Street Fighter

I like a lot of bad movies. I don't even mean that in an ironic "ho ho, the poor quality of this movie amuses me!" sort of way. I just have low standards, and if a movie is at least able to hold my attention for its duration, I'm usually willing to be pretty forgiving about whatever flaws it might have. I would never have attempted to watch so many movies based on a video games if I didn't have a pretty high tolerance -- some might even say an affinity -- for crap. With that said, Street Fighter is terrible, and I've been putting off writing this revue because I felt I'd already wasted too much of my life on it. So this is going to be a bit of a quickie.

This movie sat on my head and beefed. I couldn't tell you what the plot is, except that it involves M. Bison being dictator of a fictional country that looks like Thailand, and he's got some hostages, and a bunch of people named after characters from the video game Street Fighter II kill him and rescue the hostages. I guess that's pretty much it, actually, so just imagine that padded out to 102 minutes.

Along the way, you'll see all your favorite characters, like E. Honda, the Japanese sumo wrestler fat guy in a Hawaiian shirt; Dhalsim, the stretchy-limbed yoga master scientist; Chun Li, the undercover Interpol agent from whose mighty legs no one can escape TV news reporter; and Guile, the all-American Air Force colonel Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Highlights include Raul Julia's over-the-top performance as M. Bison, a sequence with a "stealth boat" that can turn invisible (as long as you ignore the hundred-foot wake trailing behind it), Jean-Claude Van Damme saying "I'm cunting on you," Zangief acting stupid, and Chun Li in handcuffs. Lowlights include pretty much everything else.

Perhaps I would be more receptive to this movie had I not recently seen the far superior animated movie based on the same source material, but probably not by much. It's just a really dull movie. To its credit, it has some pretty good production design and cinematography. One perplexing thing is that for a movie called Street Fighter, there's very little actual street fighting, or even martial arts of any kind. More often the action sequences are ridiculous stealth boats and military guys getting tossed over railings. I wouldn't really expect that that's what people would go to a Street Fighter movie to see.

I feel like if you're making a movie out of a video game that doesn't really lend itself to being made into a movie (i.e. most games), there are a couple of approaches you could take. You can be really faithful to the game, pandering to its fans and satisfying them but likely alienating everyone else, or you can just try to tell a good story that's only loosely based on the game, which is probably more likely to result in a good movie but may piss off the very people you were hoping the license would attract. This movie is somewhere in between: it takes a lot of liberties with the source material, in the service of a crappy, boring story. What's the point, I ask you?

But according to Wikipedia, this monstrosity actually grossed 99 million dollars and was considered a commercial hit, proving once again that I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Next time:
a brief palate-cleansing non-video-game-movie interlude:
The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai

followed by
Mortal Kombat

Double Dragon

Two movies into my video game movie watching experiment, I was still feeling pretty confident. I'd expected to be subjected to an endless stream of mind-numbingly terrible movies, but so far, they'd been tolerable, sometimes even enjoyable. But as I prepared to do Double Dragon, I started to become aware of a sense of foreboding. The DVD was long out of print, and the only copy I was eventually able to find was in pan-and-scan -- both of which struck me as signs that this movie was a likely contender for the Film Anti-Preservation Society. Would this be the first real obstacle on my journey?

Plot: Thousands of years ago, a Chinese king made a magical medallion that does something cool if you've got both halves of it, but one of the halves was recently stolen by a ninja (or something) who, in a shocking reveal, is really a scrawny blonde chick who's working for Robert Patrick. He wants to get the other half so he can do evil stuff, but it's in the possession of Satori Imada, the legal guardian of Billy and Jimmy Lee, martial artists skilled in the ancient "made you look" and "noogie" techniques.

The movie takes place in "New Angeles" in the distant, post-apocalyptic future (2007), where the streets are overrun by gangs, including the cast of Michael Jackson's "Beat It" video and the mutant bikers who crashed Gary and Wyatt's party in Weird Science (they've now recruited Gary into their gang -- but it's not Anthony Michael Hall; it's the guy who played him in the TV series). The gangs are opposed by the Power Corps, a bunch of vigilantes led by the ultimate bad-ass, Alyssa Milano.

Robert Patrick discovers that the Super Lee Bros. have the other half of the medallion, despite Satori's brilliant hiding place (hanging from Billy's neck in plain sight as he walks up to Robert Patrick and says, "What's goin' on? Nice hair, dude."). After a tediously zany action sequence including making a guy lose his footing on gumballs and fall into a baby carriage, the Lees escape from the T-1000's henchmen, but they run into Abobo, the leader of the mutant bikers, whom he's pumped full of super-steroids or something and turned into a giant puffy freak (but he seems pretty happy about it). Also, Robert Patrick blows up Satori, and if we knew or cared about her in any way, that might have meant something.

Robert Patrick goes on to kill some guy from the mutant bikers, which immediately endears him to them and they give him control of their gang. So the bikers, mimes, and Angus Young ambush the Lees. (Note: When I say "bikers," I mean it; they literally ride bicycles.) After a drum solo of a boat chase scene, they eventually escape again.

Let's move this along. The Lees and Alyssa Milano go to Robert Patrick's headquarters and get attacked by a zombie basketball player possessed by Robert Patrick (I forgot to mention, the half of the medallion that he has lets him possess people and turn into a shadow and stuff). Billy and Alyssa escape with the medallion, but Robert Patrick holds Jimmy hostage. Abobo leers at a postcard of a girl in a bikini, then sees his reflection and sheds a single tear.

The mimes attack the Power Corps hideout with Jimmy possessed by Robert Patrick. They fight, blah blah blah, eventually Robert Patrick gets both halves of the medallion and turns himself into two gorilla demon things with swords. Things look bad, but then some stuff happens and the Lees get the medallion and combine their powers to form Captain Planet. Actually, it just gives them red and blue ninja costumes, then Jimmy possesses Robert Patrick and makes him slap himself. And -- apart from a lame gag about letting Abobo drive because it's really Billy possessing Abobo but oops, no, it really is Abobo and he doesn't drive very well -- that's basically the movie.

Observations: There are certain flaws in this movie. I would even go so far as to say that it is not a good movie. I haven't played very much of Double Dragon the game, so I can't really comment on how faithful this is, but there's a point in this movie where Jimmy kicks in an original Double Dragon arcade cabinet, which seems like a pretty good metaphor. (It also raises a lot of questions about why that game would exist in the reality of the movie.)

I can't put my finger on exactly why, but Double Dragon's several big action setpieces -- ostensibly the reason the movie exists, you'd think -- feel very cheap and boring and seem as though they're just padding out the time between story points, except the story is pretty inconsequential too. The big question on my mind after watching it is: why? Why make this movie? Why would Robert Patrick and Alyssa Milano agree to be in it? Why did Paul Dini have a writing credit and why is the writing still so bad? Why the bizarre cameos from Vanna White and Andy Dick? Why the crappy 3D computer graphics at every possible opportunity? It's all very confusing to me.

The movie's one redeeming quality is that it doesn't take itself too seriously. Even though I can't think of anything that was actually funny, I just got the sense that the actors were having a good time making it. Maybe that's not true, but if not, they faked it pretty well. I guess maybe it's not a good thing if the filmmakers are enjoying themselves more than the audience, but hey, it was endearing. Also, Alyssa Milano looked pretty hot. So two redeeming qualities, I guess.

Ultimately, though, even Alyssa Milano's ass is not nearly enough to save this movie. It's quite bad, and I can't recommend seeing it for any reason, really. Even on an ironic level it's not particularly amusing. It's probably for the best that this one is left to rot in out-of-print hell.

Quotes:

• "Eat some fist, butt-heads!" -- one of the Lees
• "Those guys are gnarly." -- Billy Lee
• "Hey, broom-head! We're gonna sweep the floor with your skull." -- Billy Lee
• "Your incompetence sticks needles of flesh in my honor." -- Robert Patrick
• "You'll never find the dragons." -- Satori, seconds before Robert Patrick finds the dragons

Next time:
Street Fighter
(the live-action one with Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia)

Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (Sutorīto Faitā Tsū Mūbī)

Unlike the last video game movie I revued, Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie delivers exactly what it promises. If you've played Street Fighter II for more than about a minute, you probably have a pretty good idea of what this movie is going to be, for better or worse.

One of the first shots is of a street, and shortly after that, we see two guys fighting on or near it, hence, "Street Fighter." This pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the movie. We then spend about an hour being introduced to various characters while getting little sprinkles of exposition about the actual plot: the terrorist organization Shadowloo is recruiting street fighters to train as assassins. Their leader, Vega, has his heart set on recruiting Ryu Hyabusa, a fighter whom their cyborgs have identified as having a power level of OVER THREE THOUSAAAAAND (2,000 is supposedly the maximum). Ryu is wandering the globe, getting into fights and having homoerotic flashbacks about training with his rival/friend/maybe more?, Ken.

(Note: In the U.S. version of both the game and the movie, M. Bison is the big bad, Vega is the guy with the claw, and Balrog is the boxer. In the original Japanese versions, Vega is the big bad, Balrog is the guy with the claw, and M. Bison is the boxer. They changed it for the international release so Mike Tyson wouldn't sue. I watched the Japanese version, so I'm using those names.)

Meanwhile, Interpol agent Chun-Li, who has a grudge against Vega because he killed her father for some reason that's never explained, is working on trying to take down Shadowloo. To this end, she enlists the help of U.S. Air Force guy Guile, who has a lot of angst but ultimately doesn't do anything.

During this part of the movie, we're also introduced to Cammy, Fei-Long, T. Hawk, Dhalsim, E. Honda, Deejay, M. Bison, Zangief, and Blanka, but none of them are really part of the story except Cammy and E. Honda, and even they don't do much. Which is fine -- it would get pretty unmanageable if they tried to give every character something to do -- but it does feel like there's a lot of time spent on introducing all these characters for essentially no reason. (Fei-Long even tells Ryu that they'll meet again, but they don't. Maybe they were trying to set up a sequel?)

Anyway, eventually we get to the part we've all been waiting for: the infamous Chun-Li shower scene. For a long time this scene was cut out of the American release of the movie, but as a film purist, obviously I had to track down the uncut version. I have to say it doesn't live up to the hype at all. There's a brief shot of a pair of rather unrealistically proportioned animated boobs. That's it. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't see what made it so important that we Americans not get to see it for so long.

Back to the plot: this is where things actually start to happen. Vega has sent Balrog to kill Chun-Li, so after she gets out of the shower, he jumps off the ceiling and attacks her. Though she takes a beating, she manages to throw a sofa at him and kick him through the wall (presumably to his death), but then she goes into a coma or something just as Guile shows up too late to be useful.

Ken proposes to his girlfriend, but the whole time he's thinking about Ryu. "Ryu, I'm tired of waiting for you," he thinks. But then he gets captured by Vega, who sneaks up on him in a giant jet that can hover and, in a trippy scene, uses his "psycho power" to exploit Ken's feelings for Ryu and take control of him. Vega tracks down Ryu and makes Ken fight him. Guile tries to fight Vega, but misses every punch and a sonic boom, then falls off a cliff (as do E. Honda and M. Bison).

Anyway, as you probably could have guessed, eventually Ken's love for Ryu overcomes Vega's mind control, and the two of them team up and hadouken Vega into his jet, which explodes, and Interpol or the Air Force or somebody blows up Shadowloo. Guile is led to believe that Chun-Li is dead. He says to what he thinks is her corpse, "I took revenge on Vega as I promised," which is kind of funny when you consider that what he actually did was get knocked off a cliff by Vega after not damaging him at all. But it turns out Chun-Li isn't really dead; she's just playing a rather cruel joke on him, so he strangles her (pictured).

Ryu and Ken split up at a Stuckey's, both agreeing it's best. They'll "settle things with each other" the next time they meet (wink wink, nudge nudge). Ken leaves with his girlfriend in their convertible, and Ryu the fighter walks down the street. The end!

...OR IS IT?! Out of nowhere, Vega appears and tries to run Ryu over with a huge truck! I know that sounds like something I would make up, but that's really how the movie ends! It's a classic horror movie surprise ending, not at all appropriate in tone with the rest of the movie. It's great!

I spent more time summarizing that plot than I expected, but there really isn't that much else to talk about in this movie. Like the game, it's pretty much just a series of loosely connected fights. The fights are pretty cool, though, if you're into that sort of thing, and the animation is decent (though I feel like the characters are a little too muscular (I don't like men with too many muscles)).

Like I said before, my main gripe is that the movie spends so much time showing us characters who turn out to be pointless. It's cool to be able to say, "hey, look, it's that character that I like" and all, but it's just a whole lot of time before the story gets going, spent on exposition that never pays off (the Zangief/Blanka fight scene is particularly pointless, as it's the only time those characters ever appear and they don't interact with anyone else).

There is, as far as I can tell, no moral or theme to the story. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens. So... I really can't think of much else to say. If you like Street Fighter II, you probably wouldn't dislike this movie. I don't feel like it was a complete waste of my time, but I doubt I'll ever think much about it again. I have no strong feelings about this movie one way or the other, except that the ending is hilarious. It's probably not worth watching the whole thing just for that and the shower scene, though.

Next time:
Double Dragon

Super Mario Bros.

Two of my passions in life are video games and movies. For some reason, though, these two great tastes have a history of not tasting great together -- whether it's games based on movies or movies based on games, the end product is usually not very good, at best. It's almost as though the two forms of media are different and stories created for one medium can't easily be adapted to the other. But they keep trying, and this phenomenon is endlessly fascinating to me.

In that vein, I'm embarking on a new project: I shall attempt to watch every movie based on a video game (or at least all of them that I'm able to obtain), and I will report my findings here. In practical terms, this means I'll be watching a lot of crappy movies. That's okay, because I kind of like bad movies, but who knows, maybe a gem or two will sneak in there. And maybe, just maybe, we'll learn a little something about ourselves.

And what better place to start than the infamous Super Mario Bros.? To the best of my knowledge, this was the first feature film based on a video game, and the game upon which it's based is one of the most successful and influential of all time. The film was not as successful or influential. Time magazine called it one of the top ten worst video game movies -- a claim I find somewhat dubious considering what's come out since (I guess we'll find out over the course of this feature). Mario fans were not pleased because the movie deviated so far from the games, and non-fans were like, "what the shit is this?"

I saw Super Mario Bros. in the theater upon its release in 1993, and my primary complaints were that the Goombas were too tall and Luigi didn't have a moustache. I still stand by those complaints, but the movie has actually grown on me since then. Sure, it takes a lot of liberties with the characters and story of the Mario games, but it's not as though the games were known for their compelling narratives in the first place, and the world the movie presents is interesting enough in its own right.

The premise, as explained in the first two minutes by pixelated cartoon dinosaurs and Dan Castellanetta doing a cheesy accent, is that 65 million years ago a meteorite hit the earth, and while in our world this event killed all the dinosaurs, it also created a parallel dimension in which they survived and eventually evolved into creatures that look exactly like humans and speak English but are actually reptiles. That dimension is now a totalitarian dystopia ruled by the crabby despot Koopa, who deposed the benevolent king some time ago. To protect their infant daughter and some magical rock, Princess Daisy, the queen dropped her off on the steps of a church in Brooklyn (in our dimension) shortly before being killed, and Daisy was raised as a human.

In the present day, Daisy meets the struggling plumber brothers Mario and Luigi Mario. Luigi is immediately smitten with Daisy, so when she gets kidnapped and dragged into the other dimension by Koopa's goons so that he can use her to merge the dimensions and rule both worlds, the Marios follow and (spoilers!) eventually rescue her and overthrow Koopa (and as an added bonus, the Marios' unscrupulous plumbing rival gets turned into a chimpanzee in a suit).

So the story is nothing to write home about, but I think this is somewhat made up for by the texture and attention to detail in the world the movie presents, particularly if you're a Mario fanboy. The movie takes familiar ideas from the games and twists them in all sorts of interesting ways, like turning Toad into a street musician/political prisoner and Big Bertha (the giant red fish that can swallow you whole even if you're big (nmiaow)) into a large woman who tosses armed grannies off balconies. The Mario Bros. get their amazing jumping abilities from special mechanical shoes called Thwomp Stompers. Snifits drive garbage trucks, Bob-ombs wear Reeboks, and a Super Scope becomes a de-evolution gun. Plumbing, pipes, and mushrooms also figure prominently. Some of these interpretations may be a bit silly, but at least they're creative, and you can't accuse them of just cashing in on the Mario name with a generic action movie. Not everything works, but I give them an E for effort.

The downside is that the story is kind of a mess and the characters pretty flat, but again, that's true to the source material and I wasn't really expecting anything more, so it's hard to get upset about that. But the pace is quick, the setpieces are varied, and there's a whimsical score (as in music, not high score! ha ha because it's a video game movie, get it) and some funny lines.

It may not be great, but I think Super Mario Bros. is actually a cut above many of the other live-action kids' movies of its era in many ways. Its main problem is just a matter of expectations: if you go in expecting a faithful adaptation of the game, you're probably going to be disappointed (and it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect that, considering the movie's title). I'm not sure whom this movie was made for, but I think it's safe to say that it wasn't the majority of the people who saw it. But if you go in with an open mind, I think you'll find a fairly enjoyable "live-action thrill ride" that doesn't deserve the heaping helpings of scorn it continually receives. (It also helps if you're ten years old.)

Next time:
Sutorīto Faitā Tsū Mūbī
(a.k.a. Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie)

Star Ballz

All right, look. Here's the situation. My sadistic colleague gave me the assignment to revue Star Ballz. She had seen it years ago, so she should have known better, but she told me to do it anyway, and hearing that it was a hentai parody of Star Wars, Sailor Moon, and a bunch of other pop culture, I thought it might be fun. I knew it would be a bad movie, but I thought maybe I could enjoy it ironically or at least have some laughs making fun of it. I was young and foolish then.

I'm reluctant to even write this revue, because I just know that some poor fool will read it and make the same mistake I did. Don't do that to yourself! I am perfectly aware that some movies are "so bad they're good;" trust me when I say that this is not one of those movies. It goes so far past "so bad it's good" that not only does it go back to being bad, but it reaches new levels of badness that scientists haven't been able to classify yet.

You might also think, "well, I'm not looking for Hamlet here; porn's porn." All I can say to that is that if you actually get off on this movie, you're probably not the kind of person I ever want to meet. The character designs look like they were drawn in some horny fat kid's Trapper Keeper during sixth-grade social studies class. The animation for the sex scenes is the same few frames cycled over and over again in each shot, and then each shot is repeated several times (even in different scenes), so there are probably about seventeen total frames of animation in all of the sex scenes.

The voices sound like they were recorded over VoIP on dial-up using the built-in microphone on someone's iBook with the gain turned up too high. The best thing I can say about the audio for the sex scenes is that it's consistent with the animation, in that it's a few moans and phrases sampled on someone's Casio keyboard and played over and over again. Everything's mixed all wrong so you can hardly make out the dialogue most of the time, but that's probably for the best. In fact, if you must watch this movie, you should probably just turn the sound off. And the video.

The touted "hilarious parody" consists of including a character for no reason other than to say "look! We are aware of the existence of this character of whose existence you are also aware! Isn't that hilarious?" If you're lucky you might get more value for your buck when the character makes some sort of ass joke. It's the Family Guy school of comedy.

To add insult to injury, the movie includes no fewer than two fake-out endings before it finally does end. I'm letting you know ahead of time in case you ever get kidnapped and tortured by someone who shows you this movie, so the first time the phrase "THE END" comes up, don't get your hopes up, because you still have a good ten minutes left. Er, well, you have ten minutes left, but they are by no means good. The best thing I can say about this movie is that it is only forty-seven minutes long, but then, that's forty-seven minutes too long, and I assure you it feels like much longer. (That's what she said! (And I make that terrible joke only to point out that it's much funnier than any of the ones in Star Ballz.))

My initial reaction to this movie was the desire to punch everyone involved in the production in the mouth, but over time that feeling gave way to a sort of melancholia, and I started to worry about what kind of circumstances in people's lives could have led them to make a movie like this, and how many of them have killed themselves since then. And if they haven't, why the hell not?

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II

In an earlier post, I asserted that the mission statement of this blog was to revue things that are jawsome, or to revue things that are not necessarily jawsome in a hopefully jawsome way. The subject of tonight's post, the 1987 horror movie Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, falls in the latter category. I could not in good conscience call this movie jawsome, or even good, but it does have a certain charm.

I haven't seen the original Prom Night, but from what I hear on The Internet, that doesn't matter, as aside from sharing a setting, an actor (as a different character), and the catchphrase "It's not who you come with; it's who takes you home," the two are completely unrelated. Prom Night 1 was apparently a straightforward slasher flick, fairly well respected in the genre and set for a remake in 2008. But I don't care about it.

In the world of 1980s horror, you were either a Jason man or a Freddy man. Unless you were a woman. I would count myself firmly among the Freddy camp. Prom Night 1, it would seem, was more of a Jason kind of movie, but Prom Night II: Electric Boogaloo is a rare case of a franchise changing teams mid-race (please pardon my mixed metaphors) and ripping off A Nightmare on Elm Street pretty directly with a supernatural villain and lots of surreal, dream-like sequences (though in this movie they're not dreams). Throw in a 1950s theme with appropriate soundtrack, a pinch of incest, and a dash of showering lesbians and you've got a recipe for wackiness.

The story of Prom Night II: Twenty-Three Skidoo starts in 1950-something at the high school prom, where the titular Mary Lou is floozying it up and making out with some guy, much to the dismay of her prom date, Bill. Demanding vengeance, Bill decides to dump pigs' blood on Mary Lou during her coronation as queen o' the prom. Sorry, did I say pigs' blood? I meant a stink bomb. Unfortunately something goes wrong and Mary Lou's apparently kerosene-soaked prom dress immediately goes up in flames, roasting her alive.

Flash forward to the present (the '80s), where we meet Vicki, a moderately not-unattractive blonde girl with an unfortunate hairstyle and an overbearing mother who's all set to be queen o' this year's prom (Vicki, not her mother). Some boring stuff happens, and Vicki's classmate Josh, who is basically J.T. from Degrassi, is introduced, making a radio out of a potato and saying, "This moment will be inserted into the anals [sic] of science history, and I think we all know how painful that can be." Which should give you some idea of the comic sensibilities of this film. (Okay, I'm underselling it; there actually are some decent jokes in the movie.)

We now learn that Bill, the guy who set Mary Lou on fire, is now principal of the high school and has a son who doesn't want to go to college and sometimes forget to eat. Oh, and that son is dating Vicki.

For some reason that I either missed or they just didn't bother to tell me, Vicki goes down into a spooky basement or something in the school... oh yeah, I think she's trying to find a prom dress because her mother won't let her buy one, and I guess they keep dresses in the school basement. Whatever, it doesn't matter. The point is she finds a mysterious chest and opens it. Little does she know that she's freeing Mary Lou's soul! Which was sealed in the chest for some reason, along with the official prom queen tiara and cape, which Vicki takes.

Next we get a bit of melodrama as Vicki's even-more-unfortunately-coiffed friend Jess reveals... very... slowly... that some guy impregnated her and won't call her back. Fortunately she won't have to worry about this for long. We're about twenty-five minutes in and it's time for the first official murder! (Mary Lou's origin story doesn't count.)

Jess fiddles with the tiara, which pisses off the ghost and all hell breaks loose. By which I mean some bags of shredded paper burst open and some paint falls off the shelf. Then the prom queen cape attacks her and drags her toward a paper cutter. You wouldn't be faulted for thinking she's about to get her head chopped off... but no! It's the classic misdirect, and she actually just ends up hanged by the cape instead. Oh, and then after she's dead, she gets thrown out the window for good measure.

Naturally everyone assumes that Jess killed herself and then threw her own corpse out the window, and some asshole priest uses her funeral to espouse his views about violence in the media (what?). Vicki finds herself mysteriously drawn to Mary Lou's grave.

But the prom must go on! One of the other prom queen nominees or whatever makes a snide remark about Jess, and Vicki flies off the handle. This is foreshadowing because -- I'll save you the suspense -- she's gradually being taken over by Mary Lou's spirit or whatevs. She starts having hallucinations about a dark, nightmarish Silent Hill version of the school, where the Fonz attempts to rape her.

Meanwhile, the nerdy comic relief J.T. guy asks a girl out, which I guess is supposed to make us like his character more, or maybe just remind us that he's in the movie, because to be honest I had forgotten. Then Vicki gets brained with a volleyball, resulting in more creepy hallucinations with everyone calling her Mary Lou and the volleyball net turning into a big spiderweb that she gets caught in. Principal Bill hears her yelling "I'm not Mary Lou" and is disturbed, so he goes to the basement/dress storage room and somehow figures out that Mary Lou's soul escaped from the chest, though I don't know how he knew it was in there in the first place.

On account of getting beaned, Vicki gets the rest of the day off from school, but her psychotic mother decrees that she must spend it confessing stuff to a priest in a pointless scene. That evening she has some more Mary Lou-related hallucinations, in case you haven't figured it out yet. Then her really fucking creepy rocking horse comes alive, unseen hands grope her under the sheets (or something), and her mirror turns into liquid in a gag straight from Evil Dead.

Well, that scene was pretty cool, but by this time the film's leisurely pace is starting to wear thin and you just want her to finish getting possessed and start killing people already. There are some more scenes that don't really add up to much. The priest tries to warn Bill (his former classmate) that Mary Lou is back and that "she can't touch me; I'm a priest," but Bill should be careful and find Jesus, but Bill's not having it. Meanwhile, Vicki complains to her boyfriend about the inconveniences of being possessed, and the mean girl convinces J.T. to rig the prom queen election via computer in exchange for sexual favors.

In an unrelated incident, Vicki slaps mean girl and gets sent to detention. Then, with some pretty cool effects, she gets sucked into the blackboard. She ends up in the basement/dress storage room, naked, and apparently this is the point where she's fully taken over by Mary Lou. Vicki Lou goes back to the priest for another confession, except this time she asks him to fuck her, then kills him. Apparently his crazy notion about being invincible due to his priestiness was inaccurate.

The next day, Vicki's classmates are confused because she's dressing anachronistically and being sassier than usual. J.T. is the only one who correctly assumes that it's because she's possessed. When Vicki Lou's chemistry teacher Mr. Craven (groan) gropes her, she blows the hair out of her face, causing something to ignite the teacher's crotch.

Next is the film's most famous (to me) scene. Vicki Lou and some girl get in a fight in the locker room. When the girl goes off to shower, Vicki Lou joins her and tries to make out with her. The girl gets creeped out and runs away, leading a very nude Vicki Lou to stalk her throughout the locker room while singing the Little Richard hit "Tutti Frutti" in a creepy way. When the girl hides in a locker, Vicki Lou uses her telekinetic powers to crush the locker that she's in like an aluminum can, causing what is presumably brain matter to sluice through the vents. Pretty gross. I actually saw this scene on television many years ago but didn't know what it was, and it left enough of an impression on me that I eventually decided to track down the whole movie.

Anyway, nothing can really top that scene, so I'm sorry to say it's pretty much all downhill from here. Vicki Lou comes to visit Bill and vaguely threatens his son, then goes home and makes out with Vicki's father, which unnerves her mother, whom she telekinetically pushes through the front door, possibly killing her but I'm not sure. Bill knocks his son unconscious with his own shoe, then goes to dig up Mary Lou's grave, but finds preacher-man buried in it instead. Why would Vicki Lou take the time to swap them out? How would she know that he would dig up the grave? It seems like a pretty random and stupid thing to do, but I guess maybe from having dated him, she knew that he was the kind of person who, upon finding out that the girl he killed was possessing his son's girlfriend, would go and dig up her corpse. That's pretty impressive forethought.

Next there's a weird scene where J.T. takes a picture of Vicki Lou at the prom and asks her if she's seen Monica, and she turns into a burst of white light. I have no idea what that's about, but it doesn't seem to affect anything, and the next time we see any of those characters they're just going about their business as usual. So, just ignore it, I guess.

J.T. goes to his secret nerd lab to hax0r the prom queen election results, as per his agreement with mean girl, who shows up and holds up her end of the bargain. Then she goes back to her date, who asks her if she has any more mints because her breath smells great. Gross. When J.T. changes the prom queen from Vicki to mean girl, Vicki Lou doesn't like it and electrocutes him through his computer.

After the most awkward possible reading of the line "Ladies and gentlemen, we're gonna pick the prom queen now," Vicki is announced as the winner. The mean girl is dismayed, and a guy asks her, "How'd you blow it?" See, because she blew that dude, get it? Meanwhile, Bill's son has recovered from the shoe attack and shows up at the school. Also meanwhile, Bill himself is up on the rafter above the stage as Vicki Lou is coronated. Is he going to recreate the stink bomb stunt and burn this girl alive too? As it turns out, no... he just shoots her. Just as his son arrives! But it's too late. She's dead.

But not really! The dessicated corpse of Mary Lou bursts out of Vicki's body (I guess that's where she put it after she took it out of the grave) and everything starts getting all Carrie on us. Oh, by the way, mean girl is randomly impaled with a neon light, so don't worry, she got her comeuppance for being mildly rude. Mary Lou makes a bunch of lights and stuff explode, and I guess this gives her energy and restores her body to mostly non-dessicated status. It also gives her voice a lot of reverb.

Well, Mary Lou rampages a bit and eventually chases Bill's son down to the basement/wardrobe department, where the priest's corpse (how did it get there?) tells him he's in deep shit. Mary Lou pulls the classic "pretend to be a loved one" trick and impersonates Vicki, and Bill's son falls for it, the poor dope. It seems that if she can get him pulled into the chest (the one her soul was stored in, I mean, not her breasts), then... well, I was going to say that she'd be free, but she seems pretty free already, so I don't know what she's trying to do, but basically he's in danger of being sucked into the chest. But at the last second, Bill shows up, puts the tiara on her head, and kisses her. Then there are a lot of bright lights and a crazy tracking shot, and something explodes. The implication is that Bill and Mary Lou are gone, somewhere. Now Bill's son opens the chest and for some reason Vicki comes out of it, even though we saw her get shot and die and a creature burst out of her corpse earlier. I think what they're trying to say is that the real Vicki was in the chest ever since that blackboard scene, and everything since then was really just Mary Lou looking like Vicki, which I guess I can buy.

Anyway, when Vicki comes out of the chest, Bill's son asks her if she takes sugar in her coffee, and she says, "No, that stuff'll kill you." That's a callback to an earlier scene where they had coffee, but it doesn't make any more sense in context. It has nothing to do with the current scene and is really lame.

Cut to: A cop saying, "I don't know what we got here! Something strange," in a way that just sells it. And that's his only line. Anyway, the survivors are leaving the prom. Bill is back, so I guess he didn't die after all... or did he?! He's going to drive Vicki and his son home, but he turns the radio to one of the soundtrack's dozens of songs that include the name Mary Lou! And he's wearing a ring that seems like it probably has some significance, but I wasn't really paying attention to that scene earlier. But at any rate I get the idea that the kids are probably not in a good situation as creepy Bill says, "Hey kids. They're playing our song! Let's cruise." and all the windows roll up and doors lock and they drive away to their doom in a direct rip-off of the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street, except nobody gets pulled through a door which was really the best part. Also, the car's license plate says "MARY LU2". Why the 2? Oh well. The end!

In conclusion, this isn't a very good movie, but for the most part it is at least entertaining, and has some pretty neat special effects set pieces. For me, cheesy horror movies like this live and die (no pun intended) on their creative death scenes, and this one delivers a few pretty decent ones, and it has a sense of humor without becoming a total parody of itself like the later Freddy movies. And if you're not into any of that, well, you can't go wrong with full frontal nudity.