February 12th, 2006 |
I recently discovered that my local dollar store is now stocking Chinese made DVDs in slim DVD cases. Well you know I had to stop in there and see what they had! Amidst piles of crappy no-name kids' cartoons and black & white western movies I found this gem; a two movie double feature. That's fifty cents a movie, dawg. Here's the first one.
So help you God, if any of you guys are on an oil rig right now I will kick your ass. Okay no, really, if anyone's on an oil platform right now I would love a fan sign from you. That is sweet.
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STREET FIGHTER
Prisoner 1820 has a visitor of a Buddhist priest. While introducing him, the dubbed voice of one of the men changes to what is clearly a different man speaking. One person voice by two different voice actors. Beautiful.
Prisoner 1820 is apparently due to be executed. In his karate matches he has killed seven people. He has no last words. He is the last of the "real" Okinawa Fighters. He longs to fight the priest, who gladly acquieses. But the guy really isn't a priest - he's the Street Fighter! Shhh! Long cool woman in a black dress!
Oh dear, slow motion fighting.
The monk knocks out the prisoner and proceeds to give him a back rub. No, really. Massaging his chi or something. He smooths the oxygen out of Jun-ji and puts him into an "oxygen-coma"...okay. But he can still walk, sort of, and the cops who apparenly weren't watching take him immediately up to the gallows. Bummer, dude.
But before he can be hanged, he throws himself down the stairs. There we go, that's the oxygen-coma kicking in. Apparently he has to be hospitalized and nursed back to health...before they can kill him. So they cart Prisoner out of the jail in an ambulance.
The ambulance is then immediately stopped by Street Fighter's sidekick, who knocks out the cops and the nurse, while yelling "I got you!"
Deaths: 0
Severe Beatings: 2
Street Fighter catches up and the two anti-heroes steal the ambulance and drive off with the unconscious Prisoner.
Apparently the Street Fighter rescued Prisoner under contract by the prisoner's Brother. Brother, however, doesn't have enough money to pay SF the rest of what was promised him. He tries to attack Street Fighter, who flips out and kicks the guy's ass, then tells him he'll give him more time, but he'll need some collateral.
At which point he grabs the brother's sister and says, "We'll make out, on the streets!"
Weirdo.
Then, apparently, they decide to attack him again, after it's already been shown that he can clearly kick their asses.
PANTY SHOT!
You know...I don't think Street Fighter is a real Buddhist Priest after all.
He continues to violently abuse the two, grinning and insulting them the whole time. The brother tries one last flying leap kick, and the Street Fighter simply ducks. Brother flies right out the window, and falls to his death. Good job dude.
Deaths: 1
Severe Beatings: 2
Meanwhile, we are introduced to a main-ish plot wherein a billionaire oil baron dies, leaving his fortune to his attractive yet distraught daughter.
Terry Tsurugi, the Street Fighter, is described as "the meanest guy in the world. One to whom money means everything." Hahaha, you know why? He took the sister and sold her into slavery for 3 million yen! Hahaha, he's so evil!!
They have a big black guy and a bunch of thugs try to rape her? She resists so they pump her full of drugs and knock her out.
The man to whom he sold the girl has a request for him. Over dinner with a couple from Hong Kong they discuss the request. Oh snap, they want him to kidnap the heiress to that oil company.
It's the Yakuza! Pwned.
Street Fighter doesn't trust any of them and leaves the meeting. Now the Yakuza is after him!
In possibly the worst editing ever, Monk is back in his apartment working out with his partner, the kooky guy from before. The door handle jiggles, and immediately the scene cuts to a roomful of fighters duking it out with the Street Fighter.
It's a Yakuza hit gang, but Street Fighter totally kicks all of them to the curb. I counted eleven guys but there may have been more. He keeps doing that Bruce Lee thing where he just hisses a lot and goes "whhhhheeeeeee" and people run away from him, but it's a lot more sinister than Bruce's "woooo." If that makes any sense.
Then he actually punches out a guy's teeth. Man this guy's a bastard.
Deaths: 1
Severe Beatings: 12
Terry Tsurugi. Jerk for hire. Anyway the one guy that he let go tells his employer, who whips out a gun and kills him!
Deaths: 2
Severe Beatings: 13
One of the hallmarks of the Street Fighter series is the creativity that goes into the ultraviolent shots that punctuate the fight scenes. You can tell a mile away when they're going to happen, because the rauckus flying-fists and lightning kung-fu action stops and goes to a snail's pace of meticulously set up special effects. It's really quite dischordant and purely for shock value, but that's what makes them so hilariously entertaining.
Terry runs into the karate school and kicks a few guys' asses, then runs up to the dorm where the beautiful heiress is sleeping. He bursts into her room and makes out with her for a while, while the martial artists stand around and stare in shock and disbelief. Then he uses his influence to insist on a karate match with the leader of the school.
I don't know why.
The whole school stands around Street Fighter in a circle as one by one a couple guys try to take him on. Eventually the leader gets sick of his boys getting destroyed and agrees to the fight. I'm not going to count those as severe beatngs.
They spend a while sizing each other up. They seem roughly evenly matched. Man that Street Fighter is an evil jerk. He would have been a much better Darth Vader than that Hayden Christiansen guy.
Actually Terry is getting beat down by the leader of the school. He gets thoroughly trashed and the leader randomly tells him that he knew his father, and that he figured it out by studying Street Fighter's technique. Okay.
Flashback! The reason he's so mean is that he saw his father get shot before a firing squad for spying. But he wasn't a spy!
Deaths: 3
Severe Beatings: 13
Anyway this flashback, brought on by the leader, gives him the strength to stand up again and get back into the fight. And to kick the guy's ass. What?
Okay, let's take a break and review what has been going on so far:
- Street Fighter pretends to be a monk
- SF breaks a guy out of jail and hides him
- SF kills the guy who contracted him to break the guy out of jail
- SF makes out with the guy's sister
- SF sells the sister into slavery
- SF meets with the Yakuza and enrages them by calling them untrustworthy and cheap
- SF destroys a Yakuza mob and punches out a guy's teeth
- SF forces the heiress daughter to kiss him
- SF violently beats up students at a karate school
- SF brutally attacks the leader of the school, who knew his father
Wow. Hiro Protagonist this guy ain't.
Street Fighter's goal. Here's the thing. He broke into the school to prove that the Yakuza/Mafia could break into the school. He fake kidnaps the heiress to prove that the Yakuza/Mafia could do the same. He beats up the leader of the school to prove that he's a valuable ally to them.
"I hate punks worse than anything. And I would love to see the mob destroyed. Soooo I want to join your side."
He wants to enlist their help to take out the Yakuza, apparently.
Meanwhile in Hong Kong!
Ludicrously dressed evil villains plot against Terry the Street Fighter.
Enter these two crazy dudes. The blind one on the right just whacked the leg off a guy who tripped over his cane. The fruity dude on the left stabbed a guy to death who talked about his boss.
Deaths: 4
Severe Beatings: 13
Prisoner from the beginning finally shows up again, hanging around the bar. He's a good fighter, so the boss of the bar shows him a bunch of prostitute-slave girls to convince him to join his side. Ohhh snap, he sees his Sister!
Now the Prisoner and the boss both hate Terry Tsurugi!
The heiress has to travel back to actually inherit the business, and the Street Fighter tails her to protect her. His motivation is, apparently, the inheritance money. He wants to get his hands on those millions!
But they take out the Street Fighter by picking up his car with a giant crane. Uh oh Street Fighter, now what? They drop the car forty or so feet off the side of a bridge, and go to check on him. He's laying there all bloody, but he gets up and kicks their asses when they go to check on him. He's fine, folks, he is Oh. Kay.
The ensuing fight produces this scene, taken straight from the movie footage:
OUCH.
I don't know whether to cringe or laugh. Probably laugh.
Yup. Laugh.
Bahaha.
Deaths: 6
Severe Beatings: 13
Apparently that scene influenced some of the shots of Romeo Must Die.
Street Fighter and his sidekick eventually make it to the Yakuza headquarters and immediately start a ruckus. They fight a giant brick-wall of a man who's slow as molasses but seemingly impervious to his attaks. Until, that is, Street Fighter pokes his brains out with his fingers.
Really.
Deaths: 7
Severe Beatings: 13
Street Fighter starts to wipe his bloody fingers on his partner's shirt, who responds in a hurt tone, "Heyyy, laundromat closed!"
LAUNDROMAT CLOSED!
LAUNDROMAT CLOSED!
Street Fighter, disgusted with his partner's cowardice, sends him back out to wait in the car. Street Fighter moves on.
This time, it's personal, I guess.
Terry finally encounters Prisoner from the beginning of the film.
Pshh, who uses sai in the movies? Laaaame. Prisoner throws it at Street Fighter and misses. SF picks it up and threatens Sister with it! Haha, what a skeevy dirty fighting coward. He leaps through the window to where his partner was waiting with the truck and runs away! HAhaha, coward.
Somehow, um, okay: Heiress gets attacked out in the country. There's some blathering about Japan vs China, and she and her friends drive away after the unsuccessful attack.
Crossing a rickety bridge, they come across Blind Man standing in the middle of the road. Kind of creepy.
The two men get out to help him out of the way, but Fruity Man is hiding in the bushes and throws a dagger into one of them. As he stumbles around, Blind Man beats him with the cane. The other friend goes to attack Fruity Man but gets a dagger through the eye. Bummer.
Ugh, that's pretty sick. They show him yanking it out and the eye socket spurting blood. It's really dark and jerky, so I couldn't get a good screenshot, but trust me it's pretty sick.
Amazingly, One Eye gets a few good hits on Fruity Man, but Blind Man takes him out after killing the other driver. Deathcount +2!
Deaths: 9
Severe Beatings: 13
Heiress is captured. Way to suck.
Later on (I don't know how they tracked her), she looks out the window of the building they're keeping her in and sees Street Fighter coming up in a power boat. Haha, subtle!
The big black guy from earlier tries to rape her. Again. Haha, one track mind there dude. OH SNAP. Street Figher busts in a rips off the guys' balls!!
OH SNAP! Every guy reading this right now is cringing. According to Wikipedia, The Street Fighter is the first movie to receive an X-Rating purely on violence. And apparently it was for this scene!
Deaths: 10
Severe Beatings: 13
Now apparently the guy's tender and gentle and treats Heiress with respect. They scale down the side of the building and the cliff and almost escape into the boat unnoticed. Street Fighter sends them off but decides to stay back, to have some fun beating up random thugs, I guess. I hear he hates punks.
LAUNDROMAT CLOSED!
They fight for a while, but then random top-evil-babe interrupts the fight. They capture Street Fighter so they can find out the location of the girl. Even though they couldn't possibly have gotten far (it's been two minutes since they escaped), and took off in a loud motorboat. One of the henchman certainly could have said "hey, I heard their boat. It went up stream. They're probably right up there."
I'm going to count a few severe beatings in there.
Deaths: 10
Severe Beatings: 16
But no.
They've tied him to a tree at the top of a cliff and they're beating him with a stick. Ouch. Guns are bad.
His partner shows back up to help, and gets captured immediately, of course. In his love and fear of his master, he tells the villains where Heiress is. Street Fighter is piiiissed off.
The weird dressed guy tries to kill Street Fighter with a sword, but SF just twists a little, and the "killing blow" instead precisely cuts him loose from the tree. Street Fighter flings himself off the cliff, tumbling down rocks and plummeting into the river. Hahaha, LAME.
Apparently they didn't kill Street Fighter's partner, but instead just let him go free...?...because it cuts to much later, where the partner has dragged SF from the river and tries to get him help. Street Fighter is sick of Partner's cowardice, and calls him a "miserable crawling cockroach" and tells him he disobeyed all his orders.
He abandons his partner, who has repeatedly saved his life. Man this guy is evil.
Okay, move on to another city. Now Street Heiress and Evil Lady are trying to sneak on some ship or something.
Blind Guy and Street Fighter now square off. Blind Guy really freaks out Street Fighter by, get this, standing in front of the sun, and then moving so that SF gets blinded. Great.
They fight for a while, sword-cane versus arm braces. Suddenly a guy on a motorcycle drives by Blind Guy a couple times, and then gets sliced up by Blind Guy's sword. WTF?
Street Fighter uses the distraction to kill Blind Guy by stabbing him with a piece of his own sword and then cracking his skull. Ow.
Deaths: 11
Severe Beatings: 16
Of course the guy on the motorcycle was his partner, who disobeyed one final time by not staying away. Dying, he has saved Street Fighter yet again.
Deaths: 12
Severe Beatings: 16
It was almost touching except for this WTF-enducing scene:
Yes, Street Fighter's way of mourning his dead partner is to repeatedly insert his fingers into the dead man's nostrils.
A SINGLE TEAR!
Finally the heiress is abducted to an oil tanker.
The whole deal here is to get Heiress to sign away all the rights to the oil company. That's it, just a bunch of money. Turns out that they killed her father in the first place, and now want her to sign away the company.
Again, the picture of stealth, Street Fighter simply pilots a motorboat up to the ship, and no one noticed. A thunderstorm rages outside as Street Fighter (should I call him "ship fighter"? no.) wanders around the ship killing people and looking for Heiress.
He knocks out a guy and throws him the 40 feet or so to the water. I'm pretty sure that guy's dead.
Deaths: 13
Severe Beatings: 16
There are a few random battles of no consequence. Street Fighter dispaces, oh, thirty or so henchmen with no apparent wounds. Let's just call it 10 severe beatings since no one's really cool enough to count as a death. There are a couple railing kills, but again, it's all really just "look how bad-ass I am" space filler.
Deaths: 13
Severe Beatings: 26
Finally Street Fighter gets around to killing a couple of the white collar dudes, who don't present any problem. A few more thugs run around and get taken out too.
Deaths: 17
Severe Beatings: 30
Evil Lady gets a dart through the arm, and then Street Fighter stomps her brains out behind a couch. Apparently it's uncouth to show him killing women.
Deaths: 18
Severe Beatings: 30
Who's left? A couple white-collar thugs, a couple businessmen, the weird dressed guy, and Prisoner.
Deaths: 19
Severe Beatings: 30
Oh yeah he just killed another guy.
On their words of honor, Street Fighter and Prisoner square off on the desk for honest fighting!
If this movie had any good guys, the Prisoner would be the protagonist. I mean, he was imprisoned but was broken free, but then his brother was murdered and his sister sold into slavery. Now he's squaring off against the psychopathic madman who's killed dozens of people in the last few days?
While they're squaring off, one of the businessmen shoots Street Fighter! Hey that's playing dirty! Weird Dresser also thinks that's uncouth, so he immediately slaughters the guy and the main Caucasian business man - the one who orchestrated this whole affair to begin with.
Deaths: 21
Severe Beatings: 30
Theoretically, all the real villains are now dead.
But Prisoner, Sister, Heiress, Weird Dresser, and Street Fighter still need to reconcile their differences. Where's Doctor Phil when you need him? So Cosmo says you're fat? Well I ain't down with that. Cuz your waist is small and your curves are kickin'
Sister jumps into the fray and fails to kill him herself, but she does manage to trap him against a stair case in a bear hug. Over the crash of the storm, her tortured cry is heard:
"BROTHER! STAB HIM...THROUGH MY BACK!"
Ridiculous. Wouldn't "Brother, I'm holding him. Reach around me and stab his face!" been just as effective? Stupid emo girl.
Anyway, Prisoner does indeed pick up the sai and stabs his sister through the back. Again, it's really dark and muddy and there were no good screenshots to be had, but trust me, Prisoner just killed his own sister.
Deaths: 22
Severe Beatings: 30
Street Fighter is dangerously wounded, and he flails around like a fish. Prisoner steps over the corpse of Sister and ninja punches the heck out of Street Fighter, who collapses in convulsions and twitches.
Prisoner, a tortured soul, very nearly finishes off Street Fighter, but at the last second SF reaches out and literally tears out Prisoner's throat while grinning like a madman.
Holy Cow.
That's sick.
What the heck. THE END FOR NOW.
What in the hell does that mean?
Street Fighter is mortally wounded, Heiress loves him, and Weird Dresser is perfectly healthy and standing there with a big sword. Wow. He's evil, though. He's a villain. And Street Fighter is incredibly wounded. I'm sure they'll resolve this neatly in the next installment.
You know, Weird Dresser looks a lot like Ray Romano's brother.
DANGIT Prisoner should have died! Okay presumably since Street Fighter "won" the fight, the other evil guy just let him go, as per their deal previously. Since when do evil murderers honor their word? That's why they're evil murderers!
Deaths: 22
Severe Beatings: 30
Click the graphic below to continue reading the review of Return of the Street Fighter!
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