There’s something about JCVD being a sort-of leader of U.N.-like peacekeepers and Bison (Julia) being a drug lord akin to Pablo Escobar who is spending his ill-gotten gains on supersoldier R&D for some reason rather than wine, women and song.
What about the film? Well, I’m not going to lie, it’s patchy at best, nonsensical at worst, primarily as the filmmakers tried to add a grounded geopolitical story to the ass-kicking. Honda, and, of course, Ryu and Ken and all their homoerotic frisson disguised as competitiveness you totally didn’t spot as a child. Toplining the bill, you had peak Jean-Claude Van Damme coming off the back of a hat trick of classics including Universal Soldier, the mullet-infused snake-punching Hard Target and future-mullet Timecop (perhaps the greatest run of action films by a Belgian ever), the always excellent Raul Julia in his final film role quite clearly picking up a paycheck and chewing the scenery, the dependably villainous Wes Studi from The Last of the Mohicans (Why does Magua hate the Grey Hair so much?) and crikey dingoes Kylie bloody Minogue!īeyond the stars, you had the ever-so-slightly racist Street Fighter characters that the world had fallen in love with including Zangief, Vega, E. Yes, Capcom’s iconic video game was finally on the big screen and on paper it had all the ingredients to be a monster hit. However, in a sea of mediocrity, there was an island of mad brilliance in the shape of Street Fighter: The Movie. With box-office hits like the effete Four Weddings and a Funeral, the campy deliciousness of Interview With a Vampire and the head-scratching travesty that was The Mask, 1994 will not be remembered as a banner year for Hollywood. The fight scenes are hysterical, the made-up island country is absurd and, yes, the ninjas do surf on handmade surfboards to fight the enemy … Leslie Nielsen. Sega even sold a version of this game in real life.
Lucky for them, the younger brother, a seer, discovers he can control their ninja battles using a video game on his Sega Game Gear. Surf Ninjas is precisely as advertised: Two brothers, clad in tie dye and overalls like any self-respecting ‘ 90s teenagers, find out they’re actually princes of a made-up-for-the-movie Asian nation and they set out to save it with a young Kelly Hu and some pluck.
SCRATCHED A MILLION OFF MY CHECKLIST 3 YEARS AGO MOVIE
My typical pitch for this movie stops there, because no further motivation should be needed. Surf Ninjas features the Tone Loc and a 30-year-old Rob Schneider inexplicably playing a redheaded teenage sidekick in an ensemble that defies logic. This aptly titled 1993 action movie has earned a respectable 12 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but those stodgy reviews clearly don’t see what the 7-year-old version of me saw, leading a 30-year-old version of me to own two copies of this flick on DVD.
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