning the pistol around and shooting itself in the face. Jax picked Motaro, Kitana naturally opted to face Sindel, and therefore Sonya was left with Ermac or Rain, or whatever the hell that particular ninja’s name was (we’ll stick with Generic-Red-Ninja to be safe). But instead of trying to make it sound like this would somehow be even a slightly significant pairing, Sonya herself simply said, “leftovers are fine with me”. Why the fuck even bother at that point? If you’re not going to take this seriously, why should anyone else? And it didn’t get any better once we get to the meat of the action. The first great moment came when Jax was slap-fighting with Motaro with very little success. Eventually, Jax got frustrated enough that he ripped off his metal arm enhancers and went old school. That’s all well and good, but if we think back, we should all remember that he was found in a medical facility, having just had those metal enhancers put onto him. So if they needed to be surgically installed onto him, why the hell can he just rip them off like a goddamn jacket? If they could come off that easily, shouldn’t he have been able to just strap that shit on in the first place? Once again the movie couldn’t be bothered to maintain its own shitty logic.

Shitty Hydra Vs Shitty Dragon: no matter who wins, you lose.

But all of that was just a sideshow to the main event of the final battle between Liu Kang and Shao Kahn. Like the movie as a whole, this fight dropped a Cleveland Steamer square on our chests. It began with Liu Kang getting his ass handed to him by Shao Kahn. But not ready to give up and go back to the Glee Club quite yet, Liu Kang put his thirty seconds of training to good use and invoked his transformation into his “Animality”. Not to be outdone, Shao Kahn did the same, so the final-final battle now became a shitty dragon versus a shitty hydra. This looked so bad that it would have been an improvement if they had done the entire thing in stop-motion filming using Lego characters assembled by rabid baboons. And to put the icing on the cake, the movie once again took something that was badly done and made it completely pointless. After Liu Kang went to all those lengths to learn his “Animality”, it was used for about two minutes. Liu Kang and Shao Kahn grappled for a few moments, fought to a draw, then fell together off a stone plateau and returned to their normal forms once they landed. I know it’s been asked before, but, again, it can’t be said enough; why the fuck was this even in the movie? At that point, Shao Kahn turned to his Elder God father for assistance. But before daddy could help, two other Elder Gods showed up and held him in check, proclaiming that no outside assistance would be given (once again proving that deities are only good for providing no assistance to anyone whatsoever), and the fate of the worlds would once again be decided by…MORTAL KOMBAT!!!!! Yes, the trademarked scream rang out one more time as the final-final-final battle was set to begin. By now even the makers of the movie understand that anyone would be goddamn tired of the whole affair, so the battle was kept fairly brief. As you’d expect, Liu Kang ended up beating Shao Kahn to death and the world was saved.

I don't remember Liu Kang having a sodomy attack in the game...

Once the battle was done, two final things happened. First, Rayden was revived and promoted to the rank of an Elder God. Given the events of this film, one can only assume that this was bestowed upon him as a result of spectacular, blazing incompetence. And finally, the movie ended with everything magically going back to the exact point where the movie began, thus nullifying the events of the entire film. That’s about as satisfying an ending as finding out the whole thing was a dream that Liu Kang had after passing out from auto-erotic asphyxiation while watching the first movie. Fuck, if only I could be magically transported back to a time that I hadn’t seen this film…

The Verdict:

When it comes to cinematic accomplishments in the field of crapulence, this movie has rocketed to the upper echelon in an American Gladiator rollerball of hilarious disgrace. Unlike the respective videogame series on which they are based where it is a one sided slaughter, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation swaps blows with Street Fighter: The Movie and almost manages to keep pace. If it could be faulted for anything, it would be simply failing to have Jean Claude Van Damme in the movie. A ridiculous thought, maybe, but why not switch one inappropriate French actor for another and have JCVD play Rayden? It wouldn’t have been any more ridiculous than James Remar. But there is one little detail that balances out that slight criticism. Having received the double pack DVD of Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation for Christmas, I couldn’t help but notice the ratings on the back of the case. Mortal Kombat: Annihilation is rated as having, and I’m quoting here, “Non-stop Martial Arts Violence”. That’s the official rating of this movie. Not just some martial arts violence or even a moderate amount. Someone in some position of authority actually thought to categorize this as non-stop. That’s pretty damn awesome. I’m left with little choice but to give the movie five generic multi-colored ninjas out of five.

What We Learned:

The complete and total annihilation of our world can be accomplished with an army of hooded generic henchmen who accomplish little more than somersaulting everywhere, unless one of us has a dream about becoming a shitty dragon. Live in fear, people. The end is nigh.

Back To The Main Page.

Quick, turn the channel! This one's about to do the splits and kick my ass!

Donkey: Our journey began as all things, indeed even the world itself, must begin: with Jean Claude Van Damme. But with a cinematic body of work like his, what Van Damme movie were we to start with? It was like being faced with a veritable buffet of dong-punching excellence and trying to figure out where to start. But after spending a mere two hours repeatedly playing the same level of the NES classic turd sandwich, Ninja Gaiden 3, we achieved a height of tedium that few could experience without swearing that they had entered the seventh circle of hell and the answer became clear. As it is widely acknowledged throughout humankind’s recorded knowledge, there are extremely few movies that involve the phrase “based on a videogame” that are not utter bullshit. There was no better place to start. And as faltering in the face of this dark territory was not an option, we knew that our resolve on this virgin voyage would only be strengthened by the ray of hope that was Van Damme (hereby referred to as “JCVD”, “Johnny Splits”, or simply “Sweetness”).

Milobar: I’ve met whores that are less willing to spread their legs than JCVD is.

Donkey: Goddamn right. And I’ve got it on good authority that even the hairs on Van Damme’s scrotum can do the splits on command. He would be the only shepherd who could guide this humble flock through the darkness and into the sunshine of Infinite Awesomeness. And lead he did, friends. Lead he did.

The Plot:

Donkey: Street Fighter: The Movie is loosely based on the smash hit videogame Street Fighter II. And we do stress the term “loosely”, as it wouldn’t really be surprising to discover that the movie was equally based on a hooker-fueled meth binge, or a bout of explosive diarrhea brought on by licking the floor of a Cambodian slaughterhouse. The first warning sign of the quality that we were about to endure was the fact that a movie based on a fighting tournament does not feature a tournament anywhere in the plot. It’s not even close. They might as well have taken the characters from the game and had them reenact The Terminator, Short Circuit 2, or Terms of Endearment. It would have been just as goddamn relevant.

Milobar: Don’t forget, this isn’t just a movie based on a video game. It’s a movie based on a video game that was also the basis for another video game. Street Fighter: The Game: The Movie: The Game is one of the greatest experiences the human species has ever known.

I'd like to take a moment to talk to you about premature ejaculation.

Donkey: Wholeheartedly agreed. You just haven’t lived until you’ve nailed Captain Sawada in the junk while doing the splits as a digitized JCVD. And while we’re on the subject, why is Sawada even in the game? Did his two lines and zero fighting scenes in the movie actually impress someone other than his grandmother? I’d rather fight with a horribly digitized version of the film’s caterer.

Street Fighter: The Movie features JCVD playing the role of Colonel Guile, and an assortment of other actors who are sadly not JCVD rounding out the rest of the cast.

Milobar: My personal favorite is the Hawaiian actor who, looking as non-Japanese as possible was absolutely born to play E. Honda.

Donkey: It makes about as much sense as a Belgian with a thick French accent playing an American. But the most notable of this lot is Raul Julia playing General Bison…

I'm guessing this was an awkward visit to the Sears Photocenter.

Milobar: …whose death, after watching this movie, appears more and more to be a desperate suicidal call for help.

Donkey: He is the brutal yet happy-go-lucky dictator of the magical land called Shadaloo. There’s no need to look for it on any map, as the movie figures that since it’s clear that white people don’t live there, nobody will know or care if it really exists or not (a quick test to prove the point: without looking, explain where Argentina is on the globe…yeah, exactly). Bison is embroiled in a civil war and what appears to be an extended tickle fight with the AN, or Allied Nations, which would be the equivalent of the UN if the UN were run by the Village People.

Milobar: As opposed to being run by My Chemical Romance, as it currently appears to be.

Donkey: But just as it appears that the AN forces, lead by Colonel Guile, have turned the tide of the war in their favor, Bison makes the brash and horribly predictable decision to kidnap AN aid workers and the AN soldiers protecting them so that he can demand 20 billion dollars in hard currency or Starbucks gift cards.

Milobar: An interesting aside: this movie came out in 1994, when I was 15 years old and had never set foot in a Starbucks in my life. In fact, I don’t think I even knew what a Starbucks was, other than a shitty character from a shitty TV show about shitty robots chasing shitty humans across a shitty universe.

Donkey: We are children of the 80s, after all. Come to think of it, why wasn’t there a Battlestar Galactica NES videogame back in the day? I would have totally played that, especially if the game started with a level where Apollo had to leap across a series of platforms to retrieve his bellbottoms after a wild night of disco dancing and robot dog love.

Since Bison has raised the stakes of this intestinal cramp inducing poker game, it is up to Guile to team up with fellow world warriors, who are conveniently in the neighborhood to fulfill quests of their own (whether it’s Chun Li’s quest for the vengeance of her father’s death or Ryu and Ken’s quest to apparently give everyone a high five) so that they can defeat Bison and end his reign of terror once and for all. That is, unless Bison is wearing a suit that simultaneously gives him CPR, an injection of Red Bull directly to the taint, and a hand job in the event of injury, thus somehow making him fucking immortal…but what are the odds of that?!

Milobar: In the industry, although I’m not sure exactly what industry I am referring to (textiles?), that last sentence is what professionals like to call foreshadowing. Or as I like to personally call it: hey, asshole, we just told you what is going to fucking happen.

The Case for Greatness (aka The Lowlights):

Take a good, long look at my motherfucking tank.

Donkey: The movie started by showing us the very definition of kick ass, as JCVD entered the film by jumping down off the front of the goddamn tank that he was riding to do an interview with Chun Li, despite the fact that he’s in an active war zone. One can only assume that when you’re JCVD, either you need an armored chariot just to carry the weight of your massive balls, or you believe that you’re the Grand Marshall of an unfortunately timed pride parade. And he’s a colonel? What kind of idiot would put a man who rides on the front of a fucking tank like he’s on a surfboard in charge of others?

Milobar: Americans.

Donkey: And it was even sadder that he wasn’t alone riding that tank. There was actually a group of people who thought that the possibility of rogue sniper fire or even just falling off the front of the tank and being horribly crushed if it should happen to hit an unseen bump in the road was a risk worth taking for no foreseeable reward. But a few scenes later, JCVD upped the ante with armored vehicles, as this time he crashed one through the side of a building to interrupt a cage fight. The fact that his vehicle was carrying what appeared to be two missiles mounted on either side of it was odd enough, but the missiles actually protruded out past its front, meaning that when the vehicle impacted the wall, the missiles would have been the first thing to hit. Now, granted that while two of us are technically scientists, none of us are actually PhD-carrying Rocket Scientists. But regardless, that seemed like excessively poor planning. Why not just bust through the wall like the Kool-Aid man wearing a vest made entirely out of C4 while carrying two lit blowtorches and sporting a cocked mousetrap over your junk and see how that works out for you?

Seriously, this is the Bronski wedding? Shit...my bad!

Milobar: Greatest Halloween costume ever.

Donkey: And even if there was no risk of them exploding, what is the fucking use of having long range missiles at that particular moment? To launch at the people standing four feet in front of you? “Freeze everyone, or I’ll input the launch codes, turn two keys simultaneously, wait for the thrusters to warm up…” But of course, this cage match was the direct result of Ryu and Ken trying to sell Sagat, Bison’s primary ally and cage-fighter-turned-arms-dealer, a shipment of guns that shoot tennis balls, which is a plan that could only be better if the guns were neon colored and had “Nerf” written on the side of them. So I guess it makes sense in a roundabout way that the only way to end a scene that started with head-shaking stupid is by ending it with George W stupid.

Bison proved to be an equally baffling character, and it was the little touches that really attracted the flies to this tightly coiled pile of perfection. The first thing that we noticed in his opening scene was that he’s riding a levitating, Sharper Image multi-media control center. Even beyond its apparent lack of purpose, who the hell took the time to develop that? That’s the kind of ridiculous and unnecessary technology that guys in your high school A/V club would dream up in between sessions of masturbating to the fantasy of Shatner banging their female World Of Warcraft avatar.

Did the designer of this set actually see the rest of the film?

Later on in a scene where Bison was interrogating Chun Li, we got a peek at his private office and all its glory. It contained a chandelier made entirely of human remains, which seemed unfittingly morbid in an otherwise campy film. Especially since the other item that really stood out in the scene was a painting of Bison in uniform, made up like a sad clown. With that kind of contradiction, I was almost expecting the camera to pan around to find a bloated, half-decayed human corpse chained to the wall next to a singing, mounted fish wearing a sombrero.

Editing is overrated.

The entire scene in Bison’s office really came to a grand pinnacle of awesomeness when he and Chun Li began fighting. She put Bison through a glass panel at the base of his mini-bar head first, and as he was pushed into it, the backing of the case came away and you could see through the set wall to the soundstage behind it. The only thing that could have made this better was if a group of teamsters was standing on the other side, checking each other’s well-developed guts in a competition to see which of them had more discarded beer nuts trapped in their belly button lint. Even if you didn’t have the budget to have a back up plate of glass handy to re-shoot this scene, you have to love the fact that they didn’t cut away from the shot a split second before you see this gem.

Milobar: But the greatest moment during this whole wet dream for geeks was when Bison responded to Chun Li’s accusation of murdering her father, telling her that he didn’t remember it:

Bison: “For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me…it was Tuesday.”

Donkey: Unquestionably the highlight of the scene, one of the greatest moments in the movie, and one of the best lines ever written. That’s goddamn poetry. But the two main characters of the movie didn’t hold a monopoly on stupidity. This was supposed to be a Street Fighter movie, after all, and last we checked, if you plunked a quarter into a Street Fighter II arcade cabinet, you got more than one garbled pillow fight between Guile and Bison in a kiddy pool full of rancid tapioca.

If you're a fan of Dhalsim (left) or Blanka (right), this movie is doing its best to change your mind.

In this movie, Blanka was actually Carlos Blanka, and rather than being a feral orphan raised in the jungles of Brazil, he was JCVD’s best friend and fellow soldier who was one of the hostages that Bison had captured. Of course, JCVD was fucking brilliant enough to leak this information right in front of Bison in the first ten fucking minutes of the film. So Bison decided to have Dr Dhalsim (whom, for all you Dhalsim fans from the games, was obviously about as much of a fighter as an arthritic octogenarian in the dementia stage of syphilis) use Blanka as his test subject to become a genetically altered soldier. This was done on not only a physical level by pumping him full of multi-colored, generically named fluids that may as well have been labeled “Make-U-Stronger Juice”*, but also on a mental level by subjecting him to a constant stream of violent images, ala A Clockwork Orange. It just seems to write itself, doesn’t it?

I'm betting the DNA Mutagens taste like lemon.

Milobar: * Make-U-Stronger Juice is a registered trademark of Shitty Movie Night Productions Limited Incorporated

This is probably the first, and only, time you will ever read me saying this, but I wish the writers had taken a cue from Mel Brooks and instead of subjecting Blanka to a series of violent images, had merely forced him to watch a VHS tape of Street Fighter: The Movie on repeat. After about 3 full viewings, any human would be willing to kill any other human with their bare hands and/or an electrical discharge through their skin.

Donkey: But as much as all that gives me the same strange tingly feelings in my pants that I rarely experience outside of pumping a chemical toilet, it was Dhalsim’s act of mercy that really made my pants stand up and salute. To keep Blanka from becoming a completely psychopathic killing machine (which is apparently very easy to measure exactly, as his level was at 49% at the time of said mercy), Dhalsim swapped the barrage from “bad” imagery (killing, fire, etc) to a stream of “good” imagery (weddings, children, etc) that he just happened to have handy. Of course, maybe it’s just me, but the idea of being subjected to a constant torrent of footage involving weddings and children would probably drive me even harder down the path of murderous rage.

Milobar: I have to interject at this point. Regardless of my previous comments about being driven into an insane rage by Street Fighter: The Movie, who the fuck actually thinks that just watching a bunch of videos of violence would cause someone to become a homicidal maniac? I mean, seriously, they basically just make Blanka watch CNN for a couple days.

Donkey: While every bit of logic I’ve ever had begs me to agree with you, my friend, I just take a moment to imagine what it would be like being subjected to back to back episodes of Hannah Montana for days on end. Once you unleashed me, I promise that the living would envy the dead.

The hits just kept on rolling as the movie reached its climactic final battle, much like getting to the dry heave stage after a night of hard drinking; you figure that things will get better now that you’ve already thrown up those dozen doughnuts that you ate on a bet, only to discover that it gets much, much worse. Apparently, you had bratwurst for lunch. The finale began with one of the greatest motivational speeches ever given outside of a high school girls’ field hockey team.

But they tell us we can go home...wait, where's everyone going?

JCVD stood up before his troops, all forty of them, and essentially told them that they can go home and give up the fight, or they could go with him and finish it. If you haven’t seen this movie then your life isn’t complete, but at least Google it and watch this scene. I swear it’s so inspirational that the three of us spent the last forty five minutes of the film giving a constant standing ovation, even though it served only as a consolation after we realized that we couldn’t grab our coats and actually go join him ourselves. Granted, after fifteen minutes it became a little awkward, then after thirty minutes it actually turned into a bizarre cheering/bawling combination of jubilation and horrifying desperation. But regardless, the point is that it was damn touching.

After JCVD supplied us with that five minute oratory orgasm, the final assault on Bison’s lair almost began. But not before JCVD took some time to watch a brief video clip of what appeared to be him and Blanka attempting to get laid (which is just a goddamn creepy thing to be carrying on you) and remember what his motivation was for the apparent suicide run. Hey, finding a good wingman for the bar ain’t easy. The assault consisted of an attack lead up a river by JCVD and his “stealth” boat. What exactly made it a boat stealthy, you ask? Apparently running a simple electric current over what appeared to be a fairly unremarkable speed boat that some asshole painted black and decked out with an exceptionally ridiculous spoiler. And why not, really? Keep in mind that when we’re talking about stealth, we’re not only talking about the boat being invisible to radar. No, that kind of technology is for wimps and commies. Apparently if you look at this boat through a regular camera, it’s literally invisible to the naked eye as well. Seriously, that’s a pretty magical fucking boat.

Milobar: That’s what she said! Hey-o!

Invisible to the naked eye...unless you consider the water spraying up and the wake it leaves behind.

Donkey: And as that boat of kickassery made its hidden assault up the river, there was nothing that reinforced what kind of budget this movie had quite like showing random explosions of nothing that were supposed to represent the boat taking out radar stations. Fuck, blow up a three inch model of a radar station, or steal generic scenes of radar stations exploding from other movies, or even just blow up a cardboard box labeled “radar station”.

Milobar: Do the splits and have an explosion come out of your crotch.

Donkey: Do something. Showing the scene of the goddamn Death Star blowing up at end of Star Wars: A New Hope repeatedly would be more impressive than just blowing up nothing.

Milobar: Speaking of which: Turkish Star Wars anyone?

Quick, put a quarter up on there. Anyone can beat this asshole.

Donkey: But our master villain Bison wasn’t going to take this kind of assault lying down. No, no…he was bright enough to take a light nap in the late morning after getting kicked in the face by Chun Li so that he would be rested and prepared. How prepared? So prepared that he got onto his Sharper Image floating command station, grabbed the controls which consisted of the exact control console of a Super Street Fighter II arcade cabinet (yes, because a story missing the tournament plotline and hiring failed soap opera stars to play the series’ two most important characters is easily made up for by randomly throwing in a fucking joystick that we’ve seen before…bravo, assholes), and proceeded to play the greatest game that a criminal mastermind could hire EA to develop: Mines In The River Make Stealth-Boat Go Explode Awesome Yeah!!! That’s right; he used his console to release mines that were supposed to blow the boat up. And after a few minutes of predictable failure, he did what all gamers do when they’re having their asses handed to them in a fighting game by a superior opponent; he mashed all the buttons at once in an attempt to pull off some type of ultimate cheap move, which in this case unleashed all the mines at once. Of course, those of us that have an IQ higher than a dehydrated apricot with Down syndrome would wonder why the hell he didn’t just do that in the first place. It’s a good thing that our heroes had the forethought to eject from the boat and swim to shore (and yet were somehow standing on the shoreline a few minutes later with hair and clothes that were remarkably bone dry), or all would be lost.

The battle between Guile and Bison was then set to begin, and just like every other pivotal moment in the movie, why not start it with a moment of ball-clenching confusion? Once it was clear that he wasn’t getting paid the absurdly modest amount that he asked for, Bison decided to raise the pod that Blanka had been kept in during his transformation and unleash him upon his hostages so that everyone around him could enjoy the hilarious spectacle of wholesale slaughter.

Fun Fact: The script originally called for him to ride a unicorn out of the booth, but it was deemed "not gay enough".

But instead of Blanka stepping out of the pod, JCVD quite literally flew out of it in a jump kick that cleared about thirty feet. Now, if there was a lot of wire-fighting in this movie, we wouldn’t have batted an eye at this. But this was literally the only time that the movie decided to wipe its ass with the theory of gravity, so it wouldn’t have been more out of place if JCVD was replaced with a housecat just for this scene.

Once that kick is thrown, all hell broke loose. Honda and Zangief ended up rolling around in unbridled passion that they masqueraded as fighting, Ryu and Ken ended up battling with Sagat and Vega (once again, by the way, the movie missed an extremely obvious opportunity to pay homage to the game, as Ryu and Sagat, the two classic rivals of the series, were not pitted against one another), and the rest of the army, that apparently stopped for cheeseburgers and reach-arounds, finally decided to show up.

And once the climactic final battle finally got underway, it perfectly captured all the elements that the movie itself consisted of: it started rather unremarkably, took a stunningly bizarre turn off the path of basic logic for a stroll down the lane of insanity, and ended with a ball-busting punch to the sack of intelligence that can only be described as “Van Dammage”. After a few minutes of fighting that was as lame as you could reasonably expect when one of its participants was a man well into his middle-aged years, Guile kicked Bison (rather poorly) into a computer console that proceeded to electrocute him. The day was saved! And what better way to celebrate than with exceptionally poor dialogue? Thinking that Bison was dead, Guile grabbed his communicator (what the hell was that thing supposed to be, anyways? I didn’t think videophone technology was exactly perfected in the early 90s) and finds Cammy waiting for him. Let’s all take a listen:

Cammy: “Colonel, are you alright?”

Guile: “I’m okay…I’m just half dead.”

Cammy: “And Bison?”

Guile: “…All dead!”

Take a look at those buttons. This console was apparently designed in 1983.

That’s the kind of brilliant line that you close a movie on for people to ponder amongst themselves in discussion groups and think-tanks for years to come, so one could reasonably expect that the movie was over. But no, it was just getting warmed up. While Guile was prattling on into his videophone, a random computer in the scene detected Bison’s injuries and initiated some kind of goddamn revival process internal to his suit that started by giving him CPR, then moved on to electric shocks, and finished with a shot of adrenaline. That’s it? That’s what is supposed to make him invincible?

I just put my hands up, right? And you'll add the lightning in post? It'll look like shit? Whatever, I still get paid.

And not only did Bison rise to continue the fight, he has also somehow had gained the ability to shock electricity from his fucking gloves, thus smacking JCVD down like he was Luke Skywalker facing off against the Emperor. I know that I’ve asked this before, but it can’t be asked enough because it kept coming up over and over…what the fuck was he waiting for? When your ass is getting handed to you badly enough that you need your suit to revive you, why not pull that little nugget out of your arsenal before you’re essentially beaten to death? Bison then revealed that not only could he then shoot electricity, but he could also make his boots glow which somehow caused him to fly. That’s right, I said fly. Seriously. And he used this ability to pull off the ultimate super-move: barreling through the air, face first and rather slowly, directly at his opponent. Thrilling! Yes, I realize this was an attempt to recreate Bison’s most effective special move from the game, but if you’re going to do it this badly, then you might as well have him bore Guile to death by reading him teenage angst-filled love notes instead. And after hitting Guile with this and then slapping him around with a little more lightning, Bison decided to hit him with that ultimate move one more time to bring the fight to a magnificent close. But this time, JCVD was ready. Did he duck, allowing Bison to soar past him overhead and probably go crashing headfirst into a wall? Nah, that’s too easy. Instead he struck back with a JCVD signature move, the leaping roundhouse splits-kick (or the Flying Ballerina, if you will). And even though this consisted of a sweeping motion, where his leg was clearly moving from one side to another, this somehow caused Bison to go soaring directly backwards upon impact. Sure, might as well give physics and basic logic one last fart soufflé. Bison sailed backwards and crashed into his wall of televisions, which brought the fight to a very underwhelming close. After all that, one simple kick finished the job. Outstanding.

Good things always happen when you attack face first.

Once Bison was dead, his army was vanquished, and no one appeared to be even slightly harmed (all that fighting and you don’t see so much as one dead body laying anywhere), our heroes all gathered for awkward chit-chat, a stumbling and pathetic attempt at romance between Guile and Chun Li that was about as awkward to witness as your slow cousin trying to hit on his sister, and to re-enact a random group picture that you were rewarded with when you beat the videogame for one last baffling reference to an irrelevant part of the videogame. But since this movie killed most of their careers, might as well allow the cast to part ways with a memento that serves as a grim final reminder as to what they traded their futures for.

Now THAT'S how you end a film. And a lot of careers.

The Verdict:

Donkey: This movie starts with a solid punch to the dong and ends with a flying splits-kick to the face of anyone who dares wandering in unprepared for its glory. This is what shitty movies are all about. I have no choice but to give it 5 flying JCVDs out of 5.

Milobar: I own this movie on DVD. About 4 years ago, a co-worker heard me talking about this movie at work. A few days later he came in to my office and plopped the plastic case down on my desk; “Hey, I saw this movie at Wal-Mart for $4 and you liked it so much I thought I would buy it for you.” Thank you, overweight ex-co-worker. This movie is the greatest investment I never made.

What We Learned:

Donkey: War is hell, unless get a blue beret and a stealth boat, you fucking sissy. Then it’s just damn whacky.

Milobar: Real heroes always strike a stunning pose of unabated gayness after a successful battle. Including the misunderstood Russian wrestler who I’m pretty sure was a bad guy up until the last 30 seconds of the film.

Back To The Main Page.