Five Awful Films Based on Great Games

2 – Double Dragon

Technos, Japan

Released: Nov 4, 1994

Cost To Make: $16,000,000

Box Office: $2,341,309

With two of the whitest Asians you could ever imagine, the scene is set for the mighty side scrolling giant Double Dragon to become the porn-film without porn it so obviously set-out to be.

There are accents you can’t place and outfits so fetishist, you’re subconsciously waiting for the tearing of Velcro trousers that reveal the lead characters lunch dragging on the floor behind him. Even the fight scenes are choreographed to include insertion and penetration shots at every opportunity lest the director decides to move the scenes around.

Fight sounds are manly and grunted accordingly; even the martial cries of ‘ha!’ wouldn’t look out of place coming from a round eyed Asian schoolgirl confronting a tentacle thing dripping with lascivious splodge. Ahem.

As much as Labyrinth tried there’s something about weird eyebrows that automatically mark the owner down as a bad’un. Eyebrows that grant them the power to form gangs of brainless bruisers, training them in the noble art of queuing patiently to take their turn testing how firmly set in their jaws their teeth are.

Some nods to the canon and the cliche ‘heroes stand-off’ was seemingly enough to send film makers giggling into their nose candy at the prospect of gamers shelling out for a ticket on opening night. Having learnt nothing from this disaster, Mortal Kombat applied the same rules and threw in a Lambert for good measure, only managing to add weight to the thought Highlander 2 could have been rechristened Mortal Kombat for all the difference it would have made. At least then we would have had Sean Connery too.