Guilty Pleasure No. 61: Double Dragon (dir by James Yukich)

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The time is …. the future!

The future looks a lot like a cheap music video. Due to repeated earthquakes, California is now an island and Los Angeles has been left in ruins. The city has been renamed New Angeles, even though the correct name would have been Nuevos Angeles but whatever. The important thing is that city is now a mess. The police allow the gangs to run rampant at night in return for not running rampant during the day. The nightly news, which is anchored by George Hamilton and Vanna White, is full of stories about the federal government refusing to send any more aid to California, despite the fact that Jerry Brown is the Vice President. For some reason, Andy Dick plays the weatherman and gives continual updates on the smog and rain.

Despite the fact that the city is the most dangerous place on Earth, Satori Imada (Julia Nickson) still makes the time to drive her teenage sons, Billy (Scott Wolf) and and Jimmy Lee (Mark Dacascos, who was clearly not a teenager when this film was shot) to and from their karate tournaments. However, that might all end because Sartori possesses half of a magic medallion and the evil Koga Shuko (Robert Patrick, looking oddly like Sugar Ray’s Mark McGrath) has the other half. Satori gives her half of the medallion to Billy and tells him that he and his brother must keep it out of the hands of Shuko.

That’s not going to be easy because Shuko not only has control of the local gangs but also the police. Fortunately, rebel leader Marian Delario (Alyssa Milano) is willing to help out the Lee brothers. It all leads to a lot of fights, a lot of running, some campy humor, and stiffly delivered dialogue. For whatever reason, the filmmakers decided that the way to make this marital arts film a success would be to push accomplished martial artist Mark Dacascos into the background and instead focus on Scott Wolf, who spends most of the movie looking like he’s either confused by the plot or terrified as to what Double Dragon might do to his career.

Yeah, this movie is pretty stupid and the plot is pretty much impossible to follow. And yet, it is oddly entertaining in its own weird way. If you ignore the story and just focus on the visuals, it can actually be kind of fun. Look at all the bright colors. Look at Robert Patrick, with his goat-tee and his 90s pop star hair. Look at Alyssa Milano, who, surprisingly, seems to actually be in on the joke. Look at all of the Mad Max-inspired fashion choices. From a purely visual point of view, New Angeles is a huge improvement on Los Angeles. Along with the film visuals, the film is also worth watching just so one can witness just how over-the-top Robert Patrick goes in his performance. I don’t normally think of Patrick as being someone who chews the scenery but, in this film, he gives into every cartoonish impulse that he has and it’s actually a lot of fun to watch. There’s not a moment of subtlety to be found in either his performance or Alyssa Milano’s and thank the Angels for that. Finally, I have to appreciate the fact that the film’s main message appears to be that the government and all other forms of civil authority are basically useless. Not even Vice President Jerry Brown can be bothered to help out the people of New Angeles. That pretty much tells you all that you need to know.

In the end, Double Dragon is not a particularly good film but it’s fun in its own deeply dumb way.

Previous Guilty Pleasures

Monday Live Tweet Alert: Join Us For Double Dragon and Blue Steel!

Posted on April 24, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

As some of our regular readers undoubtedly know, I am involved in hosting a few weekly live tweets on twitter and occasionally Mastodon. I host #FridayNightFlix every Friday, I co-host #ScarySocial on Saturday, and I am one of the five hosts of Mastodon’s #MondayActionMovie ! Every week, we get together. We watch a movie. We snark our way through it.

Tonight, for #MondayActionMovie, the film will be 1994’s Double Dragon! Selected and hosted by Bunny Hero, this movie features double the action! So, you know it has to be good!

Following #MondayActionMovie, Brad and Sierra will be hosting the #MondayMuggers live tweet. We will be watching 1990’s Blue Steel! The film is on Prime and Tubi!

It should make for a night of fun viewing and I invite all of you to join in. If you want to join the live tweets, just hop onto Mastodon, pull up Double Dragon on YouTube, start the movie at 8 pm et, and use the #MondayActionMovie hashtag! Then, at 10 pm et, switch over to Twitter and Prime, start Blue Steel, and use the #MondayMuggers hashtag! The live tweet community is a friendly group and welcoming of newcomers so don’t be shy.

VGM Entry 16: A question of authorship (part 2)

Posted on August 14, 2012 by necromoonyeti

VGM Entry 16: A question of authorship (part 2)
(Thanks to Tish at FFShrine for the banner)

Castlevania was released on the Nintendo first, but only by a period of one month. Vampire Killer was in development alongside it, and the two games are certainly not identical. It’s rather disappointing then that the soundtrack turned out to be a hasty port from the NES. Preserving Kinuyo Yamashita’s melodies was not the mistake here, but Konami should not have attempted to replicate the NES arrangements as closely as possible. Differences in technology meant an exact replica was not possible, and the result comes off as a dumbed down version of the NES music rather than a new spin of equal merit. Failure to consider a system’s unique limitations produced a soundtrack that just wasn’t that great.

This is just as much of an issue in reverse, with artists taking too much comfort in superior sound quality. Arcade games seem to have had it best in the pre-Genesis 1980s (and perhaps afterwards too.) My primary example thus far, Hisayoshi Ogura’s Darius, is probably unfair, because it is a reasonable contender for the title of greatest video game soundtrack of the 1980s. But having heard the miraculous feats it accomplished, let’s take a look at another arcade soundtrack: Double Dragon, composed by Kazunaka Yamane for Technos Japan (not to be confused with Tecmo) and released in 1987.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1136QL5RWk

Now here is a soundtrack that shamelessly exploits the sound capabilities of an arcade machine if ever I’ve heard one. The bass is massive for its day, almost as a novelty. The tunes laid over top of it have a somewhat obnoxiously shrill quality made worse by one of the worst drum tones I have ever heard. The troubles just amplify in the next song, as you are forced to accept that the drum beats are truly an afterthought totally devoid of value. The song that kicks off at 7:10 sounds like elevator music. The only redeeming value is that groovy track at 2:40 that emulates every stereotype in the book and (that dreadful plague-ridden snare that just won’t die aside) just happens, almost as a fluke, to pull it off. My sincerest apologies to Kazunaka Yamane, especially in consideration of the possibility that this arrangement may have been completely out of his hands, but this whole soundtrack is just absolute garbage.

A lot of soundtracks are. Don’t take it too harshly.

Abysmal arrangements killed the arcade original, not Yamane’s compositions in the raw. But then the game was ported to the NES a year later. Whoever headed up the project–perhaps Kazunaka Yamane himself–decided it would be a good idea to retain all of the arcade version’s original tunes. The outcome couldn’t have been better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUoIZwHJlzI

Of course the contrast fluffs my opinions a little, but I think this really kicks ass. With the Nintendo’s monumental dearth of bass it was no longer possible to pretend that technology-exploitation could sell a game, so for starters the music compensates by blasting out at warp speed. The tones are all complimentary. The drumming, while still pretty dismally bland, is more of a non-entity than a nuisance, and it at least incorporates a little variation. And the shear ingenuity required to take that utter crap and make a solid go at it is commendable. I’d mentioned that the groove track at 2:40 was the arcade version’s only redeeming quality. But it was total bass exploitation–probably one of the hardest tracks in the game to convert. No? Skip up to 2:37 in the NES version (bless your attention to detail Garudoh). They pulled the style conversion off flawlessly.

The NES port of Double Dragon might deserve credit as one of the best CPR moves in the history of gaming music, if nothing else. It’s not my favorite soundtrack by any means, but I admire whoever accomplished it. It almost feels like a sort of proto-Mega Man.

But that’s the question these rampant port projects in the mid to late 80s have me stuck on. Who was responsible for them? Short of conducting personal interviews, how will I ever find out? Maybe Kazunaka Yamane redeemed himself in epic fashion, or maybe someone else arranged it, or, maybe having written the basic songs, Kazunaka Yamane had little further say in any of the game’s arrangements.

Did I mention Double Dragon was ported to the Sega Master System too? Yeah, that version retained all of the original melodies too, and reconstructed them in a third entirely different way. Ay yai yai….