He gave the two halves to each of his sons. It opens on the past and the legend of the Double Dragon amulet, telling of how thousands of years ago an ancient Chinese king sacrificed himself to create a medallion, one half with the power over body and the other with the power over soul. ![]() It’s firmly in guilty pleasure territory.Īs I’m watching it though, it’s not actually all that bad. It’s got 3.8 out of ten on IMDb and it’s got four and a half stars out of ten on Amazon Prime which gives you some idea of what we’re looking at. ![]() What I’m saying is Double Dragon seems right up my street. In that one, ninja robots attempt to steal back a sacred blade. Those movies had names like Ninja Thunderbolt (where ninjas on rollerskates have a car chase that ends when the hero finds a hill to drive up, and it also features a pre- Street Fighter spinning bird kick), Scorpion Thunderbolt (where the IMDb synopsis sums it up as “while a deadly snake monster runs amok in Hong Kong, a man (Richard Harrison) learns of an evil witch who wants to steal his magic ring” and that description still doesn’t do it justice), and Ninja Terminator. He did this thing where he made what felt like two movies and then poorly spliced them together, usually starring US karate expert Richard Harrison. My favourites were from a producer called Godfrey Ho. I grew up on cheap and crappy kung-fu movies. Turns out that guy’s name is Bo Abobo, and the smaller picture show how they decided to present him in the film. From what I remember in the arcades as a child it was a side scrolling beat ’em up where you had either punch or kick and you fought a guy who looked like he had a pumpkin for a head. I’m as surprised as anyone that they made a Double Dragon movie. So the movies I have in front of me for this marathon of mediocrity are: Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Double Dragon. Games with zero plot, allowing the film makers carte blanche to build worlds around them. Looking at the list of the six I thought the best thing was to watch the three movies based on iconic arcade games. (side note: Tom Hanks was originally pegged for the role of Mario but turned it down when filming would clash with Philadelphia, and the role instead went to Bob Hoskins) What we got instead was a legendarily bad movie that ended the career of the directors, and there are already a million stories and videos out there about it. This, though, was the Super Mario Bros movie we were robbed of! His Super Mario Bros would have been a dark comedy road movie about two brothers on an existential journey. The first draft was written by Barry Morrow who’d just won an Oscar for his script for Rain Man. The resultant film was supposed to be a dark(ish) comedy with a similar tone to Ghostbusters. ![]() to a small indie studio called Lightmotive, giving up creative control but retaining licensing rights. Infamously, Nintendo followed this up by selling the movie rights for Super Mario Bros. Latest issues of our independent film magazines now available at .uk That, and a promo for Nintendo’s Power Glove, a product that looked cool, but was shelved by the time the first game actually made for it hit the shelves.įILM STORIES & FILM STORIES JUNIOR MAGAZINES The Fred Savage vehicle The Wizard then was Nintendo’s first foray into movies, and as much as I loved that film as a kid, it was essentially a 90 minute advert for Super Mario Bros 3, a game that wasn’t out in the UK for a full 18 months after the film was released. After watching Netflix’s excellent documentary series High Score I’d watched a couple of YouTube videos about videogame movies, I felt prepared to delve in: it was time for some videogame films.Īfter all, with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson making the delightful Rampage movie almost as penance for the execrable Doom, and current Man Who Can Do No Wrong™ Ryan Reynolds starring in the quite lovely Detective Pikachu it seemed like videogame movies were finally starting to come of age.īut which to watch? Initially I thought let’s watch the six that they made in the 1990s!’ and then I looked at the list and went ‘maybe not’. I’d been playing a lot of Pokémon and watching the cartoon series which in this moment felt like preparation. “Well, I put this off long enough” I thought to myself as I sat down with the three movies cued up to get watching.
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