By DANNY GALLAGHER

It's not often a reader asks me to print a correction or a retraction about a column. But when one does rear it's ugly head in my email inbox, my immediate reaction is to read it calmly, consider my mistakes and throw it in the trash hoping no one will realize my careless and reckless disregard for the truth.

Alert "Movies that Suck" reader Jim Smith of Bellevue, Washington writes:

"While I'm certainly no fan of 'Street Fighter' (there are those of us callus enough to believe that it might have actually killed Raul Julia), it was not (Jean Claude) Van Damme's worst work.

"Did you forget the 1989 JCVD classic 'Cyborg'?!?! The raw emotion as he screams for five minutes trying to show... trying to show... he was trying emote something. Anyway, bad, bad, bad."

Dear God, how could such a huge mistake have escaped from my keen editing eye.

It's hard to convey the embarrassment I'm feeling right now. This is worse than the time at summer camp when someone ran my underpants up the flagpole and a commercial plane flying overhead mistook it for a windsock and crashed into a mountain.

I haven't felt this embarrassed since the girl I took to the high school prom turned out to be a raging lesbian. Well, I don't know that for sure, but it's a much more assuring explanation for why I didn't get any that night.

This seemed like too big of a mistake to miss. After all, "Street Fighter" is pretty bad, but could "Cyborg" be worse? I had to find out for myself.

Luckily, the friendly neighborhood video store had a VHS copy on their $1.99 shelf along with plenty of Dolph Lundgren flicks that no one has seen since 1984, a flood of straight-to-video titles that got there so fast there's a permanent breeze in the front of the store and enough copies of "Gigli" to supply all of the Iraqi prison guards with enough instruments of torture to last long after the war has ended.

It had been awhile since I've seen "Cyborg" voluntarily, but I was willing to give it a fair shot like I do with every movie. Not five minutes went by before I started looking for the nearest, sharpest object in my reach because I had to nail my hand down to keep it from reaching the remote. That's how committed I was to watching this thing to the end.

Thankfully, I got through the rest of it without stapling my other hand to the coffee table, which would've been hard to do since my other hand was nailed down with a ball-point pen. And, of course, it was a billion times worse than I remembered. But then, so was "Street Fighter" after I watched two weeks ago. Something strange was happening here.

I went back and watched "Street Fighter" again. Boy did it suck. Then, "Cyborg" again. Sucked even more than the first time I watched it. I went back to "Street Fighter." Yep, it still sucks. Then back to "Cyborg." It sucked just as much as "Street Fighter."

That's when the scariest thought I've ever had since the first President Bush had a heart attack and I realized that Dan Quayle was next in the line of succession entered my mind -- there is no "worst Jean Claude Van Damme movie" because all of Jean Claude Van Damme's movies equally suck.

I ran back to the video store and, after noticing the $1.99 rack had doubled it's "Gigli" collection in under two hours, cleaned the store out of Jean Claude Van Damme movies. Walking up to the counter with an armload of these things, I couldn't have looked like more of a dork if my pants were around my ankles and a group of jocks were carrying me by the back of my underwear.

I watched them all -- "Double Impact," "Knock Off," "Sudden Death," "Universal Soldier," "Nowhere to Run," "Legionnaire." I even rented and watched "Double Team" starring Van Damme and (I'm not making this up) Dennis Rodman. My soul felt unclean after that one. I had to call a priest and everything.

Nearly two days after watching every single Jean-Claude Van Damme movie ever made, none of them stood out. They all equally sucked. Van Damme has no worst movie ever made because they all suck.

So, Jim, you were right, "Street Fighter" is definitely not the worst film he's ever made. I owe you an apology and Van Damme owes us all much more than that.

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©2004 by Danny Gallagher

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