Fatal Fury The Motion Picture

As with its contemporary Street Fighter II, this adaptation of a beat-'em-up console game struggles and ultimately fails to make the jump to non-interactive media, though not without some incidental pleasures on the way. Viz's dub is perfectly serviceable, albeit with some unplaceably alien accents from the supporting cast that only add to the fun as one tries to guess whether someone is supposed to come from Oirlend or Scutlund. With overmuscled men meeting, greeting, indulging in strange acts, and then parting, it has a strangely homoerotic charge, peppered with sanctimonious moral messages about the nobility of fighting for what is right but without questioning whether anyone should be fighting at all.

FF: Legend of the Hungry Wolf (1992) sets up the original back story to the game, in which Terry and Andy Bogard witness their father's murder and become bare-knuckle fighters, in a tournament plot not unlike Tekken, eventually avenging him by defeating his murderer Geese Howard. Mere months later in FF: The New Battle (1993), Howard's half-brother, Wolfgang Krauser, returns to challenge Terry. With time out to reunite a street urchin with his mother in a halfhearted subplot, Terry soon hunts Krauser down to a showdown in a German castle, while other characters pop out of the woodwork for a few rounds to please their fans. The franchise reached theaters at its peak with FF: The Motion Picture (1994), which dumped at least part of the "you killed my father" plotting in favor of an Indiana Jones rip-off. Laocoön Gaudeamus is searching for the legendary Armor of Mars (compare to Jackie Chan's Armor of God, 1987), lost by his ancestors during the Crusades. His estranged sister, Sulia, hires Terry to stop him before he can use the armor's magical powers, in a plot that presages Spriggan, though it was too late to save the tired and formulaic FF franchise. V