Wait, they made another Street Fighter movie?  Why?

Wow…here’s a movie I thought I’d never see.  Everyone remembers that the first Street Fighter movie was a gigantic bomb, right?  So why is Hollywood bothering to try again?  And why cast a block of wood like Kristin Kreuk–a.k.a. Lana “My parents are dead!” Lang from Smallville–as your title character?  At least Jean-Claude Van Damme, who was the lead in the first Fighter flick, had actual martial arts experience.  That said, I gotta admit the camp factor on this movie is likely to be incredibly high, which means I’ll almost definitely check it out.  And hey look, its got Oscar-nominee Michael Clarke Duncan in the cast as the battling boxer Balrog!   I wonder if he’ll bring a more realistic edge to this misunderstood character than his predecessor in the part, Grand L. Bush, star of such classics as Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence and Secret Agent 00 Soul.

Vintage Trailer of the Week
Keeping with the video game theme, travel back in time with me to May 1993.  Bill Clinton had been in office for four months, Sylvester Stallone was staging yet another big-screen comeback with Cliffhanger and A Different World was approaching its series finale.  But that month’s premiere event was the theatrical debut of a big-screen live-action movie starring those lovable Nintendo pitchmen Mario and Luigi.  Of course, the duo’s first movie also turned out to be their last and for good reason–it’s freakin’ awful.  But this trailer remains a thing of early ’90s beauty.  I can’t decide what I like more: the extensive use of C+C Music Factory’s “I’ve Got the Power” track, the sight of a super-skinny John Leguizamo running around in green overalls or the hilarious voice-over narration that delivers such bon mots as: “They’re brothers…they’re plumbers…they’re on the trail of a kindnapped princess and a mysterious meteorite!”  This ain’t no game indeed.

Oh and just for the heck of it, here’s the trailer for 1994′s Street Fighter movie.  Take note of JCVD’s coked-out line readings–how much blow was he snorting between camera setups anyway?