Not too long ago, I watched an awesomely bad movie called "Over the Top". Sylvester Stallone drives an 18-wheeler (which happens to be outfitted with a weight lifting machine inside of it) for a living. Decides to pick up his brat of a son from boarding school and drive him across the country, teaching him how to be a real American by arm wrestling, and then entering himself into a big tournament so he can win a new truck.
Cheesy? Yeah, but it had that "so bad it's good" feel to it. Whereas, Pocket Ninjas had me and my viewing group of about 8 people in a state of complete torture, and we barely watched 1/10 of the movie!
We flipped throughout different parts of the movie and never saw any real ninjas. Every "fighting" scene involved people wearing clown masks who could most likely pass for Insane Clown Posse juggalos. Skipping throughout the scenes, it looks like the director ran out of ideas to fill in the gaps of the movie, so he decided to just add random training montages constantly throughout the film. Kid you not, I saw at least 3 or 4 different scenes of people in dojos training. They're about as meaningful and relevant as when Family Guy decides to add in 4 minute segments of Conway Twitty performing.
The kicker of this all is that the villain of the movie is a little 10 year old asian kid. I didn't have the patience to watch and figure out why he was the supreme bad ass, but seeing him bark out orders to a grown man was a facepalm moment, for sure.
Flash forward more through the movie and there's more training montages, bad dialogue, and then my group's personal favorite scene: A boy talking to a girl, holding an original Gameboy and pretending to play it, when you can clearly see there is no cartridge in the Gameboy. Now THAT, my friends, is pure win as far as bad movie making goes. Seriously, you couldn't afford $30 or however much it cost to pick up a copy of Tetris?!! C'mon.
I skip to the end, wondering how the final battle of the movie will play out. Any flick with ninja in the title has got to have one, right? Well, for Pocket Ninjas, the little head clan leader kid yells out something about "Sonic Virtual Fighting 3d" or some other nonsensical crap. Then, he and some other kid don a bunch of prehistoric 3D attire, and they end up controlling the bodies of two men who punch and kick each other for about 10 minutes, all the while with cartoonish sound effects playing. The movie was shot in 1994, so I think they were going for a rip off of Mortal Kombat by having this plain looking white guy (Kano?) fight a guy dressed basically as Sub Zero.
Sadly, no fatalities, just a bunch of Looney Tunes sounding punches and kicks, and then the movie is over.
Makes you wonder if "3 Ninjas" was this bad when you watched it as a kid. Let's name the little fat kid Tum-Tum. We can't fail! ...Right?
Indeed that movie had nothing in it that could warranted as "entertainment". But you forgot to mention the epic balloon battle. When they were fighting and balloon rising from EVERYWHERE and scaring them. it made no sense.
ReplyDeleteMark G