Video game movies have a chequered history. Most of them - like Warcraft, Prince of Persia, Doom and Hitman - are simply awful. Maybe Jim Carrey can break the trend and make an actually-decent Sonic the Hedgehog movie - honestly, it can't be as bad as the Super Mario Brothers movie.

The Street Fighter live action movie definitely features in the 'so bad it's good category', however. It's awful, but at least it's funny. That said, if the comments made by the film's director, Steven De Souza, are to be believed, it's remarkable that they got a film made at all.

De Souza claims that the 'Muscles from Brussels' was absolutely buzzing out of his tree for the entirety of the shoot.

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In a revealing interview with the Guardian, he said: "I couldn't talk about it at the time, but I can now. Jean-Claude was coked out of his mind.

"The studio had hired a wrangler to take care of him, but unfortunately the wrangler himself was a bad influence.

"Jean-Claude was calling in sick so much I had to keep looking through the script to find something else to film; I couldn't just sit around for hours waiting for him.

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"On two occasions, the producers allowed him to go to Hong Kong, and both occasions he came back late-on Mondays he just wasn't there at all."

Obviously, having your headline star off his nut all of the time can't have helped, but it actually sounds like the least of their worries.

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First off, they filmed the whole thing in Bangkok, Thailand, during what can only be described as 'difficult' political times. Thailand was recovering from an incident called 'Black May' during which 52 people were confirmed dead as a result of military crackdowns on a protest in 1992.

During the Street Fighter shoot, an assistant director said that 'a possible coup' was on the cards. Not ideal.

Credit: Universal Pictures

Furthermore, they'd blown most of the budget getting in Van Damme and Raúl Juliá. Juliá played M. Bison and was - by all accounts - fantastic.

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Bizarrely, the cast also included pop star Kylie Minogue as Cammy, as a result of the Australian Actors' Guild wanting de Souza to hire an actor from Down Under for a major part.

Unfortunately, Juliá was suffering from stomach cancer and couldn't fill out his costume, let alone fight against a huge, cocaine-addled Belgian. Street Fighter turned out to be Juliá's last ever film. He died later in 1994.

Raúl Juliá tangles with Jean Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter. Credit: Universal Pictures

As a final insult, the movie was released and subsequently critically panned. Variety called it 'disjointed and far less captivating than the video game that inspired it'.

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Basically, it lurched from fight scene to fight scene without much thought towards actually giving it a plot or, you know, character development. Van Damme gets a few pretty tasty quips in, but that's as much enjoyment as many will get out of it beyond the comedy value.