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Staplerfahrer Klaus - Der erste Arbeitstag (2000)
Absolutely Hilarious
If you have ever wondered if a forklift could be used as a deadly weapon, look no further than the German short film Staplerfahrer Klaus: Der Erste Arbeitstag.
It starts out like any one of those cheesy workplace safety videos, with the narrator and animations explaining the do's and don't's of forklift operation, as our main character Klaus blunders his way through the first day of work. However, it's not long before his mistakes result in his coworkers dying in hilariously over-the-top gory fashions. Even as if the body count grows higher and higher, the film never really stops trying to be a serious workplace safety video, which is why the whole thing had me in stitches.
Staplerfahrer Klaus is in German, but you certainly don't need to understand the language to enjoy this short.
The Super Mario Bros. Super Show! (1989)
A Travesty
Have you ever adored a TV show as a kid, and then years later, had a chance to see it again and found it terrible, and realized that it probably wasn't so great when you were a kid, either? If you were a Nintendo obsessed-kid in the 80's to early 90's, as I was, chances are good you tuned in religiously every Saturday to watch the Super Mario Bros. Super Show, produced by DiC Entertainment. This abomination actually consisted of three separate shows, the animated Mario segments, the live-action Mario segments, and lastly, the stunningly awful Legend of Zelda segment. I will deal with each separately.
The Mario segment features our heroes the Mario brothers, as well as Toad and Princess Toadstool, who for some reason follows the Mario brothers everywhere. Each episode they travel to a differently themed "land," such as Spy Land, Rap Land, Pasta Land, etc., all the while doing battle with their arch-nemesis King Koopa who is always planning some nefarious scheme. As always, the princess ends up getting abducted by Koopa and it's up to the Mario brothers to rescue her. The set-ups for each episode are painfully repetitive and contrived, and the show is filled with terrible attempts at humor that I don't think even the smallest of children would find humorous. There is also Koopa's rumored foot fetish, as in the very first episode, he orders two of his flunkies to...get this...lick his feet. Make of that what you will.
The first thing anyone is bound to notice is the quality, or lack thereof, of the animation. The characters often differ significantly from their video game counterparts (although not nearly as bad as the Zelda cartoon). Characters are often mis-colored, have the wrong voices dubbed, move their lips without speaking or vice versa, and on one occasion, "float" in the middle of a wall due to a misplaced celluloid layer. The coloring and artwork is simplistic and amateurish, the characters move so stiffly they make anime look fluid by comparison, and the "special effects" are so clumsily drawn they must be seen to be believed. The whole show looks rushed and hurried, as if the creators saw the marketing potential of the Mario name and wanted to rush a cartoon to air as quickly as possible.
But the animated segments are pure gold compared to the live action segments, with famed (cough) wrestler Lou Albano playing Mario and "some schmo who played Luigi," the stereotypical Italian/Americans, with the stereotypical accent, love of pasta, and blue-collar job. Every episode the Mario Bros. are visited by a guest star, some of which included Magic Johnson and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. The live action segments attempted a kind of Monty Python-esquire brand of absurdist humor, and like so much else in the show, failed miserably. At the end, Mario instructed the viewers to "stay tuned for scenes from the next Legend of Zelda!" before segueing into the credits sequence, unleashing the hilariously awful song and dance number "Do the Mario!" on the unsuspecting audience.
But I've saved my bile and vitriol for what is by far the worst aspect of the SMBSS, the Legend of Zelda. The Zelda games were always somewhat more serious and darker in tone than the Mario games, but to the writers of this dreck, it was all the same. Link was a lecherous, surfer-voiced idiot who openly lusted after Princess Zelda, getting shot down every time with shockingly unfunny results. The running gag throughout is that the every time Link is about to get a kiss from the princess, something or someone interrupts. This travesty also brought for the infamous "Excuuuuse me, princess" line; sure to grate on anyone with a modicum of respect for the Zelda franchise. It was obvious that a romance angle handled with any degree of seriousness or maturity would have too much for the target audience (who were still firmly entrenched in the "girls are icky" stage) to handle, so the writers tried to make it funny, and by funny I mean very, very not funny. The fact that the games presented no such romance angle is just adding insult to injury.
Every character from the games, bar none, is portrayed as a complete idiot. The mighty Ganon whom we were pitted against in the games is reduced to nothing but a fat swine in laughable outfit, who seemed about as threatening as the Jolly Green Giant. Like the Mario segments, most episodes revolved around him abducting Zelda or trying to steal the Triforce; apparently Link and Zelda are too stupid to actually go into Ganon's lair and kill the bastard, which would be both interesting and sensible, two things the Zelda cartoon will not have! Not to mention that it would force the writers to come up with plots that weren't directly based on the game.
As usual, it's up to our hero Link to save the not-very-legendary princess by shooting bolts of energy from his sword, which actually made NES game sounds, I kid you not. As terrible as the Mario segments were, at least the characters behaved in a manor that were believable by the game's standard. The Zelda cartoon, on the other hand, butchers characters beyond what even the worst fan fiction author is capable of. It's that bad.
In short, the Super Mario Bros. Super Show is an insult to our beloved Nintendo games. As proved by their horrible hack job of Sailor Moon (which wasn't exactly gold to begin with), DiC Entertainment should not be allowed anywhere near anyone else's work again, especially not video game franchises.
Street Fighter (1994)
I perform the "Shun Goku Satsu" on this movie
Shortly after the beginning of the disastrous Street Fighter movie, we see the words "Based on the Capcom game Street Fighter" displayed. How ironic, then, that the movie following is anything but. For a movie that purports to be based on one of the most well-known arcade games of all time, the Street Fighter movie does not so much tell the story of the game as it does rape, butcher, and mangle it into an unrecognizable form. The Mortal Kombat adaptation, while certainly not being a cinematic masterpiece, at least stayed relatively faithful to the games.
Somewhere along the line in this parade of broken lives and shattered dreams, someone decided that the tournament-based, Enter the Dragon-like storyline of the game would never fly with the American movie-going public. And so it was rewritten, becoming a typical American action flick, with plenty of huge explosions, loud gunfights, and thinly veiled right-wing propaganda. A Japanese protagonist? That will never do. Why not cast the Belgian Jean Claude Van Damme as the American Guile, and have him become the main character? It's not as if fans of the game are going to mind, are they?
Street Fighter the movie is a catastrophe. Every character, bar none, from the games is butchered and rewritten beyond recognition. Chun Li, played perhaps the only well-casted actor in this dreck, Ming Na Wen, has become a mere reporter (with a smirking Balrog and a Hawaiian shirted E. Honda as her camera crew, natch) instead of a detective, Ryu and Ken are incompetent gun smugglers, and Jimmy/Blanka and Charles/Nash become the same person in one of the most laughably absurd plot contrivances ever thought up. There are so many incongruities between this movie and the game that it becomes difficult to tell if they are merely the result of the incompetence of the writers, or their actual intent. For example, were the writers (whom I hope are begging for change at bus stop right about now) aware that "Shadaloo" was merely the name of M. Bison's organization, and not the name of a fictitious South Asian country? (which conveniently rests atop present-day Myanmar?) Or were they simply not paying close enough attention to the game's storyline? Who knows?
Consider the most egregious example of the screenwriters' disdain for the source material: M. Bison walks into his laboratory and addresses one of the scientists there as "Doctor Dhalsim." Was Dhalsim a doctor in the game? Do we ever see him fight in this movie? Do we ever see him using his remarkably elastic limbs? The answer to all these questions, of course, is no. The writer's simply drop in a character named "Dhalsim" just for the sake of saying they included him. The movie's failing is in its desperation to include every single character to the detriment of the rest of the film. I can only imagine what Akuma would have looked like had the writers decided to include him.
Anyone who played through Street Fighter knows that each character had at least one defining personality trait. Ryu was the stoic martial artist seeking to become a true warrior, his friend Ken was brash and arrogant, Vega was obsessed with beauty, Sagat wanted revenge on Ryu for scarring his chest, etc. It should come as no surprise that none of these traits appear in any shape, form or fashion in this movie, and in the rare moment that a character DOES act like their game counterpart, it's more often the result some sort of lame contrivance than a scripted personality trait. Chun Li's cameraman Balrog only happens to box. When Ryu and Ken and "inducted" into M. Bison's army, the uniforms they wear just happen to resemble the white and red karate gis they wore in the game. To top it all off, M. Bison gives a lengthy explanation of how his "magnetic levitation" that allows him to perform the movie's equivalent of the Psycho Crusher. It's as if the screenwriters set out to make a completely different movie, and were only told halfway through that it was supposed to be a Street Fighter movie.
Which brings me to my next point; there's little actual "street fighting", giving fans of the games precious little to chew on through the movie's running length. Whatever fight scenes we get are brief and unexciting, and are nothing next to other martial arts movies. Instead we get Jean Claude Van Damme running from scene to scene, spewing out pithy one-liner after one-liner, gleefully trampling any remaining source material that hasn't already been butchered. Only Raul Julia and Ming Na Wen come through with any dignity left; they apparently realized what a turkey this film was and at least tried to have some fun with their roles. Their noble efforts, however, are sunk by the awful screenplay, which should be an example to future filmmakers of how NOT to adapt a video game to the big screen.
As an aside note, there was actually an arcade game made of this movie. Yes, it was terrible, too.