Big Screen Cut Scenes

The purpose of this site is to document, in a hopefully humorous fashion, all the live-action movies based on video games. My plan is to review video game movies in chronological order, starting with the oldest and moving forward to the present.

Just to be clear on what kinds of movies qualify:

- The movie must be live-action. I know there have been tons of animated movies based on video games, but I don’t think I’m up to finding every one based on a Japanese fighting game, nor up to watching all those damned Pokemon movies.

- The movie must be feature-length, and preferably played theatrically. Obviously, there will be some straight-to-video movies covered as well, especially if they are sequels to theatrical features.

- The movie must be based on a electronic game of some sort. Arcade, console, PC, phone, doesn’t matter. If it beeps, it counts.

Administration

 

I’m going to start off with a movie that is a bit of an exception to the rules of the blog. Sweet Home is probably not, strictly speaking, based on the video game of the same name. However, the movie and the game came out the same day, their promotion was heavily tied together, and I can’t help but think that the movie was made with at least an eye on the tie-in game. There is a certain amount of “get the item to get to the next room” going on, and this is the only haunted house movie I can think of that ends with a multi-stage boss battle.

Written and directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, who is now internationally known for cult horror films like Cure (1997), Sweet Home is more of a parody of Poltergeist (1982) than a straight haunted house movie, and the tone veers wildly from humorus to very mean-spirited.

Juzo Itami (a well known director in own right) plays Kazuo, a TV producer who wants to film a documentary in the remote Mamiya Mansion. The mansion was the home of a famous painter of the same name, but when he and his wife died the mansion was left abandoned and rumored to be cursed. Kazuo has also heard that Mamiya’s last painting may be in the house, unknown to the rest of the world. After some negotiating with the local officials, who figure they’ll get a shot of publicity whether or not the TV crew lives or dies, Kazuo gets permission to make the show.

Kazuo sets up in the mansion with the rest of his crew. The crew includes Asuka, the host of the show and apparently an expert at art restoration, or at least using a vacuum cleaner; Akiko (Nobuko Miyamoto), another producer; Taguchi, the cameraman who has a crush on Asuka; and Kazuo’s high schooler daughter, Emi. They aren’t there long before strange things start happening. After they find the lost painting, other paintings mysteriously appear on walls that had none. Asuka is possessed by Lady Mamiya and digs up a baby’s corpse in the nearby forest, though she has no memory of doing so. An elderly man from the nearest town shows up, and warns everyone that Lady Mamiya was driven mad by her son’s death. As the TV crew is killed off one by one, the survivors have to decode the meaning of the paintings before the Mamiya curse gets them all.

If anything keeps Sweet Home from being a satisfying viewing experience it’s probably the inconsistent tone. Early on the movie is one step from out and out slapstick, but later a character gets melted in half and drags his oozing torso across the floor. Nasty stuff. Also, dead babies should probably not be a major plot point in any comedy. After a surprisingly intense climax, the movie reverses course with one character’s unlikely (and humorous) survival. Finally, Sweet Home goes the extra yard to be complete rip-off of Poltergeist by having the mansion collapse after the end credits roll.

From some of the trailers, you can tell it’s a big deal that Dick Smith did the special effects in Sweet Home. Smith is mostly known for doing the special make-up for The Godfather (1972) and The Exorcist (1973), and here I assume he was mostly involved in the creation of the large Lady Mamiya ghost that appears at the end of the movie.

Sweet Home the video game is today mostly the answer to the trivia question “What was the first survival horror game?” It’s a top-down RPG, but with an emphasis on puzzle solving rather than combat. Its importance is mostly that it is a clear influence on the original Resident Evil game.

 

Sweet Home (The Video Game)

 

Sweet Home (The Movie)

Horror, RPGs

 

Remember 1993? That was the year that Hollywood officially ran out of ideas. Every book had been adapted, every movie remade, every original idea tried. What was left? The situation was so bad that some studios considered letting Steven Segal direct his own movie. Then some executive realized: Video games are popular! Let’s make a movie based on a video game!

After sending an intern down to Toy ‘R’ Us to do some research, it was determined that Super Mario Bros. was the most popular game franchise, and therefore the one most deserving of a quality Hollywood treatment. A script was written, actors cast, sets built, and the movie was released. Now it was just up to the grateful masses of filmgoers to go see the movie, and validate the executive’s judgement.

Steven Segal would direct On Deadly Ground in 1994.

Playing a Super Mario Bros. game can feel like having a particularly interactive acid trip, but the Super Mario Bros. movie feels like having an acid trip while somebody tries to explain to you what the game is about, possibly in a language you don’t entirely comprehend.

An animated prologue explains that when an meteorite strike ended the age of the dinosaurs an alternate universe was somehow split off where the dinosaurs continued to live and evolved a civilization. Then we see a child abandoned on some church steps in New York City in the 1960s, and finally we get to modern day and we meet our heroes, the Mario brothers. They’re Mario Mario (Bob Hoskins) and Luigi Mario (Jon Leguizamo), low-rent plumbers. They meet an archeology student named Daisy (Samantha Mathis), who happens to be the foundling from the prologue. She’s kidnapperd by a couple of goons from the dino dimension, and Mario and Luigi manage to follow using an amulet Daisy had on her.

The  dino dimension looks like a set remaindered from Blade Runner, and most of the dinosaurs, somewhat strangely, look perfectly human, but with bad hair and worse fashion sense. The city our heroes find themselves in is ruled by King Koopa, played by Dennis Hopper. Koopa amuses himself by evolving and devolving the residents of the city. By devolving some people he’s created the Goombas, big hulking goons with tiny dinosaur heads. Koopa also devolved the previous King of the city, turning him into the ubiquitous, rubbery fungus that infests the city. (This piece of back story only seems to exist to make a claim on the dino dimension being the Mushroom Kingdom from the games.) Finally, Koopa needs the amulet the Mario brothers have to “collapse the dimensions” and bring the dinosaurs to the human world.

Why the hell was Dennis Hopper in this movie, anyways? Bob Hoskins, at least, can be excused because biological destiny probably made him take the part. But Hopper? There may have been a time around 1968 when he was telling everyone he was “King Koopa,” but after 25 years it should have worn off.

You have to really squint to see how most of the movie relates to the video game. For the most part the movie is a standard late 1980s/early 1990s fantasy-action movie, with lots of frenetic chases, things exploding, and, of course. a constant stream of allegedly funny wisecracks from Leguizamo. There may be characters named Toad and Yoshi, but the movie has nothing to do with either the plot of games or the whimsical tone that makes them so much fun. Instead Super Mario Bros. is kind of dark and mean-spirited, and not very fun at all. The only real reference to movie’s video game roots happens in a scene after the end credits, and Nintendo isn’t mentioned at all in the opening credits.

Super Mario Bros. did inspire what I thought was one of the funniest jokes I’ve ever read in a movie review, one I aspire to someday be as funny as. It was in, I think, Sight & Sound magazine. The line was (and I’m paraphrasing because they don’t have online archives), “According to the press materials they gave me, over two million square meters of plywood went into making Super Mario Bros. And that was just the acting.”

Super Mario Bros. (The Video Games)

(Super Mario World)

 

(Super Mario Bros. 3)

 

Super Mario Bros. (The Movie)

Platformer, Science Fiction

 

In the wake of Super Mario Bros. there was a constant stream of movies based on video games, probably not because Super Mario Bros. was a success, but because no Hollywood producer wanted to risk missing out on the next big thing, and video games were becoming a very big thing. Hence Double Dragon, another largely generic 1990s action movie based on a then popular video game property.

But maybe not that popular. It’s worth noting that by the time the movie came out Double Dragon was all but dead as a continuing video game franchise. There have been many Double Dragon games on various home systems since, but all of them are remakes of earlier games. To the degree that the movie is based on what little plot the games had, it’s mostly based on the SNES game Super Double Dragon.

Set in a post-apocalyptic future where Los Angeles was destroyed by a quake in 2007 and redubbed “New Angeles,” the main characters of the movie are Jimmy Lee (Mark Dacascos) and Billy Lee (Scott Wolf). The Lee brothers are orphans who were raised by Satori (Julia Nickson-Soul), who trained them in martial arts. Now the Lees spend their time entering underground martial arts tournaments and dodging the street gangs that rule the partially recovered city after dark.

The real power in the city, though, is Shuko (Robert Patrick), the richest man in the world. Shuko has acquired one half of a mystical medallion called the Double Dragon, which allows him to turn into a shadow creature. He wants the other half of the medallion, which it turns out is in the possession of Satori. Shuko sics the gang leader Bo Abobo (Nils Allen Stewart) on Satori and the Lees.

After some chases and a dustup with Shuko, Satori is killed and the Lee brothers are on their own, on the run, and trying to keep Shuko from getting the amulet. The only friendly people they can think of is the benign street gang called the Power Company, led by Marian (Alyssa Milano). The only way that the Lees and Marian can think of to effectively fight back against Shuko is to steal the other half of the amulet (even though they don’t really know what it does), and that means sneaking into Shuko’s heavily guarded office building.

Much like Super Mario Bros., Double Dragon is so different from the video game it’s supposed to be based on that you have to wonder if the movie was an based on an unrelated script with some Double Dragon gloss added on top. The games were set in present day New York, with some outlandish enemy characters thrown in. Double Dragon the movie makes a big deal of its post-earthquake setting, with Hollywood being partial submerged, a flourishing business in selling jacks to hold up damaged buildings, and the police being afraid to come out at night because the gangs have taken over. Most of the action scenes have a random, “what the hell” quality to them, especially when there’s jet ski chase for no reason, or when Shuko mutates Adobo into a bloated monster. There’s also an element of satire, with news broadcasts from Channel 102 (which at the time probably seemed like a ludicrously high number) featuring George Hamilton and Vanna White as anchors. Also look for Andy Dick as the weatherman.

When it comes to the main characters, it’s tough not to notice that Marc Dacascos is doing most of the heavy lifting in the marital arts department, even though the Lee brothers are supposed to be similarly skilled competitors. Today Dacascos is known for being a minor martial arts star who plays a staggering number of different ethnicities: The native American in Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), a Jungar in Nomad (2006), Chairman Kaga’s “nephew” on the American version of Iron Chef, etc. Scott Wolf, as the brother who needs to be stunt-doubled more often, is probably best known for being a lead on Party of Five. Alyssa Milano plays Marian, a damsel in distress in the game, but in the movie a tomboyish gang leader. For most of the movie she wears a green tank top, a pair of the shortest jean shorts imaginable and what look like painter’s overalls converted into assless chaps. This outfit is probably someone’s fetish, but I don’t want to know whose.

There are small bright spots in Double Dragon. Against all odds, there are a couple of good lines of dialogue. For the record, I reproduce them below.

The first is from Hawk, Abobo’s lieutenant:

We know these guys. The Lee brothers, Ug and Home.

 

And later, when Shuko is chastising Abobo for failing to retrieve the amulet:

But I consider you like a son, Abobo. And like a son, I can always have another.

 

Double Dragon (The Video Game)

(Super Double Dragon)

 

Double Dragon (The Movie)

Beat 'Em Up, Science Fiction