8.5/10 – Grilled Seal of Approval

Ah yes, the classic “Let’s get a bunch of guys together to go kill some other guys.” Never fails to be an entertaining plot.

One of my all time favorite films is The Street Fighter, with the sequel, Return of the Street Fighter, following close behind. The Street Fighter movies have nothing to do with 13 Assassins with the single exception that they are all Japanese productions, but I’m going to talk about The Street Fighter anyway because I don’t give a fuck.

Sonny Chiba stars as the titular character (still talking about The Street Fighter here, come on stay with it), a badass to the upteenth degree, who is as comfortable sexually assaulting a woman as he is knocking out the eyes from the mother fuckers who cross him. That is to say, he’s not a nice guy, but he is our hero, so we’ll follow him and support him as he wrecks havoc on the bodies of the idiots who are foolish enough to double cross him.

He fights dirty, he talks dirty, the dude simply is dirty, but he never gives up and he’s got that twisted crazily devoted brand of honor that I assume criminals only have in the movies.

Do do do do do do do

I got my eyes on you, you’re everything I see
I want your high kicks and fists to defend me
I got my eyes on you, you’re my Sonny
I want your high kicks and fists to defend me

I bought the full collection of Street Fighter movies (four of ’em) right before I left for Asia. I couldn’t bring all of my movies, so I was forced to make some difficult decisions. This is what I brought and carried around for two years:

1) Princess Mononoke – Obvious decision as this is my All Time Favorite Film and also I have a giant Mononoke tattoo on my stomach so it would be kinndaaaa weird to leave it home.

2) Riki Oh – The Story of Ricky – My #2, and what a fucking movie it is. A crowning achievement in cinema and also a movie I have shown to people and never ever had a bad reaction from it. A crowd-pleaser! (Also only showed it to my incredibly demented friends so that may have played a part.)

3) The Street Fighter/Return of the Street Fighter
4) Sister Street Fighter/Street Fighter’s Last Revenge

These were two discs with two movies on each. Also, Sister Street Fighter is fucking terrible movie, but I had not seen it and it had Street Fighter’s Last Revenge (Awesome!) on the other side so I was forced to bring. But it was a very tramatic decision for me! I was incredibly worried someone might peek in my bag, go through all of my dirty socks and underwear, go under my laptop, slip through the wads of cash and jewelry that I brought from America to import into Cambodia, dive beneath the two Sherpa’s I kept in case I lost the trail, burrow underneath the 19th century limited edition biography of Shakespeare  that was written by the illegitimate son of Abraham Lincoln, push through the pile of whale placentas I kept for their healing purposes according to the witch doctor of Banjo-Kazooie, and then open up the bottom pouch where I kept my movies and THEN they might see that on one side I had a terrible movie. It was a very frightening time for me. I stayed awake for hours, no, no, no not hours – days! YEARS! MILLENIA!

My body was cast out into the stars and I spun wildly in my womb of everlasting self-doubt. Would they think I actually liked Sister Street Fighter? What would happen if I gave that impression? Would I be imprisoned? Would I be assaulted? Would I be sentenced to a life of servitude at the feet of an obscure half-cousin of the former King of Cambodia?

Buuuuut in the end I decided that probably no one would even realize I had the flick and if they did I could just tell them I didn’t like it. Problem solved.

OR WAS IT?!?!?

To Be Continued…