Tag: Pinkie watches video game movies

A video game movie… about video games?! The Wizard Review

In an attempt to watch video game movies , except for the in universe ones, (as in they exist besides the games as part of the same universe)  I wondered. What counts as a video game movie. BloodRayne was up next but I could not stomach Uwe Boll right now. So instead I looked for something more innocent, a road trip movie about a boy and his autistic brother, wanting to travel to California.. for unknown reasons. That is right I watched 1989’s  The Wizard.

But Pinkie! The Wizard That’s Not A Video Game?!

How Astute of you.. my dear Island guests.. or me pretending to be an Island guest! That paragraph title is Correct! The Wizard is not a video game movie in the classical sense as we do not follow the story of a video game… not that any video game movie does that ..but I mean … non of the characters in this movie is a video game character.  Instead this is a movie about video games. A boy playing video games to be exact. One could call it a 90 minute Nintendo commercial. It has received.. a fairly poor reception. Having a Metacritic Score of only 2.3 and a critic approval rating of 32% on Rotten tomatoes. With an Audience Score of 60% and a 6,1 on IMDB.. this however promises to be one of the better watches I get in all 43 video game movies I counted.  It scores less than Postal on Rotten Tomatoes though.. which is absolutely wrong. I enjoyed this movie… .okay enjoy might be a big word.. but I certainly did not hate it.

The movie was made in 1989 and directed by Todd Holland. It stars Luke Edwards as the autistic  young Jimmy Woods, who later gets the nickname the wizard. He is in an institution for his heavy form of autism. His family has broken up after his sister died a few years ago and now the boy constantly tries to run away from home to go to California. One day after his father played by Beau Bridges, kinda distances himself from the boy his brother Corey played by a young Fred Savage breaks him out angry at his father for ignoring Jimmy’s wishes. Together they travel to California but they discover.. they need money. A young girl named Hayley joins up with them and convinces them to let Jimmy play Nintendo games ..in arcades.. for money! They can use the money to travel.. when they discover that in California there is a big video game competition with a big cash price.

Divorced mother and now involved with the owner of the institution Christine hires a professional Child returner/kidnapper. This angers Father Sam who sees the error of his ways of neglect and travels along with his eldest son, played by Christian Slater in order to find his two boys!  While they travel Nick.. the Slater Characters, brings along an NES and father and son bond over playing video games like Mario 2 and Zelda 2.  While also playing a very hillbilly esque cat and mouse game with the Childnapper guy. Who finds Jimmy first.. and can he make it to California, will he win the elusive tournament or will it go to the almighty gamer Lucas.. who wields THE POWER GLOVE? All these questions as well as why Jimmy wants to travel to California will be solved in a hundred minute movie. 

Nintendoes

First of all it should be noticed that the movie has a fairly competent cast which already is a good sign. Secondly a big name to Nintendo is connected to this film. I don’t mean in the way like “yeah go ahead and make a movie about us” either. This movie was the World Wide reveal for Super Mario Bros 3 of all things. One of my all time favourites if not THE favourite Mario game.  So there was some confidence in this movie.  We also see the movies antagonist Lucas use The Power Glove, a peripheral/weird controller I talked about in the past. It’s so bad.. and hey.. that line is in the movie!  We also take a peek inside Nintendo Power magazine in america.. or the Nintendo Hotline for tips and tricks! I am not sure if it’s one and the same back here in the Netherlands it was so I assume it was a similar type of deal.  We get this type of movie we don’t really see anymore. Three kids on the road..united by friendship. It takes inspiration from movies like Stand By Me which came out three years before.  For those who don’t know that movie.. well  remember that first screen in Pokémon when you click on the tv? “Four Boys walking on a railroad.. time to get rolling myself?’ Well that’s the movie they got that from! As a result the movie has this solid “frame” to build itself onto. Which benefits it.. it does feel fairly focused..which is hard to do for kids travelling across America. 

It is also not afraid to do it’s own thing where Stand By me is very set in the wilderness this trip of the Wood Boys and Hayley is much more suburban, which comes with a different set of challenges. Challenges this movie handles fairly well. They have to deal with people wanting their money back after a lost bet, they have to deal with robbers, using their tiny statues to get what they want easily, they have to deal with stuff like.. wanting to gamble for money..but not being allowed to play in a Casino so.. having to arrange a mule. It shows Universal Studios theme park.which is funny because that later became a video game on Nintendo,, and has a few interesting choices. The kids in this movie for the most part act like kids.  For example how Hayley lies about how awesome her life is .. only to later reveal her father left her because her mom had a gambling addiction. The skills she have stem from having a gambling mother and a trucker father not from some form of greater intellect. Jimmy being so autistic he easily sees patterns in video games is a bit iffy.. but hey he’s kind of like Nintendo Rainman that’s kinda enjoyable. 

The kids deliver a fair performance and the whole being unable to communicate with your little brother thing and that sometimes they have to guess what Jimmy is feeling makes the kids part of the journey very fun to watch. It is funny so see classic NES games like  Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon and the first Turtle game  be played on camera.  While there are plenty of movies of games.. movies about gaming are fairly rare.. the only other ones that come to mind are Ready Player One, Gamer and Pixels.  All the others are exaggerations though.. this one has no superpowers, no virtual treasure, no aliens.. no this is just a story about a boy who is talented at video games. It’s “romanticised” enough to be entertaining bu in the end all this movie is about is how video games can strengthen your bonds and a trip that started because a family was unable to communicate. In it’s own way it is kinda cute! For a lost 100 minutes it isn’t even that bad. …. However…………

Ninetendon’t

Unfortunately this movie is plagued by a myriad of flaws as well. The most glaring one is that the movie is not written by a gamer. “Wow Jimmy you got 50.000 points in Double Dragon” sounds a bit cringe.A beat them up is not about points it is about survival.Later they even do points in Mario and Ninja Gaiden.. and while it is true that Championships do mention points there is a clear dissonance here. You can tell the team here doesn’t understand video games.  A lot of the writers and the actors don’t understand video games. Why does Cristian Slater have to hold a controller that awkwardly and instantly tab buttons when playing Mario 2.  The gameplay doesn’t match his hands.. how hard is it t to actually make him play or at least learn him how a video game works.. even if you then use a pro all he has to do is understand the controllers and you make him do the actions he sees on screen.. then you put that shot a second or so earlier in your timeline and voila. But no people feel rather like incompetent games..even the amazing Lucas seems to make way too many button clicks for a game he is playing. It does seem like he knows how to use a Power Glove though! So maybe he is just that BAD.

That brings me to a second element of this movie that isn’t great. It has aged incredibly poorly. It has been written with a fairly “hip” language for 1989.. but we do not talk or dress like that anymore. While that can be a hilarious time capsule effect this time it affects everything. Where for example Sentai are a timeless concept so a time setting just gives it body.. like an aging wine..only not persé as good.. more like a distinguished flavor kind of thing. Yet in this movie, it’s the lingo people speak in, the games that are being played, the way that tournaments are being held, the way plot devices work and in fact the whole complete type of storytelling. Gaming isn’t as strange anymore so 90% of those who watch this these days will be able to tell you  gaming is not about score.. that is the gaming of a generation before. The way they say Mario works.. “You gotta score points Jimmy score points”  doesn’t work and the fact that they know.. how an item works in an unreleased game is odd at best. Finding a Warp doesn’t give you more points! Back then.. you could pull that stuff “Mew Under the truck”  was a thing. The lingo sometimes makes characters hard to understand. Bad was good back then.  The whole running away story would not work these days.  As a result the focus on the movie becomes.. how different were those days which takes you out of the movie.

While that point gives the movie a positive point as well, a new angle to watch it from doesn’t fully work with how the adults in this movie work. Which in my opinion is the greatest weakness. For some weird reason, they always end up in exactly the right places in exactly the right towns. One would assume that the kids may find themselves unable to travel in a straight line, because they are dependent on hitchhiking. They might travel to the west but have to settle for moving a bit more up north?! Yet both the kidnapper guy and the father and son keep up ending up in the right towns. Where then they are able to run in each other’s cars and attack each other with shovels without consequences. Weirdly enough it’s the Adult scenes and not the kid scenes that show we have to deal with a movie aimed at children. The adults go to a car repair shop and hook up their Nintendo to their tv.. while waiting for their car to be repaired. The Kidnapper ask a towing guy.. “do you want to make a quick 50 bucks.. tow my friends car away”.. which is fine.. some tow goes would that. I can accept that.. but then they bring it to a scrapyard that immediately begins to disassemble it?  Jumping the shark a bit there. Beau Bridges not wanting to stop playing Zelda II is a funny joke.. because we as kids did not want to stop playing games.. but he is trying to rescue his son from a sure to be traumatic experience…you are just turning him into an asshole by making him want to get another item in Zelda first.

Nintendo’s Entertainment System

Comedy in this movie is great.. but some jokes really do not land. Haley getting the Kidnapper guy in trouble by repeatedly yelling “He Touched My Boob” every time he almost captured Jimmy is good for a chuckle.. She is creative and cunning in this and it both works for the plot and would actually be helpful to draw attention…so when he hears truckers tell him “so you touched a young girl’s breasts you pervert” and we see him sigh we can chuckle. It’s lowbrow and will make a kid chuckle as well. Even the awkward kiss between Corey and Hayley which is a stereotypical childish joke works and it’s great.All comedy from Beau Bridges and Christian Slater however ….DOESN’T work.  They are needed in the movie but they should have been made more caring. It’s nice to see father and son bond on a journey and it would not even be that bad to make them bond over something Jimmy enjoys like video games..  yet almost all their scenes feel disconnected because Nintendo just had to make the old man enjoy games as well… at the cost of his sons!   The whole Power glove scene in fact is quite redundant as well.. we already know he cant use it at the tournament.. so it is just a tad too commercial. This scene is better now that it has aged because of how BAD it is yet somewhere along the way it feels as if this movie is having an Agenda.  

This movie can be compared to something like Ice Age. The story of the human baby being taken ot a certain location is the main plot. Jimmy has to be delivered by two caretakers to a certain location. Along the way is a lot of child friendly humor but also a heartfelt journey with people becoming friends for life and really bonding. Then there is Scrat. You know that rat thing that wants an acorn and just ends up getting hurt? Imagine taking those scenes out of ice age and replacing them with Ola Ice Cream product placement. We see Ice age baby humans looking for him.. but when a Scrat scene would show up they get distracted by Ola Ice cream. In the end you will be a bit upset that the baby finds his way back. The ending of the movie makes up for this a bit tying the desire of the boy together with a deep trauma and making him hug his father for the first time in forever. His father needed to be there at that moment.. things needed to be broken for things to heal yet to me he will now always be the jackass who thought getting through Death Mountain in Zelda 2 is more important than finding his kid. Up to a  point where I almost found that the movie failed because it wanted to promote gaming for adults.. cause Nintendo makes such addicting games you forget your family?!…

I was gonna visit my mom.. but then I saw this scene in the movie! Now I don’t know who she is! I just wanna play Contra.

I do think that the critics are too hard.. but The Wizard is a series of odd choices which leads to a conceptually strong enough movie. How good this movie actually is  depends on how forgiving you are as a movie go-oer. Let’s compare this movie to Star Wars Episode 1. It is a very different story than what we are used to from Video Game/Star Wars movies. Yet that can be good or bad. It is catered at a slightly younger audience and while it certainly had some great revelations.. it makes some very stupid choices as well. If you are the type that thinks.. JarJar ruined that entire movie.. than this  will also be a movie that you are going to hate. If you take everything face value that one broken element breaks the entire movie.  If you are more like me though you can see that other element as just an element. “They tried to make a comical character, it did not work out, let’s take that at a loss but judge the movie on the merits it has. If you are like that you can have an enjoyable time with this.. if you at least have an affinity with old timey games.  Then there is the type like my friend Bean thats like.. “It’s meant for kids writing doesn’t need to make sense’  Then I think a little bit less of you.. movies should always be for everyone no matter who your main audience is.. but heck as long as you have an affinity for old games and love to dig around in time capsules this movie will be your jam.

It’s a movie with just one very broken element and to come to a correct judgement I  will compare the show to a car you want to buy. The engine .. in this case , the story is fine, the steering wheel is fine, the movie goes where it needs to go and addresses relevant story points and it feels paced fairly neatly..though it tends to drag at some points. It isn’t very user friendly.. the car makers didn’t know much about driving so your direction indicator has some super colourful flashy symbols and kinda makes a lot of noise and your car horn is a jaunty tune making the car a bit more tacky. However your brakes.. are completely broken.  The handbrake works fine but you only apply that when you have come to a stop already.  Sure you can throw out a land anchor or just install new brakes.. but you would not pay full price for this car. Nor would you say it’s a star on the road. You wouldn’t even call it very good.  If you get a hell of a discount it can be fine if you really want to drive this particular car.  If you have other options this one will just be okay.. and if you are a nag.. this car is clearly sub par.
I had a fun drive.. and when it comes to video game movies.. being forced to use a land anchor is the least of my worries! But you have been warned!

So my quest to watch all Video Game movies goes on! Next week I probably should watch BloodRayne, now I just have to find the courage to put it on! What is your favourite Video Game Movie? Which movie should I watch next?! Let me know! Have you played NES?! Are you some sort of video game Rainman I can bank on by making you go to tournaments?! Very important questions being asked here! Speaking of making bank! I also have a Kofi. If you want to help out please click the cute picture! However I also really appreciate likes and comments all the same! So let’s have fun interactions together! Have an amazing day and I hope you’ll visit Paradise again!

A Rock going Ape: Rampage Review

Dear Island Guests, Welcome back to my attempt to watch all video game based movies ever made. By Arceus, I did it! I watched a video game movie that is not total shit! I mean sure it isn’t great.. but heck it is based on a button bashy game about a wolf a lizard and a ape destroying cities! How did this happen?! Have I killed to many brain cells with bollshit?! Or is this actually a fairly competent movie? Let’s find out together. Also my apologies the changing image format. I watched this on Netflix so I got the screen grabs from IMDB..who apparently takes their screens from everywhere!

It’s not Congo

Rampage came out in 2018 and stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as primatologist/former black ops and poacher murder Davis Okoye. He now works at the San Diego Wildlife sanctuary when unbeknownst to him stuff goes awry in space. An evil company by the name of Energy has been making a flexible DNA pathogen on a space station where one of their rats broke out. A lonely scientist trying to escape gets locked in until she retrieves the pathogen samples. She manages to retrieve three samples before fleeing back and escaping the exploding space station. However  the rat has damaged her escape pod and upon reentry in the atmosphere the little window cracks and see is burned to a crips! The pod explodes and the three samples land on several places in the United States. 

One in the Everglades where the Pathogen gets eaten by a crocodile, one lands in the forest lands of Wyoming where a wolf gets infected and one….what are the chances strikes at the San Diego Wildlife reserve. Here it infects George, an Albino Gorilla that happens to be Davis best friend. (That’s kinda sad)  But George is a good boy gorilla who can speak in sign language! …Wait a second.. a Gorilla that is a best friend, whose sign language and Albino Gorilla?! There is a lot of stuff from the movie Congo here!

As George suddenly begins to grow and more  erratic and aggressive a totally legit woman working for Energyne shows up telling she made the pathogen that made George like this. She has a cure but Davis needs to help her proof Energyne is using this pathogen for weapons. Being the evil company they are Energyne builds a radio tower to draw in these beasts so they can retrieve their pathogene.. but that doctor trying to save the world, Doctor Cate Caldwell she has to go! Can our hero use his bond with George to save Chicago?  Can he bring back George from madness. All of these questions will be answered, in a vastly illogical but fun to watch movie.  I mean there are plothoes the size of Kaiju here but hey this is a movie about a albino killer gorilla wrecking some stuff up and being almost immune to everything humans can throw it. Al becomes of some diamonds..wait no that’s not right! No diamonds! Flexible DNA pathogen that’s it.. this movie is not Congo.

A Man and his CG Gorilla

I played a lot of Gampage as a kid and George was never my favourite..but it makes sense to tell the story with him as a hero! A Gorilla that knows sign language makes a lot more sense than a wolf that follows every command or a a story about a man who trained Velociraptors that gone and mutated into something else. In fact I could argue that the interactions with The Rock and George are best thing in this movie. George is a fully CGI Gorilla obviously but there was a sense of bond I got from them still. I did not really feel the Rock was talking to nothing.. There was a legit bond between this Davis and George. Only in the action and funny moments though!

There are a few dramatic moments and here the Rock falters. He has become a pretty good physical comedy actor over the past few years. He even has some comedic timing to his lines. When he needs to be sad for a cgi gorilla though.. he isn’t always there..Still there is this very enjoyable bond between Davis and George I can’t help but like!  Even though George is way too intelligent take seriously for example, this movie really establishes it is going over the top from the first moment! It starts in space! With an evil space rat and super evil organisation shenanigans. This movie practically is a 90’s cartoon including the talking animal sidekick.. but it leans into that.. and for that reason it really works. It’s camp but if you expected anything else after the first 10 minutes or heck even from the beginning you are in the wrong movie more so than the movie being wrong. If you see this movie as a live action cartoon you might have a great time with it!

The movie uses a lot of foreshadowing. After the first scene with Davis and George I was like… oh they better end the movie like such and so or I will be upset! I got exactly the ending I wanted..but also predicted. Well there was one joke I didn’t see coming at the end that made me giggle but all in all this movie is fairly predictable. Yet in a good way. After having seen a lot of video game movies this one at least feels capably made. It isn’t a masterpiece by any means but this movie does deliver what it promises. Character traits in both George, Davis , Cate and heck even the cowboy government agent they meet somewhere along the way are fairly established.

We know why Davis does the things he does even if it is not beneficial to a situation. We understand. Sure making him a former black-ops guy feels cheap and allows him access to a set of skills that are very convenient, yet at the same time he utilizes almost ALL of those skills. So it is not a wasted plotpoint to make him more cool.. it’s a trait so insane action sequences make some semblance of sense. Plus this movie is basically a 90’s cartoon! Of course he is a black-ops!

George is even used as more than just ape, Davis actually learns from him, and while again it is very convenient to the plot it happens for a reason. Davis has a reason to care for George and the fact that George cares for him has deeper implications. Cheap but it’s there.
So every time the Rock interacts with this CGI monstrosity is when the movie really does shine! You can see George sometimes breaking out of it;s aggression because it cares about Davis as well but never so much that it becomes that much more than an animal. In a way this movie creates a symbiosis. Both need each other, and the movie also needs both. it just doesn’t really need the side characters.

A Saturday Morning Cartoon

The weakest point is definitely the villains. Brother and Sister leading Energyne, which by the way is such an generic company name it hurts, are really clearly evil incorporated. I also do not really get their plan. Their plan is basically, make a pathogen that can make Kaijus …..  …… make money!  Clearly there is a step missing there! They have no way to control the big beasties , so they make them freak out with a radio signal to draw them all to the city and let the military blow them up.. so they can take blood from their corpses. Or something?!
They also decide now.. after she got locked up for trying to break the project that Cate has to die… why not when she stole from you?!  Why when she already told the cops about you and is just hanging with a Primatologist, do you decide that now she is very dangerous.
Why would you build that radio signal on top of your own company when you know the military has to bomb these animals to death. The nervous brother and the cold sister again seems like something of a Saturday morning cartoon. They also act a bit like Pinkie and the Brain.. if Pinkie was a corporate weasel instead of an dumb dumb. They are so in your face evil you can tell they are evil by just saying hello.

This comes with a few issues. At one point the heroes realise that Energyne is luring the monsters there into the heart of chicago by a signal on Energyne’s roof. In the middle of Chicago. They don’t care the city gets destroyed.. but your still a company.. if people are going to find out it was you who drew the monsters to Chicago even if they are blown up.. you are in trouble still.. I don’t think you can freely walk about and just take these monsters blood. Also you need to sack another multi billion dollar asset. The space station you blew up cost them 20 billion already and they just shrug it off. I am pretty sure no company can take a 40 billion dollar loss without any consequence. Their plot makes very little sense and their acting is quite poor! Funnily enough .. they end like 90’s cartoon villains. Like really..  (And no this is not a spoiler unless you think the Rock losing in a younger audience movie is actual a viable option)  this brings a charm to the movie but also a makes  it a bit of a guilty pleasure. Why was I so entertained by this?

The action is similarly over the top and delivers you some fun moments such as the Rock swinging a woman in a crashing plane to launch a forklift truck into the giant Gorilla, only to see them then do similar antics to yeet themselves and a cowboy cop out of plane grabbing Parachutes while the plane breaks up. A  battle royal between Lizzie , George and Ralph is pretty good as well and given that there is a fair amount of environmental destruction, which was what the games are all about , it is at least somewhat faithful to the source material. Not that there is a lot to be faithful to. We see the most ridiculous action scenes and they are all fun. Yet they also  recognise the  limitations of their CGI and while it does make things more believable it also makes some of the camera work very unappealing. When a mercenary company is hunting Ralph in the woods of Wisconsin for example we get very dark shots, fog is used to bloom up details and most kills happen off camera. Never do I cringe that much at the CGI but at the same time I do wish that some of these scenes could have been a bit more visceral. There is almost no blood in the movies, which makes sense given that it seems to target a younger audience.. but the actions shots.. do not justify the lack of blood.
I am talking bisections, a beheading and impalement here.. all relatively bloodless. That just seems odd.  But hey  damaged characters do get dirty and get scuff marks… kinda like… you know where this is going.

I tend to use analogies to compare the movie to somewhere around the end of a review and in this case.. the best thing I can compare Rampage to is the game Rampage. Both are just a good bit of fun, with a story that is to dump and makes so little sense to put to words.   Both have scenes that drag on and on but also some great action moments. It can keep you entertained for a good 90 minutes but after that you do not feel enriched or satisfied.. you just had 90 minutes of fun and that is it. I appreciate the movie for knowing that is is exactly that. It never oversteps that and that suits the movie.. yet at the same time that lack of ambition to ever be more is also its greatest flaw. 

It’s like as if the movie makers saw this movie as a school exam. They answered the questions they knew the answer to REALLY REALLY well and got enough points to score a passing grade.. but if they had taken a moment to try to figure out one of these other questions they just might have gotten a better grade by scoring some half points on other subjects. If you ever want a  movie to just turn your brain off with and enjoy stuff blowing up and the Rock doing Rock things.. this is a solid movie to watch! I watched it in this mindset and definitely will have to put it in my top 5 favourite video game movie adaptations. It isn’t anything special but fun can be good enough.

This movie is on the higher side of the fineapple spectrum a nice popcorn-flick that feels like a Saturday morning cartoon. As long as you don’t expect more this movie doesn’t dissapoint. If you do expect more.. you probably have not played rampage before! Did you see this movie? What did you think about it? Do you think Dwayne Johnson might be overused in movies?!
Let me know in the comments! If you want to prevent me from ever starting my own genetics lab to make evil super creatures..please consider supporting my Kofi page! Support money is better than evil super creature money! If you have no money to spare! Just follow the blog, leave a like or a nice comment! I can’t start an evil firm if I never turn evil anyway!


The Sequel Even Uwe Boll Would Not Touch: House of the Dead 2 Review

Hello again my dear island guest! Welcome back to my quest to review all video game movies!  When Uwe Boll makes a movie, Uwe Boll usually makes a sequel..or two! However even Uwe Boll jumped ship with his House of the Dead movie, so someone took over this video game adaption. A movie so bad that even Uwe Boll doesn’t want anything to do with it? Now that’s what I would call a horror movie!

In my attempt to see all video game movies, I have stumbled upon a new mood, something that holds a middle between stupefied and fascinated. I call it stupenated. It holds somewhere between NANI!!!! !and Hmmmmmm SOUKA!  So it might be called Hmmm NAKA!. This  sequel movie left me Stupenated a lot.

While somehow managing to make me aggressively bored at places as well. A rollercoaster of sub-par experiences that as a whole come out as a much more interesting experience as the sum of its parts, because by Arceus this movie is soooo badly written. However it is so culty and campy and stupid.. that it is quite a bit more enjoyable than Boll’s first outing. Terrible still but at least this felt like a movie. Biggest contributor for that is the movies story.. it actually has one! The first movie basically movie, whose review you can find here, basically had the story of..some (clearly not) teens go to an island to rave..but zombies live there and shit happens, luckily they hired a weapons smuggler so they have guns. Part 2 at least tries to do some world building…it fails… but it tries.

Dr Curien, the father of the main character of the first movie saw his son get killed by his girlfriend who had been given the immortality serum after she was killed by the Spanish priest bloke in the final bit of the first movie. Now he is killing school girls and trying to revive them, however he gets distracted and one of his test subjects he thought was just dead..gets away and kills him.. turning him into and the campus he worked on into a new batch of zombies.  The secret organisation AMS who are professional zombie hunters think this new outbreak might be connected to generation 0 or at least generation 1 zombies. (Those turned by the serum of movie 1 )  From which they hope to synthesise a vaccine. So general Carter sends in some military guys along with two AMS members to find this Gen 0 or Gen 1 blood sample. There even are some wavering allegiances, complicating this important mission. Unfortunately for AMS the military people are more brain dead than the zombies.

Now of course that last embellishment was not a part of the actual story but it is true! These military guys are SOOOO dumb that like half of them gets killed in the first few minutes for the most stupid reasons. One guy just starts punching on a zombie for no reason.. he has guns.. but he just starts fistfighting him and gets bitten. The second gets bitten by that guy after trying to restrain him by .. putting their hand his shoulders and pushing him down so he can get shot to death… of course he bites out of resistance and the next guy is toast as well. These experts in making things safe have to keep the scientist Nightingale and former Secret Service Agent Ellis safe from zombies.Which of course is harder than it might seem.

While Uwe Boll had little to do with this movie the director goes for for that typical Uwe Boll cinematic feel. For example it has that “porn” cheapness to camera images and a really harsh lighting. You half expect things to escalate when a girl walks out of a shower into a locker room full of men.

That means that means except for the “gross” crippled woman from part one.. you know the one whose legs were chopped off, bled out for hours and lay their in an exploding zombie infested house that now has become a leader in a top secret organisation that puts her in a military suit for some reason,  all women are introduced to you in a bikini. bathrobe or in a slutty schoolgirl outfit that gets cut of her body by a professor trying to reanimate her… for which of course.. she needed to be naked. This time however it is blurred out!  …At first.  IN the second half of the movie woman don’t strip as much but we do get a few “odd” moments. Almost as if the writer thinks zombie girls are hot?! I am not sure.. but I think we got a few naked zombies.. at least the zombies look like zombies though … sometimes.

The movie has this campy feel to it.. with woman being a bit stereotypical ..but stereotypical badasses. I think we get one gay woman..maybe two I am not sure, it’s implicit .. there is just this tension between two girls.. although I should not say there is..but I feel like there should be.. based on their dialogue and interaction. Between the bad acting and weird storyboarding it can go either way. There is this also a cool badass science chick with a deep back story and a campus hippie girl…who by far is the best actress in the movie that is like exposition incarnate. It feels like I am watching one of those Full Motion Video , video games. You know something like Night Trap, or those Tanya scenes from those Red Alert cutscenes. It has that same feeling as games like Phantasmagoria.. maybe even Wing Commander. It’s not like there is something wrong with that but they feel like their own thing. Like how a Soap Opera is filmed differently than normal series..FMV games had this “cheapness” to it.. which is very much shown in this movie. 

This is reflected by the amount of exposition in this movie.  “As you Know” is one of the stupidest lines a movie can use for plot revelations..because why would you tell someone something they know?! Well The whole story of AMS is done like that.. In a school that has been abandoned for weeks two people survive and they happen to know everything the doctor did including stealing corpses from the morgue and after the school told him to stop… he went to find other ways.. they tell them how he tried to splice genomes and details of his research and so much more! Why would they know the professor killed a student? There is no reason they would.. why would school allow a guy to keep working there after he stole corpses, why isn’t he in jail?! Why even if they covered this up.. would two hippies know it and have their fingerprint or Bio-signature tied to a cage that holds the first zombie?!  I was stupinated! Everything is acted, filmed and written so clunky you feel like every shot has a big B branded into it.

That is what saves this movie from being worse or as bad as it’s prequel. It is so far distanced form reality it can actually surprise you. In the scenes where it doesn’t it can be boring as heck..but boy when the stupid virus strikes again .. I had a blast.

There is something hilarious about a trained soldier seeing a guy sit in a zombie infested library and say “Oh a survivor” … while being questioned by his peers “Zombies do not read that is a survivor”  meanwhile the guy has a rotting face and is bleeding all over his book and the soldier doesn’t even notice.. while knowing there are zombies everywhere. He even scolds him for being rude… WHY would someone go read a book amidst a zombie infested school?! Why do you think that is feasible?!  Even if he did it to calm his nerves why would you get annoyed he has headphones on and ignores you.. why would you not think it’s a zombie. I was Stupinated how can you think this little about your chain of events it made the movie quite hilarious though.

Soon after a part of the squad hears noises coming from a dorm room which is clearly a news-anchor reading the news.. yet for some reason TRAINED MILITARY staff, ..three of them all fail to notice this and they all think there are survivors in this room! After which they ask people to open up.. kicking in the door 5 seconds after making the request. English is my( arguably)  third language yet I as a untrained civilian, non native English speaker can hear this is a radio or a tv… yet the army can’t ?  That is funny! These people deserve to die so much! One of them does.. because he got bitten by a zombie mosquito?!  Now that is funny! Well he doesn’t die right away but he is written off. He gets bitten by a random mosquito, and just because the girl in this room zombified without any traces of forced entry?! Huh!?! So that must have been the mosquito they say. I have a few problems with that theory. Mosquitoes will only sting those with the highest body temperature in the room, so how it ever would prick a zombie is beyond me already. Maybe these zombies still have warm blood?!

Second that mosquito was in the room for days..meaning the mosquito would have to be a zombie itself, but decay is accelerated so I am not sure it would last that long, it’s not clear if it was THAT mosquito that made the girl turn.. they just guess it was and it’s totally unclear if the disease can be transmitted beyond species.. since the last part took place on an island.. you’d figure they would know if the mosquitoes there transformed. It isn’t even brought up again until the very end, the moment you discover that bugs can spread the deadly disease you might want to inform your colleagues but they just decide to just knock out the guy and leave him to die…I get you would not want to take a risk but this is a colleague, he’s instantly written off, without even asking the zombie scientist, which they can contact on their Walkietalkie thing. Instead they just decide.. well you are dead now. It felt very throwaway and out of nowhere and into nowhere.. nothing is done with this concept. 

The most hilarious death takes place around the same time. A guy sees a weeping woman who beckons him into another room, separating him from his group. It turns out that this woman is misleading him..she is actually a zombie..who acts like a siren of sorts..again.. I’d imagine her rotten face would reveal her to be a zombie or her non response to questions would at least make the man on his guard ..but no .. he gets blindsided by her! He does manage to beat her and lock her into a locker as he tries to exit the room a big zombie is behind the door… while he is already pointing his gun at the big zombie it startles him so hard he just screams and gets eaten……Trained military men everybody! They are so skilled.

If we look at consistency this movie is a lot weaker than the original! The movie does not match up with the world building at all. The set-up for things is super flimsey and it feels a lot plot whole heavier.. then again part 1 did not have a plot so…..

Mosquito guy by the way ends up being the villain of the movie..which of course is not set up at all , why am I telling you this..well because the movie first does set him up as the bad guy! He loots corpses, takes selfies next to a dead half naked girl ..with her camera he “stole” , he tells people they are going to die and basically he is just SUCH a huge douchebag that he went on this mission to get the blood sample for himself and bring it back to the big pharmaceutical companies and sell it for millions. Which to be fair is a much more interesting villain plot than “I want to be immortal because I want to live forever”  from the last part. The problem however  he is “killed off”.  Even when he turns out to be alive.. why would he still try to sell the vaccine so only the rich can buy it…Would he not help get it back so the experts van make a vaccine fast enough to save him. Also upon depolyment he left in a squad of 10 or so who took their jobs seriously! How would he ever get away with that?! Still it had a lot of potential as both sides race for the cure..but no he is killed off only to be brought back again for a weird twist ending. Why make him such an asshole not use him?  I was stupenated!

House of the Dead 2 is nowhere near as bad as its predecessor because it’s possibly worse. Plot happens for no reason at all throughout the entirety of this movie and it can be funny as heck. For example at one point Ellis and Nightingale get trapped in a zombie cage that needs the hand-print to open up… for no reason at all and never explained the door suddenly opens up. The woman who could open the door just got killed by  zombies all the way across the room. While she was bitten by 20 zombies she could still find humanity to crawl all the way across and open the door? If she even did.. not sure just assuming here as it’s the only way to open the door,  while …here we go again.. a trained Military captain began transforming in a zombie within mer seconds of a single bite?!  Sometimes they even transform instantly.. sometimes characters can give entire epilogues.  There is no rhyme or reason to this and it is stupinating to see how often a situation just goes completely derpy!

While the biggest charm of this movie is how dumb it is.. for example a character that got swarmed by zombies and only had a knife.. survives a missile strike without any scratches  while all zombies die, there are actually a few good things about this movie.

First of all the soundtrack is way less stupid than the original and those stupid game flashes are not here anymore.  Characters do actually develop over the  course of this movie and zombies look like actual zombies.  So it looks and sounds a lot better with much less aggressive muzzle flares, a much more believable setting to be decked out in these weapons used and in general a better set of world building. Of course this is nullified by dumb decisions like randomly running around a campus filled with zombies without knowing the schools lay out. At one point one character suddenly knows that in the next building  there is a science lab and this is a good place to start searching for Zombie 0 …. This happens when there are only 3 out of 10 people left… If that is a great place to start… (and sure.. if someone is suspected of making zombies… I’d say the science lab is indeed a fair starting place) why would you NOT start there first then… Stupinated! 

 The acting revealed that the actors could not believe the characters as well because it feels atrociously bad,  think Birdemic Levels of bad.. which is worse than House of the Dead 1, but a whole lot more entertaining. The dialogue is super funny at times as well. For example when Hippie girl fires at the science team thinking they are zombies they flee behind a desk an yell “Ceasefire we are AMS we are here to help” .. the response is  ‘Hmmm .oh. okay..sorry” I had about five other  moments there where I like actively thought like..’they could not just have said that’? Those bad lines are always also almost inaudible.. like tiny easter eggs of weirdness almost as if people accidentally talk trough footage. So bad.. yet some magnificent. This movie might have shown me the least logical action/reaction movie I have watched since the room. It is so bad in every single way..but the fact that it actually has a story and it leans so hard into the bad.. makes this a view I actually enjoyed.. unlike Boll’s movie. So in this case.. the worse movie is the better movie!  That doesn’t make a lot of sense but neither does this movie so it fits as a conclusion.

The Verdict

The movie is still bad and I would not recommend it to any of you guys but I guess when Uwe Boll doesn’t direct a movie it does automatically get better. This movie kept me entertained….at some parts. I still had to take break and come back for it! This movie isn’t even recognised by Wikipedia among video game adaptations so that is saying something.
Did you see this one?! Do you know of any video game movies that do not make the IMDB movie list?! Let me know and I might review it! Among the 38 sh other movies I still have to watch! Next week we will look at the Mortal Kombat Sequel and after that..we take another dip in Boll.

MONKEY!! The Super Mario Bros Movie Review

A long long time ago the earth was ruled by dinosaurs. They were big so not a lot of people went around hassling them. Actually no people went around hassling them because there weren’t any people yet just the first tiny mammals. Basically life was good. Then something happened. A giant meteorite struck the earth. Goodbye Dinosaurs! But what if the Dinosaurs weren’t all destroyed? What if the impact of that meteorite created a parallel dimension where the dinosaurs continued and evolved into intelligent vicious aggressive beings….just like us? And hey what if they found a way back?!

If you haven’t checked my blog title you might wonder. If you haven’t seen this movie or been oblivious to it you might still surprise you that these are the first words uttered in the movie that is called Super Mario Bros. This movie is something I owned on VHS back when I was just a tiny Pinkie.  For those who do not know what VHS is.. back in the pre-internet age movies did not stream on network but were pressed onto disk or even earlier trapped into a cassette with small versions of movie reels contained inside them! It was magical!  Even back then I was surprised. I personally would have never imagined to set a Mario movie in a sci-fi  cyberpunk dystopian alternate dimension ruled by Fungi and Dinosaurs. Director Rocky Morton, his former wife Annabel Jankel and their writing staff  clearly had a bigger imagination than me.. and you know me I am a weirdo!

This is how Mario Starts!

Now I called Dragonball Evolution  one of the most unfaithful movies ever but this one takes the crown. Yet where I really suffered through DBE this one has long since became a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine. I would have placed it in my Pinkie’s Guilty Movie pleasures list, but I decided to review video game movies for the next few Mondays to come and let’s while plenty of them go under that category , I doubt I can say I had pleasure when I get to the Uwe Boll movies. In fact I should spread those around a bit because otherwise I will suffer too much in a row. Anyway after that note to myself, i’ll have to admit I kind of had fun watching the Super Mario Bros movie again. Somewhere in the same vein as I would find it fun to see aliens land on earth or look at Honey Boo Boo or some weird Dutch Bed and Breakfast owner talking about wines. I don’t want to watch it all the times but sometimes it can be fun!

1/10 Moustache Curves the wrong way

So for those who do not know the plot of the super Mario film, here you go. A dinosaur queen traveling dimensions places a capsules in front of a monastery. In this capsule are an egg and a meteorite shard. From this egg hatches Daisy, who twenty years later has become an archaeologist. A mean construction mogul named Scapelli tries to sabotage her dig-site and unknowingly opens the breach between the dinosaur dimensions and ours again. King Koopa has usurped the other dimension by turning their former king into Fungus and their world has falling into disarray, lacking enough resources to continue on. If he can insert the Meteorite piece into his worlds side of the meteor.. both the worlds can merge together and dinosaur can feast and rule over mankind. Daisy being of the true royal line is the only one who can actually insert the meteor without being killed so he needs her as well. So he sends cousin Iggy and Spike ..to capture her as she holds the meteor as well. Daisy and Luigi started to date in the real world.. and when the plumbers use their skill to save daisies dig-site.. she gets captured and Mario and Luigi have to venture into the world of the dinosaurs to save Luigi’s date.

Whose that Archaeologist?

Now you might notice there already are a few differences between this and the source material. First of all it’s Daisy who is front and center in this adventure and not Peach.. who in fact is never mentioned in the movie at all.  Princess Daisy is actually the ruler of Sarasaland not the Mushroom Kingdom.. while the name is not officially coined for the Dinosaur World.. King Koopa (back before he was Bowser)  teasingly refers to it as such. Mario is Luigi’s guardian, while he is clearly of a fatherly age he decided to call Luigi his brother. Luigi is actually the main hero in this one and he actually gets  more than a cake at the end.. though not by much.  Koopa normally isn’t really a dinosaur nor is the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom… but hey!  It’s kind of a fun story, it’s just weird Mario and Luigi are in it.

Is it wrong of me to wonder how Dennis Hopper Bowsette would look like?!

The whole rescue the princess stick is in the movie and that is the main thing a Mario game is about and at least it wasn’t all just a dream, just a stage play nor had little mushroom men been transformed into blocks that Mario then murders to get some coins. It doesn’t make a LOT more sense than the NES Mario games but at least it somewhat follows a classical three act structure. We get two people growing closer, one of those being kidnapped and them two brothers trying to save one guys gal… and discovering the other guys gal is also here. Did you know Mario is into WWF?! Well now you do! It’s like a Mario fever dream. You keep wanting to watch to see what else they turned into what. How this world is so not like Mario and puts mario names on thinks that are clearly NOT that same thing.  Did you know what if you paint your SNES Super Scope Grey it can evolve people! Heh! Monkey! Did you know that Goombas are actually 2,5 meter tall muscled dinosaurs with a super tiny head. I always imagined they were like big heads on just feet! Did you know Toad actually was a Goomba?! Who would have imagined.. they look so differently in 8 bit. 

Goomba.. the Jojo’s Version

It’s kind of like looking at a five year old (or younger) make a drawing for Santa than having you explain what they drew. See this is Mario.. and this is a goomba.. and this is King Koopa and if I give this to santa he knows I’ll want the Mario game. They are about equally recognisable and it totally mesmerised me. It’s like making a Final Fantasy VII movie and recast Red as a Kitsune girl.. and giving Cloud a dagger instead of a sword.. but it can grow to any size he wants. Materia would be food that the evil demon Sephiroth would need to eat to summon an ancient demon to earth trapped in a meteor. It would not be right but it would be fascinating in it’s own right! Still that would be only fun once, at least it should yet this movie I’ve seen a handful of times now and I still find it fun. While they do deviate so massively from the source material, unlike Dragonball Evolution , everything so packed full of character that it kinda works. Yamcha in the western movie for example is just a chad with a drill, while Toad here.. is a once rebellious man that sang songs putting Koopa in a bad daylight, that got devolved into a music loving good guy who just likes to smile and make people happy. Who even plays his harmonica when he is set on fire.

I’m sorry Mario! The faithful costume designer is in another castle!

Koopa has now become a weird sort of germaphobe that loves Pizza and is fascinated yet disgusted by the fact that humans evolved from Monkies. He in fact is so obsessed with evolution that he weaponised it and used it as a key to his rule. He stems from the king of dinosaurs so he feels like he is destined to rule as well.  Nothing of it is like the Koopa/Bowser we know but yet again .. there is still a lot of character there. Even Big Bertha .. who is just a fish that eats a lot , in the games here has been given a character. I’m pretty sure that Miyamoto never imagined her as some Sassy Big Boned Sugar Mamma with a though exterior but big heart.. but thats in this movie.  All characters do at least get loads and loads of flavor. It’s a bunch of cliches mashed up yet at the same time it’s something we do not get nowadays anymore.  Characters Alla 2020 veer away from stereo types, they all get some depth and some realism, yet at the same time that also means they become much more interchangeable. Here every character is so extreme and tacky that said personality on another character in the movie would barely work. It doesn’t become a better movie for it but it certainly becomes more watchable for it and re-watchable even. There are so many visual gags , tiny nods and extreme oddities in the world building that even on my fifth romp I notice new things. Like how Bullet Bill’s are now Pneumatic cartridges for power boots?!

Apparently dinosaurs evolved from fish as well..or fish evolved in dinosaur city I mean.. uhnm… this thing is a mess!

Not just from a writing perspective the movie has its flaws, the acting is also odd. The direction is odd. For example at one point King Koopa goes to the real world with his army of Goombas.. an army of 2,5 meter monsters with guns and flamethrowers.. that actually throw fireballs. Yet he also has devolution guns on his person which he  tries to use on Mario to turn him into a monkey. He then hits the construction Mogul instead. You’d think people would be terrified that a guy with a monster army just killed a man and changed him into a monkey .. but no everyone laughs. Not only the humans whose world is being invaded by their very own eyes but the bad guys as well. They stop their actions to laugh at the monkey and the camera painfully lingers on this.. like it’s some sort of briljant gag. Why ? How?

Holy Macaroni! I wore the wrong colour!

Somewhere in the middle of the movie we suddenly see Dennis Hopper/ Koopa order a Pizza.. out of the blue.. there is a chase scene going on.. big set up.. and we get a 30 second scene where he calls for pizza. It was never established he is hungry or that he thinks so lowly of his opponents that he can coast it.. no at their most dangerous.. he just orders a pizza. The way it is acted is almost as if a stand up comedian is making a joke.. with the punchline being weird pizza toppings people would add in a dinosaur world. It isn’t funny yet there is room in the delivery as if they are waiting for people to clap and laugh at the joke.. it’s so weird.

The comedic duo Iggy and Spike! I loved them together in the games!
Oh! Somehow their expressions matched up quite nice!

Then there is a scene where Luigi played by John Leguizamo , while desperately trying to save the princess, decides to prank Mario, saying he can make some sort of impossible jump but actually he is connected to some sort of hook and crane, which at first seem impossible. Egging Mario on to jump as well.. which leads to Mario jumping to his death.  Only when Mario begins jumping he yells.. no no  it’s a joke but of course by then it’s to late. Why would anyone do that?! I mean of course it’s a joke about the brothers amazing jumping ability but they use power boots for that already. so even from a homage stand this made zero sense. He tricks his brother to jump to his death with a smile on his face and Immediately is snapped out of his trauma of seeing his brother fall to his death when Princess Daisy’s father becomes a membrane trampoline that saves Mario… grabbing him in split seconds.  These characters are so incohesive and the acting also reflects that.. this is a sloppily written and acted out garbled mass of events to enter some comedy or drama at random times.

Is it weird that I really wanted to see Bob Hoskins ride Yoshi?!

Yet in a way that is also the saving grace of this movie. You never know exactly what’s going to happen because it’s all so stupid and random. A bomb-omb suddenly obtains the power to break physics, characters suddenly fade out of existence, rules of the world do not always work the same. Throughout the entire movie.. even four or five views in I still have that “what the f is going on” vibe going..Which would be a good tagline for this movie?! Super Mario Bros. The movie  “What the F is going on?” Like a caleidoscope it feels random but it keeps me fascinated even if there isn’t that much to it. Empty and broken yet at the same time colourful and trippy.

10/10 Best Actor in the Movie!

Dennis Hopper doesn’t portray a great Koopa, but he certainly plays a memorable one! Monkey! Is still one of the things he will be remembered for. Bob Hoskins is an odd Mario ..who lacks that Santa Claus vibe, the original Mario has.. and replaces it with Brooklyn brash. Yet when we hear the name we do remember him as Mario still. John Leguizamo , mostly in his early years like this, main trait in acting is… “well I guess they chose him for this part.. how odd” and i’ll probably forget he was Luigi again..but that means I can watch this movie in the future and be right “that’s right.. that guy was Luigi! Such an odd choice” From costume design to actors, to story to screen structure and even in music.. this flick makes almost zero logical choices considering the material.. For example let me put the music choice that is present through most of the movie! The music theme they choose to represent the Mario Bros and use trough most chase scenes! Which is most of the movie… you expect some iconic movie.. you get :

We get one of the weirdest , most 90’s action comedies based on a great IP that is to this day still a mystery to me. Not a single element is great.. most of them aren’t even good.  Yet when combined they do give me a great time when watching it. It might not be for the right reasons it might not last long but a movie length of giggling face palms and me ooh’s and huh’s are definitely not the worst way I spend my time. In that way I do think this movie is kind of underrated. Yes if you break it down this movie offers next to nothing.. only a good time if you can turn of your brain for a bit .. or just let it race….. and isn’t that the most important thing a movie should offer us?! A fun runtime?! Would I watch it again?! Give me a few months  and I would say Let’sa Go!

Score:

Next week we will probably end up with a more faithful movie adaptation! A simple Zombie Shooting Game, should be easy enough to adapt to the big screen right?! Join me next week as I watch Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead! That seems like an easy job to make cool right?!