The Kokomo Post Rewinds: Video Game Movies
By DAN WEST
The Kokomo Post staff
Nostalgia can be a heck of a thing, but do the movies we loved as kids really hold up? Is “Space Jam” really my favorite movie, or have I just not watched it since I was 10? In The Kokomo Post Rewinds, we will check out movies and shows from decades past and see if they hold up to today’s scrutiny. This week’s theme: video game movies!
I couldn’t find any Double Dragon GIFs, so here’s one from a less disappointing movie.
“Double Dragon”
With a new “Mortal Kombat” movie out last week on HBO, I thought it was an appropriate time to dive into the crazy world of video game adaptations. The first one of these I ever saw was 1994’s “Double Dragon,” and I remember loving it. I didn’t really play the games, so I didn’t know at the time if the movie stayed true to the source material. Even without knowing how accurate the film was to the games, I loved this movie as a kid. There was crazy martial arts action, wild supernatural powers, and a science experiment gone wrong. Plus, a river catches fire, and that could NEVER happen in the real world! When I saw this movie, I wanted more right away.
The Verdict: The short version is that this is a bad movie. No part of it is good. The special effects are completely ridiculous, even by ’90s standards, and the entire premise of this ’90s martial arts adventure is so watered down to manage a PG-13 rating. There is a torture scene where one of our heroes wants information from a rival, and she’s torturing this vicious gang member by tying him up and force-feeding him spinach. I remember when Robert Patrick was a credible actor, playing terrifying villains like the T-1000. The weird quaff of his bleached blonde hair and walking around calling himself “Koga Shuko” is just absurd. Plus, I don’t think most of the people in this martial arts action flick actually know martial arts. There was a little too much “pushing heavy things down on the bad guy” choreography for me to believe the myth of these characters being highly trained martial artists.
RATING: 1 “That time Dr. House showed up on ‘Friends’ to yell at Rachel” out of 5: This movie takes place in the far off year of 2007, in a post-earthquake apocalyptic wasteland known as “New Angeles.” People got paid to make these movies, and then got paid to make more movies after this. If that’s not a sign that you should start that project you always worried you weren’t good enough to finish, I don’t know what is. Even Stuart Smalley thinks so.
This scene makes more sense than the entire movie.
“Super Mario Bros.”
I don’t remember much about this movie, just that it only gets spoken about in hushed terms when people want to talk about terrible movies. It feels a little like cheating to bring this one up, because it doesn’t have any special place in my heart. Sure, I saw it when I was a kid. The problem is, it was so unremarkable that I just don’t remember anything about it. I do know the casting was incredible. Dennis Hopper, Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo deserve a better movie than what I expect this is about to be.
The Verdict: Well, everyone was right. This is a bad movie. Mario started out as such a simple concept. A plumber and his brother are trying to save a princess from an evil boss in a brightly lit world full of monsters and strange powers. It’s a fairly generic plot with a couple of special tweaks, so it shouldn’t be too complicated to make into a movie. Instead, they made a weird, dark, cyberpunk world coated in fungus and something about Dennis Hopper wanting to use a machine to turn back evolution, and a meteorite that merges worlds. I understand that’s an insane sentence, I had to watch it on a screen so you don’t have to. I did that for all of you. Even Bob Hoskins, who played Mario, said his biggest career regret was doing Super Mario, and he at one point admitted to getting drunk between takes with some of the other actors.
RATING: 0 Mario Bros Games out of 5: There’s no fixing this movie. I can’t come up with anything witty to put in this section, I’m just mad that I watched this movie. I did just find out there was a rap song cut from the film called “King Koopa, You Poopa.” So that’s neat.
They shouldn’t have killed this guy off, he was just trying to warn them.
“Mortal Kombat: Annihilation”
The original Mortal Kombat movie is the known gold standard of video game movies. Because I wasn’t emotionally prepared to ruin that for myself, I chose to watch the sequel. I remember really enjoying this movie. I remember it establishing the severity of the film early on by killing a major character, and dramatically increasing the number of characters fighting. Plus, they brought in several of my favorite characters that weren’t in the first movie. There were more fights, bigger fights, and I loved it. This wasn’t a foundational movie in my childhood like “An American Tail,” but I still really liked it.
The Verdict: I was a stupid kid. That’s the only explanation that makes sense. If I liked “Double Dragon” AND this movie, I must have just been stupid. This movie is so bad. The special effects are horrible, the plot is complete nonsense even if I’m already suspending disbelief about gods taking over dimensions through martial arts tournaments. They also rush most of the fights because there are too many characters, and I’d like to again say that the special effects are horrible. The movie boils down to a terrible CGI dragon fight followed by a 45-second martial arts battle that the good guys win because they believe in themselves. I know I can be sarcastic sometimes, but that last part is completely true. The good guys win because the power of positive thinking made their karate better.
RATING: 1 Konami Code out of 5: This movie is better than “Super Mario Bros.”, but that’s a really low bar. Bad fight choreography, sloppy writing, and again, special effects that are just so bad. Watch “Beverly Hills Ninja” instead. It’s just as silly, but they do it on purpose.
