Scolding Review: Tin Man part 1

Asylum always knew Iron Man would be a hit.

5 years ago, I sat in a theater, with only a confused old lady and a smooching couple to watch Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li. It was a story I thought made sense to tell, with people I knew playing characters I liked. We all know how that turned out.

Well, for those who don't the story was a complete affront to the source material. How could these film makers take something we were all familiar with and twist it, dial it down until it becomes this unrecognizable gray mass of flavorless blandness? It was then and there that I felt for the first time stirrings about a movie strong enough to get me to write about it.

But is reinvention always bad?  With straight versions of Batman and the Marvel heroes we're getting today, sometimes I wonder if we'll ever get any weird takes on things anymore. You know, your German Impressionist Batman movie where it's like it's not even about Batman. Your Hulk where it's about how Hulk is angry with his parents and he does wuxia with trees. Your Vampirella where Vampirella is Talisa Soto.

If you're concerned about the lore of Vampirella being tarnished...your a perv in denial.

For example, with public Domain stories now there seems to be a rush to bring them to screen as  rubbery action movies. Snow White and the Huntsman,  Hanzel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, I Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, and more recently Maleficent. It's a trend that's yet to bring us anything but clunkers, seemingly.

But perhaps not all is bad. There is one version of a public domain story starring SF TLOC's own Bison, Neil McDonough and the sister of that lady from Bones and Alan Cumming that may yet prove that there is hope. It is the Sci Fi(before they put a bunch of "Ys" in there) original Minisiries Tin Man.

I know. Sci Fi original doesn't lend it a lot of credit. But let's give this a chance. It's also a perfect time to exploit all the Oz I've been reading.

The story starts with some ominous words in a dreamlike sequence. But it is a dream, one that is happening to our heroine  DG played by Zoe Deschannel. DG spents the whole first episode of the miniseries without anyone calling her anything else. You can fill the letterd yourself!

Why do I work in a retro cafe?

Death Gum is working  a waitress in Kansas, and as many heroes are wont to do in these stories, she wants more to life than what she has. Her parents try their hardest to be Aunt May and Uncle Em.

However, in another place, the evil, crosseyed queen of a land is demanding her men, The Not-SS, to find an Emerald, which she needs before a magical eclipse deadline. In desperation, she sends her men to find Doing Good, though a teletransporting  whirlwind. They arrive, and try to shoot our heroine and her family with their magic laser guns.   But Day Grunt gets thrown into the vortex, which takes her to the magical land of...Outer Zone.

Get it? O.Z.! OZ! Because it's silly, Oz is like, in Australia or something! Well, this movie's certainly about Oz, and they even needlessly credit Baum, but they still feel the need to rename just about all the characters. In some cases it makes sense because a lot of Oz's  characters  don't have names. In others, Well, you're trying to hard to sell us this action-fantasy Oz, Sci Fi.

I mean, I like big butts, but they have to look big relative to the size of the chick!

So Devil Goat gets trapped by Pygmies, who aren't quite sure if they are native americans or  africans, costume wise. They accuse her of being a spy, take her plocket of remember parents, and threaten to flay her. She takes offense to the locket part. However, hiding just above her is Alan Cumming, who they apparently felt they just had to tie to the roof.

Nightcrawler her is the Scarecrow of our Oz, an android called Glitch with severe glitches whose brain was stolen from his head. He certainly draws a few  chuckles. Together both of them escape as  the Notzi army prepares to destroy the NOt-Munchkins Kashyyyk trees.

Azky is not happy that her henchmen did not succeed, so she steals his soul and promotes his subordinate, a man called Zero, to a higher rank. They have some kind of hairy sasquatch man tied to a machine, which sucks his future predicting powers into the machine so it can be shown in her little tv. You know, in the original book the Wicked Witch only had one eye, but with that eye she could see  across the distance like a telescope with no depth perception. Here they honor that by making the witch a little crosseyed.

Azkhadelia's not impressed with the Xbox One price drop.

Danger Guts and Glitch come across a scene of some bad guys  putting the hurt on a family. She tries to help by running at them with a  broken branch, but then it turns out it was all a hologram, designed to  torture our newest party member,  Wyatt Cain, played by Neil McDonough aka Dunn Dunn Dugan from Captain America and Legend of Chun Li's Bison. This was before that, though. Can you believe I wanted to see this series just to know if he'd be good in that? Oh, man, was that ever silly.

They get the man out of his torture sarcophaguss, he shaves, and dresses up in his Walker Texas Ranger outfit, and goes into reluctant hero mode. He wants revenge on Zero, and he believes it is best for Glich(whome he outs as a convict, though maybe he means "fugitive?") But we all know he won't leave cutie pattotie Deep Game and lovably quirky Glitch behind.

"Hey, you, multiple attackers! Go away before I hit you with this twig I found!"

"Shit, it's Emily  Deschannel! Run!"

"Actually I'm her sister Zoey!"

"No rush, men."

They try and head towards Central City where the Mystic Man whom Cain used to protect might have their answers, and on the way run into an incapacitated Raw, our Cowardly Lion. He has been entombed by this horrible giant spiders that chase the group until they jump out into a river.

I feel this picture is a Meme that hasn't happened yet.

For the record, There is in the original book a giant spider, which the Lion Kills. Accuracy points, ahoy!

Even then the  bad guys come after them, so they run away and finally find Derp Glow's parents in a village of robots. The twist it, they're robots too! and they're not her parents! Due Gin is, apparently, an Outer Zone native, and her real parents took her to Earth to protect her until she was ready. She takes it all pretty well, overall. Yeah there's no huge breakdown at finding out her parents are robots, but I don't know if there's tone for that, here.

Perhaps  your encouragement levels are dangerously low, huma...I mean honey...

Our party rest up, and hitch a ride into Central City, which is like 1950s new york if they built a castle around it. There they run  into the Mystic Man, a showman hooked on Witch-Vapor drugs who is too high to even properly  refuse to help. Dino Gel eventually slaps him, and the mark robot man left in her awakens the man to reveal where they should go next.

Whoa...It's a giant Billboard of Anne Hathaway's face!

The party heads north, following Dedo Grande's dream-clues, until they get to a snowed in, locked up castle. There they find out the big twist: Her parents where Monarchs, she's a princess, and Azkhadelia is her sister! Her sister killed her as a kid, until her magic mom revived her.

Unlocky for all them, Azhkhadelia finds them using the flying monkey-bats she shoots out of her breasts. No, really.

Fly, my titties, fly!

After running through a couple of obvious green screen rooms, the Mobats(instory name foreal) have captured them all, except for Cain, who gets shot out of a window. This is how episode 1 ends.

I don't want to make my final determination, since this is merely the first episode, but I want to watch the next episode, no joke. The series, while sometimes it's effects are hockey, doesn't try to go too far into being "the serious action Wizard of Oz" one might believe.  It's like a quirky, stupid RPG about Oz. It seems pretty self aware of what it is, and I commend it for it. But is it all downhill from here? We'll see.

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Scolding Review: Lurking Evil

I had this once. In the Scruffydragon Forums mostly.

Being a reviewer is weird now that everybody's a critic. I don't really honestly expect my opinion will actually sway you against watching an affront to all that is good like King of Fighters. In a weird way we've  come around to admiting that this shit is a mite bit personal, and that maybe my advise about Terminator Salvation is pointless if you're, say, a Terminator completist or some kind of Moon Bloodgood whore.

So the question I'm posing is,  Are we giving points for effort? You see, my sister bought one of those DVD packs with a dozen lame movies nobody would have bought on their own, full of bad camera angles and killers who  never show up and those stupid endings where everyone gets killed. 

And among these, they put Lurking Evil.

1994? Holy shit, my first guess put this near the 70s!

Lurking Evil is not like these other films, and I suspect it benefits from being surrounded by these other terrible films. Who puts a low budget 90s movie among  0 budget  2k films? Oh, it's not great. However, it is a movie, which is more more than I can say of many of it's bundle-buddies.

The film starts of with two sisters  having a discussion on  what seems to be  some kind of dilapited castle. You see, one sister, which had a baby recently, really wanted the other one to carry a gun, while the second one was understandably worried about packing a piece near a baby.

For you see, these sisters, aren't in castle Fankenstein by accident, but are instead hiding from some kind of unseen horror.  Eventually said horror  peeks it's scraggly hands through a barricade and uses a wire hanger to  pull the baby's crib out to itself. Trust me, a wire hanger is not strong enough to drag an ANYTHING. My sister leaves her keys in her car a lot, I know what I'm talking about here.

 

Steve Tyler's family reunion.

The Pro-gun sister steps in for the save, but she gets bloodied and dragged away for her trouble. Hey, I know the topic of guns in America is a divisive subject, but nobody disagrees that the one advantage they have over knives is not having to get close enough to your enemies to get folded up like a clean towel.

We get  credits, and  as you'd expect, there aren't any names you know in there except HP Lovecraft. Apparently this movie's plot is based by one of Love-C's short stories. I wouldn't know if this is accurate or now, because I'm holding on  on reading Lovecraft's collected works . It's on my list, under all the Harry Potter movies, Game of Thrones seasons 1-2, and Angel Blade Punish.

 

I'd like to think the animators don't actually know how many penises a woman has.

The we meet our hero, a rough and tumble former criminal accused of a crime he didn't commit, just as he's coming out of of doing time.  He heads to his closest living relative, who runs the funeral home, and has hidden some drugs and money on   corpses  that our hero is to unearth and sell. But unknown to him, some thugs, a boss, a femme fatale, and a big guy, come immediately after he leaves and force the funeral home guy to tell them about the drugs.

Let's put this one in the refrigerator I stuff all my other drugs in.

We also meet the surviving sister from the prologue and some guy who looks like a young Emile Hamilton from Man of Steel. They talk about their plan to kill the ominous things by blowing up a church. Both of them, and a pregnant lady convene in the church, with a reverend who's not fully in favor of destroying  his working place.

I think the pregnant lady is bait, because honestly if she has any other use here we never see. If I were pregnant in a town full of monsters why...well it'd probably be too late if even the men are pregnant. But, you know, I'd take my monster baby and get the hell out.

So the drinking game is you're supposed to take a drink every time the existence of a monster is driving you mad.

They're mostly done wiring up the place to blow when our hero stumbles upon their cemetary, trying to find his drugs.  The sister kidnaps him at gun point.

But then the thugs show u, kidnap our hero AND the church crew. All that they want is to find their drug corpse. Femme Fatale does show an interest in pregnant lady, asking her who her "gone" baby-daddy was so she could kill him. However, she seems  have some emmity with the sister.

I just want to lick your baby's feet as he comes out. Is that so bad?

They finally drag hero out to dig his granma's corpse, which presumably has the drugs. But then not only does it not have the drugs, but the tomb caves in, and  our hero is carried by the monster, which is basically the Cryptkeeper from tales from the  crypt after staring too much at the sun.

Our hero somewhat or somehow escapes through an inner barricade built to keep out the monsters, upon which all of them see the monster, so we don't have to put up with any more minutes of people not believing in a monster the audience knows is real. The muscle exclains it might be  a bear. You know, one of those famous underground, lanky, furless bears we've all seen on TV documentaries.

However, instead of bailing out on the whole thing, our crime boss thinks it's a good idea to keep searching for the gold.  Muscle gets dragged out of  a tinted glass, which, while probably painful, is a lot classier than getting dragged out of a regular  old glass window.

"I'm not a bear, I'ma twink! Learn your gay sub-groups!"

The explosion crew and hero-man  turn the tide on their captors, and soon have them tied up to the walls. The reverend tries to bargain with the monster to kill him and not everyone else, and tells the monster he's gonna get a good parking space in heaven. The monster tells him God is Satan and rips out his heart.

Tim Burton's Les Miserables.

Sister goes out to get a gasoline truck, heroman 's distracted by Femme Fatel long enough for  crime boss to get out, and  Emil Hamilton gets killed, failing to keep Pregnant lady from getting dragged off underground.

Birthmark, or just a bad burn.

It all comes to a head underground, where the monsters are patiently waiting to eat pregnant lady's baby as soon as it plops out. There doesn't seem to be a reason, but I don't see a reason to take the peel off a grape either. They're the experts on baby eating, I'll defer to their judgement.

Crime boss and Hero fall in, and the monsters are all for eating them now. Except Hero's related to them somewhat, thorugh his birthmark, a steak shaped coloration between his shoulder and his arm. He manages to escape by, and you trust me that no one questions it, lighting an severed arm on fire, and he kind of brings along the pregnant lady and the sister. Crime boss sees his sought after drugs and money and gambles to try and stay here.

"I don't know how I knew it was going to work.

The  sister brings with a gas-truck, and blows the whole damn thing off. All the monsters are killed. The end,

So, you see, maybe in another context, I wouldn't give a crap about some 90s  low-budget horror film. Certainly not enough to write about it. But In the context of this one night, where the other horror movie I watched was 70% "People talking about dull stuff in broad daylight" , it is worth considering. Context is everything, and I can't recommend you watch a shitty movie, just so you can make this shitty movie look better.

So if you're interested in a movie that has action and monsters, and some semblance of a plot, Lurking Evil is kind of that, I guess?  But there's certainly better movies with better action and better monsters. So I guess it depends on how much you love monsters and action vs how much you don't love poor editing, obvious sets, bad acting and senseless story. Do whatever you want, I'll go watch Pacific Rim again.

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Scolding Review: The Jetsons Movie

But is there rap? BECAUSE THERE HAS TO BE!

Who doesn't like the Jetsons? Lots of people. Let's face it, the Jetsons will always play second fiddle to the Flinstones. Where the Stone age family gets a duration record that wouldn't be broken in decades, two live action movies, and recent talk of a new, Seth MacFarleyized reboot, The Jetsons has merely a string of TV movies, a  development-hell movie that would star Will Ferrel, if it existed, and the odd videogame here or there.  There will never be a time where they won't be the  Rival Schools to the Flinstones' Street fighter, the Antz to their  A Bug's Life, the Neo Geo Pocket to their Gameboy.

Haha, stupid! In the future nobody's gonna do sports!

So, I don't know what's not appealing enough for these characters that they can't even shill cereal and vitamins(even though the first is done fairly effective by a dazed looking bear and anemia, respectively.). I was fairly young when this was on reruns, and I don't remember much of it, except for it stubbornly not being about neither Robocop nor Ninja Turtles. With those 2 strikes against it, let's look at the Jetsons movie, and rediscover what the future looked like in the 50's when remembered by the early 90s.

 As our story begins, as in the series we get a good look, and sung fanfare at, most members of the family. There's George Jetson, who dislikes going to work in the morning but does so. His wife Jane who is  a woman. It doesn't bring in any other traits for her than that. His son Elroy, who is  a kid prodigy of sorts, and also has A GAME that he would be SAD if his FATHER didn't get to it(not to skip ahead, but every time a movie presents a kid who has a game and wants his father to watch, it is for the purposes of him not showing up and getting the lesson that he needs to be more involved in his children''s life). And finally Judy, who is  a teenager girl, in the most broad, stereotypical form. There's Astro, the dog, combining the least endearing traits of Dino and Scooby Doo. There's also the Robot maid, Rosie. Sigh. I have never met someone who has a maid, so I'm going to assume everyone in America Circa 1950's had one. Rosie raises the building itself to get the family out of the smog, a quick set up for the themes of the movie and a reminder that everything needs to be postmodernist.

Middle Name Chopped. Last name Liver.

So George leaves this cardboard cutouts and heads for work in his Float-Car. But a traffic jam occurs, in complete defiance to the concepts that would make a flying car practical. In order to resolve this common man trouble with some ingenue he inflates a cop-shaped baloon, and makes siren sounds to convince everyone to make way. However a real cop comes along, and reprimands him.

While he's at work, his boss, MR Spacely, is holding a chairholder's meeting. Basically, the board pressures Spacely to reduce costs, Spacely points out his offplanet factory/mine  could do it, and all it needs is someone to run it,  and that the last 2  people to apply for the job ran away. Meanwhile, Elroy, who never evar convinces me his voice is a child's, is schooling some chumps in Spaceketball(okay, it's called Spaceball, but my version is more accurate.) and Judy and her friend, Bizarro Space Daria, are a at a teen kids music place(I assume she's skipping school.) when the coolest most handsome space singer there, Cosmic Cosmo, invites her for a date, set for a few days in the future.

But then they get some mood whiplash when George saunters into the home announcing he's now the vice president and they're moving. Elroy is now no longer sad his dad missed his game, and Judy is throwing a fit all over the place. This is played for laughs, but later we're gonna get a horrible song out of it.

Get over it. I moved like 7 times as a kid, and I turned out fine, for a man that argues with cartoons.

So the family moves and we get a few weak gags out of it. There's a zany family of green Wookies that they have as neighbors, and there's also also a family of robots.  I get a feeling both of these were meant to be black and we all know in the future-50's-90's there's no blacks. Seriously, I didn't see any.

The female of the robot family invites the women to a mall, which brings Judy out of her marasm. Meanwhile, George goes to work, because this is what men do. Men can't be bothered to go to their kid's games or loiter in malls all day, like women.

However, soon George learns that the plant is not all fun and games. There's also some ill(advised) early 90s rap about how the factory works. It's painful but quick, like being stabbed in the eye by a Kenyan.

Judy separates and heads off to the "nature zone" of the mall, so we can get her super sad ballad about being heartbroken. Look, I don't remember The Jetsons having any songs, and if it did, they probably weren't this terrible. Eventually she stumbles upon a new boy to love, who looks like the bastard son of Captain Planet and Two-Face.

So...dreamy?

 And Elroy is now getting schooled by his kid neighbor robot AT Spaceball. See, I told you. Black. Eventually all this set up leads to George Jetson ceremonially starting the factory, which immediately starts going bonkers and shooting sprockets around. Elroy who has been building animosity towards his neightbot, saves him, even though, well he's a robot. How much can he be hurt by a piece of metal?

With the pressure on him to somehow make the factory work,  George is ever more determined to get results. but somehow the plant keeps failing. Eventually George's coworker fesses up and reveals that the plant is probably being sabotaged. George decides that the best course of action would be letting the higher ups know so they can  launch a full assessment and investigation. Or wait at work while it's dark with a flashlight, like a jackass.

His kid, the Sasquatch kid, and the Robot Kid also launch their own investigation, worrying the parents of 2 of those kids because Space Sasquatches are terrible at parenting. Eventually George goes missing, and the kids stumble into the darkest truth, that the saboteurs are...CUTE LIL'  SPACE MONCHICHEES!

If it's smart enough to accessorize, it's smart enough to be tried for sabotage.

Indeed, under the factory, right next to the ore mining drill, live this happy go lucky, highly marketable  space babies, who are having their home destroyed by the BIG BAD CORPORATION! As intelligent beings capable of speech their only hope of survival has been to ecoterrorize  the factory! And to make sure we get the point that the monchichees are in the right, the hairy sasquatch baby hug-shields the monchichi from Astro. I think that moment gave me diabetes.

I have since learned that you don't get Diabetes strictly from eating too much sugar. I hope that makes the fact I got it from this funnier.

Then George Jetson comes out of the woods, tied and gagged. It's clear the furballs, much like their direct inspiration the Ewoks, meant to kill and eat George, as they probably did to the people he's substituting. But he's still the asshole who's supposed to understanding, and he's still the one who has to compromise with the Space Monchichees according to everyone, including Captain Planet looking dude.

To even further drive who the assholes here are, Mr Spacely arrives, and tries to start the machine. The robot worker insists that he don't  without ever pointing out specifically that he's probably killing  a few people. Spacely kills the robot, and  goes on with the drilling, sending deadly rock debris flying at the Jetsons and putting them all in perilous risk.

Eventually  Jetson and his family get out, and try to stop  the machine, which his boss does not allow. Now, I think the roughly 5 people involved could take on Spacely, since he's like 3'5, has  like 50+ years, and wields no weapons. But because that would be too direct, George jumps  into a hole where a series of gags occur, and busts the machine.

Forced  by this space mutiny, Spaceley is strong armed into a deal were the Monchichi's do all of the work for nothing(because destroying the environment bad, sweatshops good?), the factory is exclusively are recycling plant, and  I guess all the Sprockets go on be part of Bono's hype machine. However, the family must return to Earth, and leave behind all their new friends. With tears in their eyes, they travel on. Awful 90's rap aaaaand scene!

So uh, that sure was some movie, huh? Never even nearly as clever and funny as it thinks, The Jetsons movie is abrasively progressive with it's politics while having some pretty retrograde characterization. The characters are a little too dull, and don't have consistent motivations, or in the case of Jane Jetson just plain have no motivation at all. The animations is mostly so-so, and the songs...are fucking terrible.  So what can I say? It's kind of subaverage at best. So perfect for the Jetsons, I guess.

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Scolding Review:Birth of a Nation

By my calculations, you should be paying 600 dollars per horse.

Award season is finally over, and we can finally put it behind us that movies people actually enjoy can hardly ever win. As fans of the scifi, adventure, and horror genres, we geeks feel this sting the most, as we must watch tepid, overdramatic pieces be recognized over the time Hulk slammed Loki into submission.

But it wasn't always like this. In fact, the very first  Academy Awards show gave quite a few prizes to one of the genre pioneers, Birth of a Nation.

I had heard of this movie in passing, and thought I'd give it  a review. After all, it's not every day you see a silent film with Zombies and masked Vigilantes by D.W. Wright, surely the Michael Bay of his time, but probably not as racist or at least with a better handle on history. I tried to avoid all spoilers, including not looking at Wikipedia and not reading the subtitles. After all, I think the drama can sell itsel well enought. Are you ready for an epic story full of Superheroes fighting Zombies?  Well, it's after the jump!



I have been informed that Birth of a Nation is NOT a film about Superheroes, nor are it's antagonists "zombies". I apologize for my mistake.  Enjoy your day.

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Fighting Female July

Folks, women are to me like fighting games. I'm no good at either, but that doesn't stop me from loving them all the same. So, while playing an awful doujin game the other day, I sort of got to thinking about women only fighiting games, about how maybe there wern't enough good ones. And about women in fighiting game in general. So I decided to look further, and in order to condense my findings, I have decided to dedicate a full month to women, and the fighting games they fight at.



So this July look for Reviews of female only fighting games, character love letters, and drawings all featuring the best, worst, and most obscure of what women have been like in fighting games. This July is Fighitng Female July.

I wanted it to be Fighting Female February, but that  did not pan out, and and  I don't love the alliteration enough to delay the whole thing a year. See you in July, girls!

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Scolding Review Dragonball Evolution

All-ah-wanna-say-issat, they don't really care about us! Aaaaaaah!

Well, well, well. We meet at last. I remember being so busy defending would be turd Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li, I barely had time to defend Dragonball. I certainly didn't want to watch it. My Dragonball experience is roughly two weeks of Z, which taught me that the franchise takes it sweet time to make stuff happen. The movie has much less time to develop an arch, yet somehow manages to waste what time it has.

The film opens to narration, but you can skip it. It's repeated wholesale later. But if you must watch it, it says that once there was an alien bad guy named Piccolo, and he and his minion Ozaru pretty much had the earth by the balls. But then some mages did a suicide spell and cast him to the center of the earth. But he just escaped. I would have liked to see the escape.

Antennae? That would look make this green skinned, pointy eared  alien named after a flute...silly...

You know, I really like James Marsters, but he's wasted on this. He doesn't get any real good moments, and doesn't even meet the heroes until the climax. It's not really a problem that he looks like he walked off  an episode of the later Star Trek series, but he's just  a dull character with  a really weak motivation, and no amount of "scary voice mod" will help with that.

Then we get to watch Goku, played by Justin Chatwin, the annoying boy from The War of the Worlds, sweat, before he gets into some elaborate choreographed fight with his grandfather. I've seen worst stunt work, but the old man has been given some terrible lines to work with.

Now, let me hunt down the elephant in the room and make some fine piano keys with it: I don't care if Justin Chatwin is white. I don't. At all. See, thing is, Goku is an alien. He COULD be Asian. Or he could  be a black guy. What in-story reason would he have to  to require being Asian of the South East variety? All this "they should have cast an Asian in the role" stuff is fairly silly to me, as if people somehow expected a Dragonball movie  made in Hollywood by Fox to be an accurate portrayal of the franchise or any good at all  let alone take some kind of high road in terms of casting. Hope in vain, true believers.

That said, Justin Chatwin is not right for the role of lead in an adventure movie ANYTHING. He needed to be upbeat, he needed to be energetic. He can't put passion and emotion onscreen here. And it's painful to see him try.

Back to the movie, grandpa wins an arousing game of "The floor is made of lava" by shooting a wave of transparent energy at  Goku. He and his grandpa proceed to bond, with Goku complaining that  stuff at school is hard, and he feels outcast and he just can't get a girl. So, hey, he's just like you, kids! He can do wirefu and shoot Mamamama energy, but he's still bullied at school! Don't you hate that?

Also, when he made this face to tell Goku to believe in himself, I quit the movie.

So then we see Goku go to high school, turning the first part of a martial arts adventure into a lame and unnecessarily cliche of bullies and classes and bullshit. But I guess the writers must have known this was trite too, so they turn the crank up on those cliches up to eleven. Goku doesn't just have bullies steal his lunch money and embarrass him. They PARK ON HIS MOTORCYCLE, DESTROYING IT(which seems like it should harm the car that does it). He doesn't just have a crush on a girl. He has visions of the girl fellating  a strawberry in a field of daisies.

Maybe they should have called it Dragonball: Subtle.

Now, usually in this stories, the hero doesn't have powers, gets bullied, then has powers. So my question is: How many fucking times would you let people bully you if you could shoot waves of energy? Let's say you have no secret other identity to speak of. Your just some misunderstood soul who happens  to have super powers and mega martial arts. What would keep you from making a big display of them?

But trouble is afoot as the evil Piccolo is using his Final Fantasy brand airship to scour the land for the 7 Dragonballs, the megamaguffins of the franchise that can grant anyone's wish once collected. He attacks some kind of asian village somewhere with his assistant, a woman who always wears magenta.

Goku decides to bail on his grandfather and his huge birthday feast in order to spend party time with Chichi, the love interest from school. So he goes to a party where everyone is, even the bullies. What is it with you Americans and going to your enemies' parties? Stay home! Go to another party!  Don't party where the people you hate are partying!

So the bullies try to murder him on sight. But Goku uses bullet time to make them  beat each other up. Having made the alpha males into beta males, he proceeds to court the female. Mating is a long process in which the thick layers of fat earned in the winter are...sorry.

Also, a bully knows how to do  a flying kick.  Super Bullying at it's best.

Essentially, this becomes, "The day Spider-Man remembered he didn't have to take shit from nobody because he wasn't a superhero and just had to beat everyone up and get the girl". He could have done this  at any point in his life. You don't even have to fight. If a guy shot an energy wave at me, and I fell down, boy, I would STAY down. They're trying so hard to sell him as a downtrodden guy, when he should at least have everyone afraid of him.

But then Piccolo just had to  try and find  Grampa's Dragonball, unaware that he had given it to Goku. You'd think a powerful whatever-he-is like Piccolo would know  who has what mythological trinket, as he doesn't seem to be tracking the Dragonballs based on rumor and speculation. So, not having found the ball he mortally wounds gramps and drops the house on him like Applebloom dropped Twist. This activates Goku's Goku-sense, and he gets there to find some cryptic talk from his grandfather, who points him out to the next useful character and then dies.

She was sweet to you, you heartless bitch!

So, free of his school duties somehow(and if I could shoot waves of energy, only parental devotion could make me stay in school, too.), Goku remains at the ruins of his former house, until Bulma Briefs, one of the most terribly named characters in anything ever, shows up  and starts an action scene. It seems she is searching for a Dragonball that was stolen from her company. However, she is mistaken about Goku and the two join forces to get to Master Roshi.

It is a good moment to point out that I don't know what this world is. It's somehow futuristic in design somewhat, but not "flying car" futuristic.  I mean, there IS a flying car, but it's an exception. Mostly it's those small, ugly European cars. I would set this future somewhere beyond Robocop, but before Starship Troopers.

Well, I know it's earth. That's about it.

So Roshi lives in an island with a San Francisco house in the middle of what looks like Neo Hong Kong. Sebulba and Goku walk in, which triggers a martial arts scene between Roshi and Goku. As far as fights go, I've seen worst, but there are two things that bother me. One is that once Goku starts punching at super speed his grunts sound silly, like Videogame spamming. And two, that Goku shoots a wave that misses Roshi and hits Bulma square in the chest...and she has no questions about that. In fact, no character is amazed or shocked at the amazing feats being performed. Like, really? You got knocked into the floor by wind coming out of a guy's hand, and  not even a "what the hell?" It's like this with Chichi too. Is this shit the norm or what? Isn't half of Dragonball people surprised at things?

So, a third party member is acquired, and this one fills the role of mentor left by whatever the old man's name was. Roshi is weird. He's over the top, but I don't get what he's even supposed to be in the first place. A crazy guy? Some kind of wacky uncle? However, I couldn't help but cast George Lopez instead of Chow Yun Fat for some reason. My mind is weird, sometimes.

Then they get to where the Temple where going, but there's a tournament there and Chichi's participating. They really want to keep her in this movie, but don't want to make her anywhere near part of the main plot. They also meet some monks, including that guy who played the black Ghostbuster. I guess he's going for serious roles now.

So our heroes travel through my favorite Dragonball environment:  huge expanse of endless desert. It's here where our heroes meet a fourth  party member:  desert thief Yamcha. And you know what? I don't even remember which one was Yamcha, but I like this dude's upbeat personality and almost cartoon like voice and delivery. This guy should have been Goku. He's probably just as known as Chatwin anyway.

Eventually they find a cave that leads into lavaland, where yet another Dragonball exists. But Piccolo sends his minions after them. They defeat them all easy .Lady in Magenta actually has  a scene in which her punches don't affect Goku.

The stakes are high!

So, she decides to attack the heart and disguises herself as Chichi using her blood because that's something she can do. She steals all the Dragonballs from under our heroes, and then actual Chichi shows up and starts kicking her. But the moves are evenly matched. Goku then has that moment in movies where there's two people that are identical but the hero doesn't know which is the real one and which one is the  impostor. I'm gonna make a gif collection of those some day.  Goku beats one down with no actual evidence but her own word and waits with his back turned until the one he saved reveals her true nature by killing him.

Also, the dress isn't part of the transformation, which leads me to the natural conclusion  Magenta scoured the malls and outlets for the same dress Chichi had and was gonna wear that night.

Goku meets his grampa in the afterlife, but then Roshi revives him. With Piccolo now having all the Dragonballs, it's on to the final act.

Pics uses his 'Balls to cause one of my favorite things to happen: Evil Geography. It's that thing where huge spires of evil rock raise from the ground, symbolizing the villains power to reshape the very earth itself. I've seen it better, but it's good here.

So Yamcha uses his now flying car to crash  into Mt Piccolo, and our heroes run upward. Vulva Girl has a shootout with Magenta, and Roshi tries to trap Piccolo in  a spell. Then the twist comes.

Speaking of Twist coming, she doesn't need you for that anymore because she's found someone else, you ungrateful hick!

Goku turns out to be Ozaru. Despite having been trapped since the days of the early Church, apparently( and really, setting Piccolo's past conquest of earth "2000 years ago?" Jesus must have fled earth when he saw him, right?)  Piccolo recast his monkey assistant as a young alien baby Manchurian Candidate that came to earth just in time for the exact event that required him to. But what little I know of DB being contradicted aside, what matters is that now the film has an excuse to put on film a  7 story high ape, one of the elements of the franchise you'd think would be too "out there" for Hollywood thinking.

Except it is too out there, because the ape is roughly the size of an NBA player. Now, putting aside the fact it's a really bad CG werewolf that happens to be an ape, think about this: The whole plot hinges on that Ozaru's return is a VERY BAD THING. It is referred to as Apocalypse.  It is key to Piccolo's return to power and that involves rivers of lava running free across the earth and the annihilation of entire countries. Now...HOW THE FUCK DOES A 7 FOOT TALL APE HELP WITH THAT? No, don't look to the movie for answers. He just chases people, poorly. Actual monkeys are scarier than that.

Also,  it looks pretty bad.

Either way, they make a Kate Beckingsale-less version of the ending  from Van Helsing, only it's Chow Yun Fat getting killed that makes Goku rediscover his  humanity.  And as such, the final fight between a powered up Goku and Piccolo ensues. It's not a bad fight. They shoot magics at each other  and fly and punch. They do the Dragonball thing, but in live action. Not excellently, but they do it. Eventually, Justin Chatwin Kamehamehas Piccolo into dust and uses the power of the Dragonballs to revive Roshi. Yamcha and Bulto get together, Chichi and Goku get together  and we even get  a hintsie that  the Piccolo I knew is gonna show up in the sequel. I can't wait to see a green James Marsters kick children on the big screen. Is it 2012 already? It is? Then I guess this movie must have been a failure and no sequel is ever coming, then!

This film is marred by bad scripting, cliché after cliché, and some pretty bad acting, especially from the lead who should be CARRYING the movie. Some of the set pieces are good and I liked the fights, but for a work inspired by Akira Toriyama's seminal stories it lacks what the source material had in spades: energy.

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