Street Fighter

Cool movie poster of an uncool movie.

The exploitation genre was and is still to date, defined as creating a marketable product related to whatever is a  trend interesting enough to finally deliver a film. If in the late 60's up to the late 80's the marketable product was nude girls and plenty of sex scenes, in the 90's, and I mean in the early 90's the exploitation genre moved to unexplored territories: Making movies based on best selling video games. Since many films had had their conversion to the home video game format with quite a decent success, it was about time someone became the trend setter of the new exploitation path of video games movies. Several attempts were made before the movie makers finally gave up for a decent amount of years.

In 1993 we saw how they killed the Super Mario Bros. franchise with a movie that was so bad, that hurt me so bad, since I'm a Mario fan that I just wouldn't find enough strength as to make a review of such a nightmare come true. 

"With Van Damme we can go no wrong"

The reason for watching the movie.

"Oh Guile you're so strong, come and bone me"

Did I say she's awesome?

Honestly, I don't know what producers were thinking when their set their minds into making a Street Fighter movie. The now legendary Capcom game in his early stages (Street Fighter I, Street Fighter II) didn't have a storyline, most of the characters were scarcely described as being in the tournament just for proving they were the strongest or just because they had fun fighting and, I can seriously tell you at least Super Mario Bros. had their storyline, simple but decent enough.

So the guys in charge of the movie checked the Street Fighter games, I guess they settled for making a film based on the Super Street Fighter II characters, the latest game in the saga in those days. 

So how do we make a story out of 17 different characters? Piece of Cake! We have this war going somewhere India or Thailand, this war is run by the Shadaloo crime organization led by Mr. Bison whose crazy idea is to own the world and run it with his partners in crime but, oh wait! there's a hero! Colonel  William F. Guile (Jean Claude Van Damme) and he's not alone! he's got the U.N. forces with him to crush Bison's madness. With that plot you have a reason for Guile, Cammy, Thunderhawk, a new guy named Sawada and that's it.

The videogame kicked ass.

So did Kylie Minogue, she should have been nude!

Chun Li's Whirlwind kick?

The rest of the characters are in the film for random reasons, mostly to help the good guys or to help the bad guys, nothing to explain in deeper terms.

The production budget was very high, high enough to pay martial arts star Jean Claude Van Dammne, acting star Raul Julia (unfortunately he passed away after the filming) and the Australian pop star singer Kylie Minogue, the rest of the cast was mostly unknown people, stuntmen & stuntwomen.

Now, Street Fighter not only sucks for having little or nothing to do with the game, but also for the wasted time in dialogues and subplots, hey! it is Street Fighter a movie about a fighting tournament! so, yeah the martial arts stars do get to do very little in the fighting business during the movie. On the other hand, the special effects are good, the props are similar to the original video game and the best of it all the movie videogame! which was starred by the same actors in the movie.

Vega.

Ken & Ryu?

Mr. Bison.

The final Battle.

Hulk, erp! I mean Blanka.

Grand Finale.

Another extra good thing is that after this movie was released Capcom decided to save their Street Fighter beloved game by creating the Street Fighter Alpha saga (Zero in Japan) This saga would explain in depth story for each character and would relate their personal stories to a bigger plot so, after all Capcom saved the day and this film is now part of the neverending list of B Movies that, for bizarre reasons have become cult items.

Here's the movie trailer: 

Tomorrow a real movie based on a videogame Mortal Kombat.