STREET FIGHTER (2026) is the new film based on the Street Fighter video game franchise. I have less of an affinity for Street Fighter than Mortal Kombat since it’s not one of the few games I’ve played, but come on. Larger-than-life characters who live to engage in martial arts competitions, sometimes with cartoonish powers? Obviously it piques my interest. Maybe I’m even the prime audience for this movie since I’m Interested In This Sort of Shit (IiTSoS) but with no preconceived notions of how these characters or concepts need to be adapted. And I have evidence to support this theory.
1. I thought STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI was kind of fun. It has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. I went to see this with a friend who’s a games journalist and he had all kinds of complaints afterwards that I didn’t relate to.
3. When the first trailer came out that showed this version’s cartoonish approach, the buzz on the internet seemed to be “that looks like the absolute worst shit ever shat from a butt,” but when I saw it I thought, “Oh wow, I gotta see that!”
I was also intrigued to read that director/co-writer Kitao Sakurai was one of the main people behind The Eric André Show and also directed André’s very funny movie BAD TRIP. That’s just not who you would expect to do a video game movie, suggesting it could be something interesting. Had I known that Sakurai had, as a child actor, made his debut in BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK, that would’ve also been a selling point too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Y2K is a 2024 horror comedy that’s the directorial debut of Kyle Mooney. You may or may not know Mooney as a Saturday Night Live cast member from 2013 to 2022, but he also co-wrote and starred in a weird movie called BRIGSBY BEAR (2017) and I would highly recommend Saturday Morning All Star Hits! (S.M.A.S.H.!), an eight episode parody of ‘90s children’s programming he co-created in 2021. This shares with those a surface appearance of millennial nostalgia but with such specific pop cultural observations and such weird comedy ideas that it never feels like “Hey, remember that!?” in a bad way. The joke isn’t ha, we used to have VHS, it’s that an evil VCR kills somebody by ejecting a dubbed and hand-labelled VARSITY BLUES at their head.
