I had always wanted to redo it, but was never gung-ho about it. Until this weekend. Why is this weekend any more different than the other 96 that I’ve spent sleeping and playing Guitar Hero through? Why, this is the opening weekend for Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li, silly! =)~
I have no intention of going out to see that…thing, as I’m sure it will just piss me off. You see, back in the day I was a huuuuuuuuge Street Fighter 2 player, and I gotta say I was pretty damn good. And my favorite character to play was Chun Li, mostly because she was quick as a snake and leapt around better than a monkey on X. I’ve never liked the big, hulking slow characters in fighting games, I guess because I’m small and agile myself. Playing as a big, slow guy always got on my nerves. Even if they were weaker, I preferred those fighters that didn’t move with the speed and grace of a glacier. Now, I’m not going to say I was the biggest Street Fighter 2 mark, I played the game all the time, but I never really immersed myself into the lore. I never found out why a 60 year old, 85 lb Indian thought that YOGA of all friggin things was the best martial art to kick the crap out of boxers, 500lb sumo wrestlers, and green electric gorillas, even if it was fire-spewing voodoo yoga (yoga, BTW, is not a martial art and it just plan sucks, Wing Chun is the way to go). I never cared to know why Bison, who according to the game basically ran Thailand, surrounded himself with a bunch of Cobra rejects or why he organized a world-wide fight to begin with. Wouldn’t have been easier to shoot his opponents in the head and chop them up with a machete? Works for the cartels.
Anywho, I’m going way off track here. Point is I liked Street Fighter 2 and I liked Chun-Li. You would think a movie based on her story (which is actually one of the stronger character stories in the game) would be right up my alley. However, the key word in my previous statement is ‘liked’. Street Fighter 2 (and the Chun Li character) came out almost 20 friggin’ years ago. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that whole ship has sailed way over the horizon by now. Said it before, I’ll say it until I’m proved wrong, but Hollywood is just plain running out of ideas. I will not go see Legend of Chun-Li, I’m just not going to plop down good cash better spent on Jack’s dollar menu just to have yet another video game movie made by people who didn’t take all of 10 minutes to research the game much even ever played it piss me off. And don’t give me that ‘how can you pass judgment when you haven’t even seen the flick’ crap. A) I’ve already been scalded by a shitty Street Fighter movie, B) the trailer is horrible and considering that they show the best stuff in the trailer… C) aside from Michael Clark Duncan as Balrog (and even that is kind of questionable) the casting itself is just a mockery of the Street Fighter 2 franchise; it’s almost as if they just opened a Tinseltown phonebook and randomly pointed at names, and D) you know that little voice you hear when you’re about to do something dangerous and/or really, really stupid, like, say, wave your penis in front of a snapping turtle or flip off the guy that cut you off in traffic when his license plate reads OGNGGZ? The voice that whispers “man, I wouldn’t do that shit if I were you”? Yeah, that little voice screams pretty loudly the second I even entertain the notion of going to see that piece of crap. Depending on what I’m told about the Chun-Li movie, I may rent it when it comes out on DVD, or even better yet catch it in 10 minute increments as it runs nonstop on FX for a month straight. And when I do, I can almost guarantee that this article will yet again be rewritten as “6 Movies That Piss Me Off”.
Okay then, now that I finally got that off my chest, let’s get on to the actual business at hand, namely pieces of celluloid crap.
I’m no stranger to bad movies; hell, more than ¾ of the movies in my DVD collection would fall into the “Bad Movie” category, some even tread deeper into Shitty Movie territory. But most of these flicks are not only watchable but entertaining as well. Case in point, Jason X (Friday the 13th in space, yeah they put Jason in friggin’ outer space {There’s a movie! Jason vs. Predator!}).
Of course, a few DVDs in my collection are not entertaining at all, I’ve seen them maybe once or twice and now they have a layer of dust you could burn for warmth. You see, there is a big difference between being a bad movie and being a shitty movie. In a bad movie, the acting may be terrible, the plot holes may be large enough to suck down entire galaxies, the effects might by the result of a $5 budget, BUT it still may be a fun movie. At the very least you can laugh and mock it ala MST3K. Even if the movie is shitty, you can usually write it off as such and tell yourself “Man, that SUCKED” as you go off on your merry way never to think about it ever again until someone asks you to name all of Ben Afleck’s starring roles. Oh, and here’s a hint from Heloise you might have missed: DVD cases of these types of never watch again movies make great hidy-holes for porn DVDs; after all, if you’re never going to watch
Rest Stop again, why would your significant other/nosey family members?
Of course, sometimes, not often mind you, but sometimes there are movies out there that for whatever reason piss you off. These atrocities will go beyond “fun bad” & “shitty bad” and actually end up in “beat to death everyone in any way involved with this piece crap and that includes yourself because by watching it you are now involved in this piece of crap AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” bad. After viewing these movies, you will be enraged. Things may get broken, hurtful words and accusations may be tossed freely about, marriages & lifelong friendships may be ended. You may even wide up bitching about them on some crappy little website on the Podunk outskirts of the internet! =O
Which is exactly what these 5 movies did to me. Some may argue that they weren’t that bad, and to be perfectly honest there are certainly worse out there (anything made by Full Moon Video, Goddess bless them). That may be so, but I didn’t say these were terrible movies…okay, I did say that, but it’s not as black & white as good and bad. It’s about for whatever reasons, which will soon be explained, these particular movies struck the right cord with me and pissed me off. Maybe I was already having a bad day, maybe I was expecting too much out of them, heck, maybe it was even my time of the month. Whatever the case, these 5 movies have resulted in the most swear words I have ever uttered out of anger towards a movie.
Now, before we start this, let me state that this is not a review in the traditional sense. I’m not going to give out Nokies or “20 groin kicks”; we already know these movies suck. I’m not going to screencap, either. All of these movies I’ve seen only once, and most I was in and out a lot of the time. As I have no desire for a second torturous viewing, I don’t remember much past me yelling “Stupid piece of SHIT!”. Just a general explanation of what they are and why they piss me off so much. They are, however, numbered according to hatred and malice I bear towards them and the demons from whose loins they spawned.
Goddess, what did I get myself into here. Let’s just get this fiasco over with so that I can get back to watching Jason X.
Lexa Doig purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
SWPH didn’t make me stomping mad, it didn’t make me want to hurt. BUT, it did kill one of the franchises I held near and dear to my heart. The worst part is that I didn’t even realize it at the time. Walking out of that theater in 1998 (I think, I’m too lazy to look it up) it never crossed my mind that I wouldn’t be able to look at Star Wars the same ever again. It was kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend because you both get busy. You start to see less and less of each other until one day you stop and realize that you’re not dating anymore. You’re not sad or disappointed, but instead simply shrug it off and go about your business without your life changed. And that, I think, is a worse crime than having something just piss you off.
P.S. Hannibal Rising very nearly made #5. That piece of crap very much sucked and was made all the more so because it was a movie about Hannibal Lector. Most disappointing was that Thomas Harris, author of the Hannibal books, wrote the horrible script. The only reason it isn’t officially on this list is because A) it had Gong Li in it, and B) it didn’t kill Hannibal Lector for me. I still read the books and still enjoy the other movies. But will I add Hannibal Rising to my DVD collection? Even if it was a copy personally autographed by Gong Li, I gotta say no. However, I would if she added an invitation to dinner.
Maybe. Really big maybe.
Research (looking at the dust-covered DVD case) shows it was directed by Uwe Boll. How in the HELL does this guy keep getting directing jobs? Has he ever made an even remotely decent flick? I mean, damn, fans of Halo actually got together a petition to keep this asshole away from the Halo movie! When he went to Blizzard Entertainment to acquire the rights to make a World of Warcraft movie, they told him “Yeah, you know, we gotta say F*** NO!” (I’m paraphrasing, of course). I really, really need to start reading the entire back of the DVD before I make a purchase.
The golden rule of any movie is that they cannot be boring. They can be bad and cheesy, they can have horrible scripts, $1 Store FX, and be edited by a 5 year old playing with pinking shears, but THEY CANNOT BE BORING! This one broke that rule and then pissed all over the pieces.
P.S. When I gave the DVD back to Mike (aforementioned brother I borrowed it from) he told me in a very cavalier sort of way “Oh, yeah. This one sucks.” I informed him that he was mistaken, it didn’t suck. Work sucks, paying bills sucks, losing $50 on the Rockets sucks, the drunk mailroom girl at the company X-Mas party very much sucks. Soul Survivors is a damn abomination.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH(insert favorite swear words here)HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’m willing to bet that this has happened to all of you in some form or fashion, maybe not with pizza, but something. If it hasn’t, don’t worry it will and you too will know murderous rage. This, in a nutshell, is this movie.
Crossovers where characters from different franchises meet are nothing new by any stretch. Jetsons Meet Flintstones, for example. Fantasy crossovers are something talked about in every media & genre: The Rock vs. Goldberg, Superman vs. the Hulk, Freddy vs. Jason, etc. Fans of both sides talk and argue about who would win and how it would go down in a zealot-like fashion and occasionally we are blessed with said crossover. Alien vs. Predator is no different, and pretty much ever since GuvAHnahr Arnie came out in the first Predator movie, sci-fi fans have dreamed of a meeting between predators and aliens. Predators are headhunters from outer space that like to hunt for sport and collect skins & skulls for trophies. You gotta imagine aboard the Predator ship a group of these one uhgalee muddtha futhkas are sitting around drinking beer, debating whose wife has bigger boobs, and one upping each other with stories of the human that got away. Maybe on their home world there’s PETH (Predators for the Ethical Treatment of Humans) that protests these hunts. Anyway, Predators are pretty cool and so are Aliens even if they are basically giant ants with acid blood. A meeting of these two franchises has always been natural since Predators are always looking for more sporting prey and Aliens are pretty tenacious critters. For years fans have dreamed of seeing such a hunt. There have been books, comics, toys, even several video games. One of my all time fav games, in fact, is the Capcom made 1994 Alien vs. Predator arcade game. If I had the money, I’d track one down and buy it in a heartbeat so that I could pump an endless stream of quarters into it. Of course, even with all these outlets, Alien vs. Predator never had an officially sanctioned movie. In the early to mid 90’s there was talk of an AVP movie in the works. When Predator 2 came out there was a scene at the end where Danny Glover is wandering around the ship and sees the trophy room filled with skulls. One such skull clearly belonged to an Alien.
Now, maybe I set my standards too high for AVP and expected too much out of it. No, screw that! I didn’t ask for much, basically just Predators and Aliens beating the piss out of each other. What I got was a movie with an asinine story, loooooooooooooooong bouts of nothing happening, unnecessary subplots involving the human characters that were as pointless as they were boring, and a terrible plot. Yea know,a HOLY CRAP THAT WAS A FREAKIN’ AWESOME AVP movie was not only possible, it should have been rather easy to pull off. After all, with the hundreds of stories already put forth in books and comics, it’s not like they didn’t have anything to start with. To be perfectly honest, if they had just made the movie nothing but 90 minutes of Predators hunting Aliens, it would have been a HCTWFA AVP flick. I would have even been able to put up with subtitles as the Predators snarled, growled, and clicked. Nope, what we got was a piece of crap made even worse because of the buildup of excitement. Disappointment is bad, but disappointment is exponentially increased the higher the excitement prior. I mean, geezum-crow, neither the Aliens nor the Predators were even seen until 50 minutes into the movie! The whole beginning is about the humans and their worthless lives. I guess the baboons writing the script wanted to make them sympathetic so that when they did die you felt bad. Well, they failed miserably, which is bad enough but they shouldn’t have even tried in the first place! You don’t care which humans in an AVP movie are going to die. HELL, YOU WANT THEM TO GET ACID SPIT INTO THEIR FACES AND THEIR SPINES RIPPED OUT!!! We’re a sick movie-going society like that. Trying to get across just why the lead female left the big, bad corporation really isn’t that integral to a plot involving E.T. and Alf in a deathmatch. And speaking of bad scenes, the movie is very dark, and I don’t mean creepy. If you were creeped out by AVP, I certainly hope you wash your sheets every morning. No, it is always shadowed and dark. I know they’re underground, but come on! Most of the time you couldn’t even tell who was who, and considering one has a long tail and a phallic head it shouldn’t be too difficult to pick them out of a line-up. I just realized that this has been one of the longest entries thus far and I’ve given AVP way more time than I rightfully should have. But just one more point – all Alien and both Predator movies have been rated R, and for very good reason. AVP was rated PG-13. What does that mean? If you thought this was a good or even vaguely decent movie, you better be 13 years old or be in a coma after taking too many mind-altering drugs.
“Whoever wins…we lose.”
I guess I can’t sue them for false advertising.
I’ve gone into detail with three other movies on this list that the root of my disappointment and thus rage is that I was a huge fan of the franchises before seeing the movie. And I’ve also gone into detail that Street Fighter 2 is no different. This movie is based, rather loosely it seems, on the mega-popular arcade fighting game Street Fighter 2. SF2 wasn’t the first fighting game (it is called Street Fighter TWO, after all) but it was exceptional and ushered in the dawn of the fighting game. Without it, such titles as Mortal Kombat, Tekken, and certainly Marvel vs. Capcom quite possibly would not have been born. It was so popular that it took over 15 years for Street Fighter 3 to actually come out, with SF2 undergoing an insane amount of facelifts and name alterations: SF2 Turbo, SF2 Hyper, Super SF2, Super Duper Crazy Time SF2 Dance Party, etc. etc. If this game hadn’t hit the market, I would have a ton more money in my bank account today. I’m sure I’ve spent thousands a quarter at a time over the years, not to mention buying the Nintendo releases at $50 a pop and the movie (wait, I didn’t pay for it! =D Yay me!). When news of the movie came out I, being so young and stupid, was very excited. Something that boosted that excitement level up further was an article I had read in Nintendo Power, or possibly Electronic Gaming Monthly. There was an interview with the director and he was quoted as saying that he was getting a feel for the game by playing SF2 with his son. I think maybe that little bastard popped another classic fighting game into the old Nintendo as a gag on dear old dad:
“I think you’ll like it.” he told me with a shrug.
Odiyo, HE has never been more wrong about anything in his life. This movie pissed me off so much, that I actually refused to talk to him for like a week because I felt he had lied to me (actually, I just needed someone to blame, and since I couldn’t gouge out the director’s eye and skull**** him, my friend made the closest thing to a scapegoat I would get). Turns out he wasn’t quite the SF2 fan that I was, so I forgave him of his horrible sin. Yeah, it was THAT bad of a movie. But the thing was that throughout the movie as it continued to get worse and worse, I never gave up hope. “It’ll get better! It’ll get better!” I kept telling myself. Then the end credits started to roll and I realized that it was definitely NOT going to get better! STUPID PIECE OF SHIT!
Sadly, this was Raul Julia’s swan song, he died after filming. After acting for close to 40 years and thrilling audiences with countless stunning performances, this amazing, legendary actor is cursed to have Street Fighter as his final movie. For crying out loud, the man was Gomez Addams, and this THIS THIS was his final shot at the silverscreen. Poor Raul Julia, after working so hard for so many years, he died after making Street Fighter. Shit, I would have too. I hope the director’s pretty damn proud of himself, the douche nozzle.
Now do you see what I won’t go see Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li???
Lexa Doig purrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!
I really like Lexa Doig =)
JRaptor369@hotmail.com