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Oh wow you guys! This is going to be like the best movie ever! There's this really awesome cartoon from Japan, and it's actually by the guy who did all the artwork for Chrono Trigger and the Dragon Quest series, and it's about this little kid with a monkey tale that's totally clueless about everything but super strong, and he just wanders all over this really cool diverse RPGish setting with a bunch of weird friends and having wacky adventures and there's this little blue imp guy who chases them around and builds robots, and all this other crazy stuff like a pig and a flying cat who both went to shapeshifting school so they can turn into whatever, and this evil mobster rabbit who can turn people into carrots by touching them, and a skeleton-alien-pirate-robot guarding a submarine, and all kinds of other crazy goofy weird stuff. There's like 150 episodes of it, and I just finished watching all of'em. There's also a couple sequels, but they're all about when the kid's a grownup and it stops being silly and just turns into a bunch of lame grunting and punching and firing energy bolts around. But guess what! A bunch of people from America decided to make a big budget live action movie based on it, and they even went with the original show, not the lame sequel that's all about fighting! AND they even guy the guy who played Spike on Buffy to be the main bad guy. Not the cool blue imp guy, the big green guy from the end of the show. So I guess he probably isn't going to be in it very much. Anyway, I can't wait! This is going to be the BEST!
So yeah. I actually am dead serious in endorsing the original Dragon Ball. At least the first 3 seasons or so. It kind of unofficially turns into DBZ around the time Piccolo shows up in all but name and you can pretty much call it a wrap. Up to there though, seriously, it's a pretty consistently entertaining bit of fun... and it really makes you look down on every other animated series ever by anyone for not having everyone change their clothes now and then. What I'm sitting down to watch though... this is just an abomination. Seriously. Even people hate Dragon Ball were enraged on general principle when trailers for this first appeared. Anyway, we start off with the backstory on the whole Piccolo bit which almost sounds OK but then goes completely wrong. They're like, trying to say Goku's giant monkey form was Piccolo's right-hand guy, and he was imprisoned thousands of years ago in some proper demon imprisoning pot by some mysterious mystic weirdos, instead of like, 50 years ago, in a crockpot, by the guy who trained an old pervert in the martial arts.
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Then we introduce... yeah, there is no way in hell I'm going to call this guy Goku. This complete loser who is not at all like Goku by any stretch of the imagination is training in embarrassing kids' movie martial arts on a clothesline with his grandfather, who then gives him the 4 star dragon ball, and more or less explains what it is, then he goes off to his decidedly American highschool, where he gets picked on by bullies, and my soul dies a little more. Meanwhile in... a dirty patch of straw huts in what I guess is... "somewhere in Asia," some slut with a gun is terrorizing peasants, then Green Spike shows up. Oh and Loser goes to "UniTech Highschool" and I guess it's the future because there's OH GODS I WANT TO DIE because there's random metal stuff and the lockers have card key locks. Anyway, he uses his magic martial arts powers to MAKE THE PAIN STOP to open the locker of some random slutty girl he clearly has a crush on because the background turns into a field of flowers when he's drooling at her in class and... I guess it's a credit to whoever researched this entire movie by glancing at wikipedia for 5 minutes that her name is Chichi, not Bulma, but I'm going to stick with Slutty because... well, I almost never use actual character names for these, but ESPECIALLY not with this movie.
Anyway... it's Loser's 18th birthday, but he's skipping out on his rather offensive asian stereotype grandfather cooling him some nice blackened whole ducks to go to a party at Slutty's where he dodges a bunch of bullies forcing them to smash up their own car instead because... you totally swing hard enough to smash up your car when someone is standing on the other side of it, or something. Anyway, Green Spike, who is wearing some heavy makeup and is dubbed over and probably really resents his name actually ending up on the credits shows up to steal the dragon ball and kinda magically wills the house to implode. Grampa apparently has just enough energy to crawl out, tend a nice little zen rock garden, by his orange tree saplings, and PLEASE MAKE IT END NOW wait around to explain the plot to Loser with his dying breaths. Then Loser... apparently buries him in a rather elaborate home made grave, like, that day and... and.. no? Can we not do this? Can we please not suck this terribly? Please movie? Do you really have to torture me this much this fast?
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So yeah. This girl with a single strand of hair dyed blue who in any other movie I would be totally loving, because she's talking in this cheesy Snake Plissken voice and dual wielding pistols and acusing Loser of stealing "the Promethean Orb" which is what she calls the 5 star ball, because she doesn't actually know what they are... despite having NO! Just no! Five minutes of me not hating you movie! Come on! Just 5 frelling minutes! Despite having build the dragon radar, which we are, of course, calling something stupid. So.. they go to find Chow Yun-Fat who lives in this little apartment building which... is just kind of on a rock with a little bridge leading over to it in the middle of... LA I guess. So they just wander in and knock stuff over and WHAT THE HELL KIND OF TRASHY GIRL ILLUSTRATION IS THAT ON YOUR SHIRT CHOW? Anyway, stupid pointless fight scene and... seriously, Chow Yun-Fat has absolutely no dignity whatsoever. What the heck possessed you to appear in this movie looking like yourself?
So yeah. Looking around for his dragon ball, which he just kinda stashed in a junk closet, Plissken finds a few old sports illustrated swimsuit issues, which we're doing to vaguely attempt to make him roughly similar in one small way to the character of the name I'm not dignifying him with, in a PG movie... just after this scene though, we have Green Spike evaporating a lake with mind powers to find another ball, and for some reason we zoom in on the water droplets as 4 of them combine briefly to form a set of boobs, which hangs there for a couple seconds, bafflingly. I have to remember to screengrab that. Anyway, before that, Chow rambles about this whole crazy 7 day blood moon eclipse apocalypse prophecy. Then after that lake evaporating bit, which I swear existed for no other reason other than to slip in a shot of water boobs to distract the manchildren who are the audience for a moment, Chow briefly mentions how he wants to teach Loser the secrets of airbending. That's not me being cute. Apparently they totally forgot what show it was they were ruining here. It comes up again shortly thereafter too. This is so totally something we're running with.
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So... they go to Chow's ancient training grounds out in the middle of the desert which... has been taken over by a bunch of random highschool kids, wearing aerobics leotards and fighting. Slutty is there. Then they leave. This scene... makes no sense and goes nowhere. Then they just kinda leave, abandoning whatever pretext they had for going there. Then they fall down a big hole, which apparently this surfer dude who I'll just say doesn't have a flying shapeshifting cat hanging out with him dug to... trap people wandering the desert and charge them money to throw a ladder down. Much like Plissken, he's going a certain dorkiness I'd really appreciate in a vacuum. Anyway, Chow flys out to tell him to throw a ladder down for them... because yeah, basically everyone on this movie can just randomly fly when they feel like it.
We cut away for a second to where Green Spike is.... strapping himself into a techno torture chair where 4 syringes poke into his arms and draw some blood, which causes him to do this totally overblown growly scream because... he's a huge wimp I guess? He's just having some blood drawn. Anyway, I guess he does this to make some kinda monster to be fought later. Meanwhile, here's some monsters to fight now. The next dragon ball is in a volcano apparently, but Surfer has a portable drill, because incredibly sloppy writing. So they dig into a volcano, and get attacked by like... spikey bug people, who instantly slorp into a twins when you cut them in half, which is what they do to them for some reason. Then they realize this does no good if they just throw'em into the lava, so they start doing that instead, and then Loser gets the idea that oh hey, they can make a bridge over the lava out of corpses if they dice one up and chop the regenerating pieces in which is kinda cool I guess but pretty WTFy especially since the computer animators fail to show evidence and... OK, I'll get to this scene in a moment, but let me finish up here. So then Green Spike's evil henchgirl with the boob window appears, and they have a pathetic fight, then Loser throws her into the lava. And then when they're leaving we see that as soon as she was off camera she apparently caught the roof somehow and hid which, OK, the audience didn't see that, but Loser was totally looking where he was throwing so this makes no sense.
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This makes no sense either. We immediately cut to Slutty fighting some pleather clad girl in a big stadium because apparently she entered some kind of martial arts tournament and here's Loser coming in to see how she's doing, just missing this fight where Pleather Girl sliced her with a metal finger cover to steal her blood to clone her and how the $#@% did we get to this scene from the last one? First off, I'm pretty sure Pleather Girl is Boob Window because we've only seen the one evil girl so... did like a day or a week or something pass between these scenes? Should there have been some indicator that time had passed, or a cut away to a scene not featuring this characters? Maybe some sort of indicator that this tournament was a thing? Come on people if you're going to make an eye-gougingly terrible movie based on source material you're using as toilet paper, can you at least have the decency to follow basic day one scriptwriting guidelines?
Anyway, again just rapidly cutting to the same characters in a random different setting with no explanation, apparently Loser is in some big ancient temple somewhere, with all the other characters just hanging out, trying to hone his, sigh, air bending techniques. He can't do it, then Slutty comes in and bribes him with sex, then he does it, and they have sex (off camera, but it totally happens) Apparently though it's not really her, it's clone her. Again, establishing the passage of time would help here. And oh, it's not a clone, boob window can shape shift. Hey, isn't there a female character in the official source material who can shapeshift? If they try to assign that name to this character I quit. That'd be beyond wrong. Also, have I mentioned that Loser is played by some kind of Poor Man's Shia LeBeouf? Also, is this random old black dude whose temple they've apparently been at Ernie "Winston" Hudson? For that matter, is he supposed to be Mr. Popo?
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Green Spike was imprisoned in a magic pot 2000 years ago. And oh, apparently he has all the dragon balls. You know what that means, right? It means he can put them all in a pedestal that summons a bid tower out of the ground in the big featureless desert. What did you think I was going to say? It summoned a dragon or something? Don't be ridiculous. Anyway, the good guys are driving there by jeep, then drive off a cliff, then the jeep's wheels flip under and fire out rockets, forming a vehicle too dorky to fly in freaking M.A.S.K. Loser faces off with Green Spike and tells him that he will defeat Osaru. Who the @#$% is Osaru again? Oh right, big monkey form. That's... still pretty random. Now we're saying that Loser was sent to earth as a baby from space, to hang out until he's 18, and be reborn as Green Spike's loyal henchthing on his 18th birthday during the blood moon eclipse. So I guess this is something Green Spike set up 18 years ago... but wait, we just said he was stuck in a magic pot for 2000 years so... yet another plot hole. Anyway, he uses the power of love and friendship to turn back to normal and hey start throwing red and blue energy blasts at each other. I almost forgot to say though, that evil monkey form? It's not even giant. It's.... actually quite a bit smaller than an actual gorilla. Just, you know same ol' human teen size he was to start with. Meanwhile Plissken and Boob Window are in this incredibly narrow corridor about 3 meters away unloading about 100 pistol rounds each at each other and not hitting a thing, then Surfer comes up and clubs Boob Window over the head.
So then Loser shouts kamehameha and jumps at Green Spike and this low-velocity mid-air collision apparently bloodlessly kills him. This is more of that wikipedia research because that's actually pretty close to how Goku kills Piccolo... except he doesn't so much jump towards him as through him. Seriously, he just kinda does this energy beam propelled areal charge and literally just human canon ball's straight through his chest. So thanks for making me briefly think of one of the more lame moments in a decent show there for a second movie. Oh and then they actually do summon the dragon to have it revive Chow Yun-Fat who apparently died somewhere in there... I think maybe Monkey-Loser strangled him to death or something. Then he goes to flirt with Slutty n this weird fashion where she says he only knocked her unconscious instead of he evil shapeshifter because she let him hit her. So... either she's a transparent liar or deeply into the S&M scene because why the $%@# let someone knock you unconscious when it allows the evil shapeshifter disguised as you to abscond like that? Oh, and yeah, that WAS Ernie Hudson. I'm getting pretty good at picking him out when I see him. Glad to know he's still getting work, even if it's just bit parts in terrible movies. I think he might actually be the least afflicted by the Curse of Ghostbusters. Well, except Sigourney Weaver of course. She's recently been in actually good movies. Like Avatar, and @#$% you it was so.
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Anyway, we have the major credits, where I learned that, and also that someone in this movie was played by an actor with the amazingly awesome name Texas Battle, then we've got this too long scene of some girl who... I guess is Boob Window but it appears to just be some random other girl in Ancient Rural Asia making fresh tea to bring to Green Spike, who apparently didn't die from that totally non-injury causing attack... way to confirm your kill there Loser. So yeah, he's still alive to come back in the sequel. Which they're totally going to make because this was such a well received movie that people watched for reasons other than morbid curiosity. And.... it was Carey Fuller who was played by Texas Battle. Uh. OK? I absolutely fail to recognize most of these names in the credits. Nobody's actual name was given besides those people I made a point of not using the names of, but apparently in the script, there were official names for like a dozen minor characters not worthy of naming, and the credits go with those. Since it's pretty much an order of appearance thing I CAN at least confirm that no, Boob Window was not supposed to be Puar, which would really have just made me vomit with indignity. She was supposed to be... Mai apparently. You know. Emperor Pilaf has those two sidekicks, the dog and the rather normal girl, Shu and Mai? So yeah. Come to think of it, why actually try (and fail) to run with Piccolo when you're so clearly doing some vague terrible cliff's notes atrocity of the first plot arc, and using the badguy's sidekick from it, roughly in proper fashion? Don't try and tell me it's a dignity thing when you're actually running with a character introducing herself as "Bulma Briefs." Also, deleted scenes: "Mai dies by stabbing." Same thing as what I mentioned, but with a knife in her back. And the regenerating bug things are apparently called Fulums, as explained by this other deleted scene. Yeah, I've still got nothing on that one.
So... yeah seriously. That was painful to watch. It was bad enough just knowing it existed. At least now I have closure or something. Special features here really are weird though. There's some deleted scenes, which are like, nothing. Then there's "Goku's Workout" where the two fight choreographers try to make some kind of no budge exercise video, which looks about as effective as the uh... wait, this movie had fight choreography in it? I seriously don't recall anything approaching an actual fight that didn't just kind of involve pointing at eachother and firing energy wads. Oh right, people punched the air now and then while people nowhere near them dodged. Then there's a terrible music video for no good reason, for a song I don't recall being in he movie, and a "gag real." And... no. I would definitely remember if this terrible song were actually in this movie. It's... flamboyantly gay dance club music. I mean no disrespect to flamboyantly gay dance club music associating it with this movie, but, that's what this is. Seriously though, why is this here? Also, I just noticed that this movie makes dragon ball one word. Weird.
