Change Your Image
blkcastro
Reviews
Hwasango (2001)
The MTV version
I was so hyped about Volcano High when I heard it was going to be shown on TV. I got even more excited when I heard that some of my favorite Hip Hop artists were going to be doing the English voice acting. When the night the movie premiered came around, I couldn't stand to watch it.
Besides the fact that there was no plot whatsoever, and the characters were all cliches, the MTV translation was terrible. Andre 3000 was terrible as Kim. He may be my favorite Emcee ever, but in Volcano High Andre sounded like he was reading a bedtime story to his son. No matter what his character was doing, Andre was still whispering. Me and the homie were just bustin up at how terrible his acting was and how it didn't match. Andre wasn't the only blemish in this catastrophe, as Lil' John and Tracy Morgan among the others were also horrible. Lil John was aight when he managed to keep his composure, but when he got excited he would come out of character and sound like he was with the the Eastside Boyz again. Tracy Morgan sounded like he was doing an SNL skit. Me and the homie finally stopped watching (taped it, and finished it the next morning) when Andre said "Stank you smelly much," which proved to me that he didn't care very much about keeping the movie's integrity intact. The inclusion of the latest Hip Hop songs is a major problem with MTV's production of the movie. This is a Korean movie, why is "Milkshake" playing when the guy jumped out the window? Furthermore, why does MTV feel the need to keep the lyrics in the music during a scene. Most of the time the voices in the music were louder than the voices of the actors which was a major distraction. Songs like Youngbloodz "Damn" and Ying Yang Twinz "Salt Shaker" were just inappropiate in this movie to begin with. Without seeing the original Korean version, I can tell that a lot got lost in the English translation. MTV would never be able to handle a live-action anime. I imagined MTV cut out a lot of the parts they didn't understand- gestures and behaviors that are common in anime. Someone posted something like "Who's idea was it to give Asian kids Black voices?" Actually, I thought the same thing at first, but most of the time the nationality of the people doing the dubbing of Foreign movies aren't really known except if they are really high profile like in FLCL or somthing. What matters is if the person is good at voice acting or not, not what race they are. I could tell Kim was obviously Andre, but I didn't figure out that one character was Snoop Dogg until the end.
Anyway, the way I see it, MTV just added more disastrous elements to an already weak production.
3 Ninjas: Knuckle Up (1995)
Too long
As a kid, I loved Three Ninjas and the second one. I ended up renting this movie, and all I remember is how long this movie was. With a dragging, almost non-existent plot, the movie relied on a barrage of unnecessary fight scenes, and the longest, most pointless chase scene ever. I finally turned off the movie when I watched a scene where Rocky is fighting some thugs. But it wasn't the child actor, it was an adult stunt double crouching to look smaller, doing all these complicated spins and kicks. I wouldn't have minded that scene, if they hadn't done it in SLOW MOTION. Now that's a bit too amateurish for me to handle.