The 1994 movie Kylie Minogue wants to delete from history: “How diplomatic do I have to be?”
Lots of people are banging on about the 1990s at the moment, and that’s understandable in some ways, because a lot of it was great.
There was Oasis, and some amazing movies, some decent fashion and no social media for a start. But there was also plenty of bad stuff, like a Jean-Claude Van Damme film called Street Fighter, and Kylie Minogue was in it.
Now, Kylie may want this to be erased from history entirely, and that would be understandable, but to be honest, she doesn’t really have to do much because most people have a) forgotten this film ever existed and b) certainly don’t remember that she played a leading role in it.
The movie was adapted from the classic Capcom beat ‘em up video game that had emerged in the late 1980s, but had really exploded in popularity in 1991 thanks to the release of the sequel, Street Fighter II. Van Damme, to give him credit, was a very big name indeed in the early ‘90s, the ‘Muscles from Brussels’ sitting on a tier just below the likes of Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone, with violent hit films like Bloodsport, Universal Soldier and Timecop under his tightly fastened belt.
Featuring all the best-known characters from the game, including Colonel Guile, Ryu, Ken Masters and Chun-Li, and packing a budget of around $35million, everything was in place for the film to do well in cinemas, and actually it did register as a reasonable hit, bringing in almost $100m at the box office.
Critically, however, it was absolutely panned, and the supporting cast may well have been part of the reason for that. Because Van Damme demanded so much money to take part, almost a quarter of the entire budget in fact, lesser-known names were drafted in to play the secondary characters, and while Kylie was a famous pop star in Europe and Australia, she was not famous in the United States.
She did have some movie experience, though, having appeared in a teen drama called The Delinquents, and so she signed on as Lieutenant Cammy White, AKA Killer Bee, although the experience wasn’t one she particularly cared to remember, as she recalled when asked about it, “How diplomatic do I have to be? The best part was learning some martial arts with [American kickboxer] Benny Urquidez. It was a crazy trip of an experience. And not one that’s at the top of my résumé, but one that I’m always asked about nonetheless.”
To be fair to Kylie, filming on Street Fighter does not seem to have been a straightforward exercise. One of the stars, former Addams Family actor Raúl Juliá was on the brink of dying from cancer, some of the scenes in Bangkok that were due to include helicopters couldn’t be filmed due to violent instability in neighbouring Myanmar so they had to use boats instead, the director ended up deferring his salary so the cast got paid, and Van Damme was in the midst of a cocaine addiction, sometimes refusing to leave his trailer and often bringing alcohol to the set.
Nevertheless, the movie has found something of a cult following decades later, thanks to the ‘so bad it’s good’ factor, even if Kylie doesn’t want to think back on it too often.
