Podcast: Arcade (1993)

Your Stupid Minds returns to the deep well of Albert Pyun with another cyberspace type 90s movie about an evil VR arcade machine that turns you insane and then kidnaps you and is also Freddy Krueger. It's 1993's Arcade, starring Megan Ward, Peter Billingsley, John de Lancie, and Seth Green as "Stilts."

After her mother's suicide, Alex (Ward) is struggling in school. During a visit to their favorite foggy subterranean arcade "Dante's Inferno," Alex and her friends check out a new VR machine called, uninspiringly, "Arcade," that makes you feel like you're INSIDE THE GAME despite it basically being a joystick and stationary Virtual Boy headset. After the amazing demonstration, Alex's boyfriend Greg (Bryan Dattilo) disappears, and Alex must find him.

It turns out Greg was sucked INTO THE GAME and also the game is evil. She recruits Nick (Billingsley) to help. A visit to the video game studio and a talk with the game's creator provides surprisingly little information. He's just as confounded by his creation as everyone else. He doesn't know how it works or why it's evil, but they've got a Q4 financial report to release so it's gotta be released come hell or high water.

Alex and Nick decide the only way to get their friends back (other friends are also sucked into the game both on and off camera) is to beat the game. Can they do it? And how convincing will these early 90s computer graphics be?

This movie sat on the shelf for a few years. After the trailer's release, Disney sent them a cease and desist due to the game's not insignificant resemblance to Tron. They spent a few years replacing light cycles with skateboards before it unceremoniously sat on a different shelf: that of your local mom and pop video store.

Podcast: Borderlands (2024)

Sure, we could have reviewed Eli Roth's Thanksgiving the day after Thanksgiving. But we didn’t. We did another Eli Roth movie instead. It's 2024's Borderlands!

Lilith (Cate Blanchett) is a bounty hunter hired to retrieve the daughter of a definitely not evil billionaire named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). It turns out he's evil and his daughter is a clone he made from the DNA of some dead alien civilization. He wants to use her as a key to unlock a vault full of floating cubes that he can use to make a lot of money. Evilly, I assume.

Lillith teams up with a team of misfits, including soldier Roland (Kevin Hart, who is, guess what, short), archaeologist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), bunny clone girl Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), hockey masked psycho Krieg (Florian Munteanu), and annoying robot Claptrap (Jack Black). They traverse through various video game levels, ripping off better movies and going pew pew pew to a bunch of bad guys.

Can they unlock the vault? Is Tiny Tina really the chosen one? And, most importantly, who cares? Find out in our latest episode!

Podcast: Assassin's Creed (2016)

It’s officially the Christmas season! Here we come a-wassailing! Here comes Santa Claus right down Santa Claus Lane! Jack Frost nipping at your nose. We’re reviewing Assassin’s Creed (2016).

Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender) is a convicted murderer who is being put to death in the Texas desert prison outpost in Huntsville. As he’s executed, he wakes up in a strange facility in Madrid. Sofia (Marion Cotillard) explains that they need to hook him up to a giant GLaDOS-like mechanical arm so he can tap into the genetic memory of his ancestors, steal the Apple of Eden, which contains the genetic code for free will, and this will somehow solve violence. Makes sense to me!

Cal is apparently a descendant of a line of assassins who have been fighting the Knights Templar for generations, mostly for this Apple but for other stuff too. He meets other assassin descendants, who basically have nothing else to do but hang around this facility for a while. There is also the icy Rikkin (Jeremy Irons), the Gendo of this organization and father of Sofia, as well as Cal’s father (Brendan Gleeson) who he thinks killed his mother.

Can Cal, under his cool ancestor assassin name of Aguilar, recover the Apple and save the world or something? Or is this creepy shadowy organization using sense memory VR to force you to do cool flips in 15th century Spain not all it’s cracked up to be? You’ll have to listen to find out! Also, if you didn’t know, this is based on a video game.

Podcast: Heavenly Sword (2014)

 

Direct download.

Blockade Entertainment went to Sony with a dream. “What if,” they said, “we took one of your lesser PS3 exclusive games and used old existing game assets to make a big budget movie?” Sony said “let’s do it!” and fished around in their couch cushions for enough money to slap this together on the cheap using a third string Korean animation studio. What we have is 2014’s Heavenly Sword, based on the 2007 game that no one remembered even at the time.

Nariko (Anna Torv) is an orphan part of a nomadic group of warriors tasked with protecting the “Heavenly Sword,” a powerful sword that is magic or something. But evil King Bohan (Alfred Molina, NOT Andy Serkis as IMDb claims. Serkis voiced him in the game) has made a pact with the Raven God and wants the sword to do evil things.

Bohan attacks the group’s base (I thought they were nomadic?) and Nariko is tasked with finding her long lost brother Loki (Thomas Jane), who is the chosen one and can use Heavenly Sword powers to defeat Bohan. Nariko goes on her quest with Kai (Ashleigh Ball) a violent little girl who turns out to be her sister. Also it turns out her dad is the group’s leader Master Shen (Nolan North) who hates girls.

Podcast: Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021)

Direct download.

Your Stupid Minds features another underperforming pandemic film with this hard reboot of the Resident Evil franchise, removing Alice and the laser puzzles of the Paul W.S. Anderson films and sticking to something closer to the video game remakes. It’s 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City!

Claire (Kaya Scodelario) is a former orphan from Raccoon City who returns to visit her brother Chris (Robbie Amell) and tell him something’s not right with the town. She is almost immediately proven right when a warning siren goes off and the T-Virus zombified townsfolk start attacking everyone. Can Claire, Chris, and the rest of the S.T.A.R.S. police squad escape the city before it explodes? Can they cram as much stuff from the games as they can? Will Jill Sandwich make an appearance? You’ll have to watch to find out!

To help you play along to the arbitrary rating, here's the GamePro Game Rating System:

Podcast: Alone in the Dark (2005)

Direct download.



Bad movie expert Nathan Smith returns to the podcast with another Uwe Boll masterpiece, his sophomore entry into his mid 2000s video game trilogy (I know he’s done more but House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, and BloodRayne are the gold standard) Alone in the Dark!

For reason reason I could only find the full trailer in German.

Based on a computer game no one’s played, this one features Christian Slater as a globetrotting paranormal investigator, Tara Reid as an archeologist and expert in fictional ancient languages, and Stephen Dorff as the head of Bureau 713, a secret government organization that seeks to protect the world from paranormal dangers. An evil old man tries to unlock monsters from the legend of the ancient Mayan-like civilization the Abkani, and it’s up to the team to stop him. Or open it before him? It isn’t entirely clear.

Some Notes:

• A great Something Awful piece from the initial screenwriter of Alone in the Dark who quit the project.
• Even though Christian Slater says his name in the movie, the security guard is only known as "Guard" in the credits.
• Who's a bigger star? Jürgen Prochnow (Das Boot, Dune) or Clint Howard (Apollo 13, Santa with Muscles)?
• Ho-Sung Pak, who plays Liu Kang in the video games for Mortal Kombat and Mortal Kombat II, is also Agent Marko in Alone in the Dark. Marko dies when he falls into a pit of spikes.
• The full chorus lyrics for the hit song "I Wish I Had a Hoagie" by Nightlunch:
• I wish I had a hoagie
  For one moment of lunch
  I wish I had your hoagie
  Your pastrami on a bun
  I'm in love with my crust
  Burning toast it is a must
  I wish I had your hoagie tonight

Podcast: House of the Dead (2003)

Stock up on quarters and let's head down to the arcade. It's Uwe Boll's first foray into the video game movie with 2003's House of the Dead! Special guest Nathan Smith joins us as we dig in to one of our favorite bad movies.

A group of teenage 20-something 30 year olds bribe a cartoonish fisherman (Clint Howard) and a grizzled U-Boat captain (Jürgen Prochnow) into taking them to an island in the Pacific Northwest for the most awesomest daytime rave coastal British Columbia has ever seen! They're attacked by zombies and an insane Spanish scientist who wants to be immortal by living forever.


Some notes:

• This is arguably the best of the Uwe Boll horrible video game movies.
• At 35:25 Nick makes an EGREGIOUS Tolkien error and never hears the end of it.
• Followed up immediately at 36:02 where we discuss a troubling confrontation with a comic book vendor and our piss-poor knowledge of obscure comic book characters.
• Not included: the gritty behind the scenes documentary exposing the seedy underbelly of  corporate sponsored raves

Grantland Article Covers Super Mario Bros. Film

Today on Grantland, Karina Longworth has written an amazing piece on what exactly went wrong on the infamous flop "Super Mario Bros.," a movie we've reviewed here during our video game month all the way back in January 2011 (feels like yesterday). For those who haven't seen the movie, it's a bizarrely uneven mash-up of Blade Runner dystopian sci-fi, references to several video-games, almost all of them completely re-envisioned, and jokes about tacky Italian women. Amazingly, the Italian jokes still feel pretty current. The article talks about what went wrong, how a character with huge brand recognition failed so spectacularly at the box office. I theorized about its failings a bit in my review, but I think what it comes down to is: people like Mario games because they are fun. People did not like the Mario Bros. movie because it is the direct opposite of fun. It falls into the trap of other prequels in that it spends way too much time explaining how the things you know came to be, and almost no time being a fun, compelling story. It even teases us with an ending that seems to promise a fun, action-heavy sequel.

Critics correctly identified the movie as "dumb," but thought it would still be a hit because kids must like dumb stuff, right? Except that the bleak set design, posters, and everything else seemed to be explicitly trying to distance the movie from the source material. In a hilarious disconnect between children who liked Mario and adults talking about Mario, NYT critic Michael Specter wrote:


"The city, a future-shock melding of Times Square and downtown, is called Dinohattan. And the despot, the evil King Koopa, has to find a way to merge the rest of New York -- which was sheared off from Dinohattan in a meteor blast 65 million years earlier -- with his desiccated, reptilian empire.

Does any of this sound familiar?

If so, you are probably a 12-year-old boy, or one of the many Super Mario maniacs who sometimes act like 12-year-olds boys."

For the record, no, that doesn't sound familiar. Except for "King Koopa," none of that sounded like anything anyone had ever associated with "Mario." Honestly I think I would have liked Mario Bros. the movie a lot more if it were just a dumb, silly little movie about heroic plumbers, instead of some sort of bleak sci-fi prequel.

Podcast: Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009)

Kristin Kreuk and Chris Klein star in this kind of sequel to 1994's Street Fighter. When Chun-Li is given a mysterious scroll, she engages in her own hero's journey to find out if her father is still alive. Or is it defeat Bison? Or clean up the slums of Bangkok? Meanwhile Chris Klein squints his way through his role as an Interpol agent hot on her heels. Or Bison's. Also everyone knows magic.



Also here is the Turtles in Time scroll we referenced.

Also to note:

• Fergie is in Planet Terror
• Moon Bloodgood is 5'10", not 5'8"
• Chris Klein's performance is crazy

Enjoy the podcast!

Video Game Movies: A Post-mortem

With YSM's first themed month in the bag, Dobson and I decided to offer our thoughts on video game movies as a whole. See us discuss, among other things, fanboys' dismissal of all things different, critics' dismissal of that which they don't understand, and Pixar's hit film Cars!

Max Payne (2008)

In 2001, Remedy made its mark on the gaming world with Max Payne, a gritty, noir-style third person shooter and detective story. Its gimmick was the seemingly groundbreaking "bullet time," cribbed heavily from The Matrix and John Woo films. Though a fun distraction, its central gameplay feature also prevented it from attaining any sort of broader appeal (can't really manipulate time in a multiplayer match). With a grand total of 5.5 hours of playtime between the two games, Max Payne gained some popularity among noir neophytes and amateur vigilantes whose fanboy aspirations quickly moved on to the Halo and Chris Nolan Batman franchises.

Cut to 2008 as director John Moore releases the game's film adaptation. Rather than appease fanboys with a direct retelling of an already overwhelmingly cinematic video game, Moore takes its mishmash of influences and adds a few dozen more for good measure. What results is a capably executed but dully trite visual cacophony of cinematographic excess that left fans of the franchise fuming. Why were they so upset, you ask? Because some things were slightly different.

Forget it, Max. It's Vikingtown.

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

One of the first, biggest, most spectacular failures in the history of video game movies, Super Mario Bros. brought the world's favorite red overalled Italian stereotype to the big screen. With a budget of nearly 50 million dollars, Mario Bros. entered the summer of 1993 with big expectations, and left with less than 50 cents on the dollar at the domestic box office. The film has earned derision from fans, critics, and everyone else since its release, yet retains that cult following that absolutely anything made when you were six years old holds for adults. It also remains one of the best examples of the difficulties translating a video game story into a feature film.

"What did you evolve from?" -Mario Mario

Street Fighter (1994)

The war-torn and completely real country of Shadaloo is beset with violence and despair from an egomaniacal despot set at world domination. No, you did not accidentally turn on BBC World Service (thank God!), this is the opening to 1994's tale of epic international struggle Street Fighter, a film that, despite its title, contains a surprising lack of street fighting. The MPAA rated it PG-13 for "Non-stop martial arts and action violence," which is such a glowing review it should have been included in the press materials.

BloodRayne (2005)

For those who somehow aren't familiar with him, Uwe Boll makes bad movies about video games. By 2005, Boll had already made Alone in the Dark and House of the Dead, two horrendously bad films based on incredibly irrelevant video game franchises.

So it should come as no surprise that BloodRayne, a video-game adaptation about a half-vampire in leather who fights Nazis, is significantly worse than it sounds. Boll changed the setting to 17th Century Romania so he could shoot scenes in Dracula's castle, thus annoying both fans of the franchise and fans of Nazis getting messed up by super-powered beings. Then he assembled what must have seemed an A-List cast to Boll: the Terminatrix, Bud from Kill Bill, the angry chick from The Fast and the Furious... how could he go wrong?!

Sadly, nothing remotely this cool happens in the movie.

YSM in 2011

What's in store for Your Stupid Minds in 2011? Another year of sporadic posts, rants, and autistic commenters, right?

 

Hold on to your pants Sally, cuz it's going to be a wild year! We're talking MORE posts, MORE reviews, MORE rants, MORE candy, MORE bouncy castles, MORE monster trucks, MORE MORE MORE!

Every month will follow a certain theme in tune with the bad movie traditions we perpetuate here at YSM. Each Monday will feature a new review from me or Dobson pertaining to the subject at hand. We kick it off with a genre so synonymous with badness, there literally has never been a good movie made within it.

Come back on January 10th when Dobson will review one of Uwe Boll's great video game magnum opi. Check out YSM every Monday in 2011 for a brand new review!