Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 1993 – Starring: Paige Turco, Stuart Wilson, Sab Shimono Released: March 17, 1993 Director: Stuart Gillard Genre: Action, Adventure, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Sci-Fi Country: USA Stream Now Tim’s Rating: Seize Your investment:
Each week this summer, we’ll take a historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by looking at a previous film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s biggest releases. This Week: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie about turtles. They have mutated, lived into their teens, and trained in the arts of ninjutsu. Let’s go back to a more dynamic era, when this combination of features last appeared in live-action cinema.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 1993
1993’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III is certainly bad enough, but it accomplishes at least one very important thing that TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze didn’t: It has fight scenes where the turtles use their weapons in relatively interesting ways. And overall, I’m more impressed with the physicality of the suit at play in this film than its predecessors, if not from an acting standpoint, then at least from a martial arts choreography standpoint (as Leonardo , Mark Caso is back from The Secret of Ooze; Matt Hill as Raphael, Jim Raposa as Donatello and David Fraser as Michaelangelo are all new).
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Iii
But other than that (and having an action movie, you know, action, is a big deal, so I didn’t mean to sound dismissive when I say “other than that”), TMNT III is pretty good. awful. It fails in exactly the same way as the first movie: it looks cheap as hell. This is the most devastating case of the turtles themselves, which are no longer produced by the master magicians at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but by All Effects, an effects house of very little special note. However, the differences are quite small individually, mainly a matter of facial mechanics that are not as flexible and expressive here as in the previous films. The eyes aren’t as engaged with scowls or smiles, giving the turtles a distinctly insincere look (“hmph, those robot turtle faces look insincere” probably doesn’t make sense, but I had it anyway). ). The way the turtle masks wrinkled on Henson’s costumes, which looked like fabrics flexing from the moving skin beneath, is gone, replaced by much simpler eye gestures that make the masks look like foam that’s been stretched. painted with a different color than the skin next to them, which is also foam. The skin itself is slightly less textured and slightly more prominently colored, contributing to the impression that it is not real. Mouths have a smaller range of lip movements. Not that there was much synchronization between the turtles’ mouths and the sounds they apparently made in the first two movies, but there was a wider range than “open” or “closed.”
Again, these are mostly little things. but the cinema is an accumulation of small things. And in the case of TMNT3, all these little things combine to create creatures that aren’t physically convincing at all, and if you don’t believe in human-sized turtles interacting with human characters, then you have no hope for your movie. titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the problem with the film’s lower production value only starts with the turtle costumes. What’s worse, this film is mostly set in feudal Japan, so instead of making a city look like a slightly more fantastical and grim city, it’s forced to make the sets look like inhabited structures from centuries past. The sets don’t quite match, however, and the film has enough bright and sunny scenes to make sure we get a good look at the crisp, Ren Faire-quality costumes. It’s almost sweetly ineffective, a desperate, plastic attempt to make Ran have coins and hope, but it never goes a mile to convince us it’s real, so the film’s time-travel elements feel contrived, as if they were not. .” It’s not enough of a problem that the entire script reeks of creative obstruction.
And oh, it’s so tricky. Writer-director Stuart Gillard, whose television experience has prepared him neither for a period play nor an action movie, can’t think of anything better than April O’Neil (Turk again) shopping for an old Japanese travel device. accidentally back in time at a flea market and manages to return to 1603, a pivotal moment in Japanese history that’s completely miscast, but it’s a kids’ movie and some silly historical inaccuracy is one of the area’s trappings. The time travel rules in this movie require two people to swap places to maintain the amount of mass in each time period, which means April is replaced by Kenshin (Henry Hayashi), son of the corrupt warlord Lord Norinaga (Sab Shimono) who seeks to use English weapons provided by merchant Walker (Stuart Wilson) in his attempt to subjugate the local peasantry. The Turtles jump after her, taking the place of Norinaga’s honor guard, and with 60 hours remaining in the techno-talk space-time continuum, the Turtles must find the Scepter of Time, save April from Norinaga, and help the villagers are led by Kenshin’s sweet pie, Mitsu. (Vivian Wu) battles the despot, all while being aided and abetted by Whit (Ilias Koteas), who bears an uncanny resemblance to his hockey partner Casey Jones (also Koteas) in New York. Showcasing its clever structure, the movie opens and closes with the turtles rocking out at a dance party, more than twice as awesome as crappy kids’ movies that just lack the inspiration to end at a dance party.
My head says that the rinky-dink production values, and the sheer nonchalance and creative bankruptcy of the time travel script are enough to make TMNT3 even worse than its immediate predecessor. my heart says, “but at least it’s nothing more than a rehash of the plot from the first time again.” And my very angry spleen at this point is starting to say my heart and head are going crazy because I’m trying to rank the relative quality of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequels. Both are, in fact, terrible, though the third doesn’t even have bits of funny nastiness: no new Vanilla Ice rap song (actually, no rap at all, just recycled rock), for one thing. It’s just one sad little step through a strange, lightning-fast story, and it seems like absolute hell on the way there. Still, it’s not half the satisfying “Time Traveling Ninja Turtles” experience as the modern arcade game Turtles in Time, and when you can’t make a movie with as much character as an arcade game whose style and gameplay are functionally identical to many other arcade games from the same era, you deserve to see your movie franchise blow up and die.
Turtles Iii (1993)
Reviews of this series Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Barron, 1990) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (Pressman, 1991) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (Gillard, 1993)
Categories: Action, Blockbuster History, Comics and Superheroes, Crimes Against Art, Indies and Pseudo-Indies, Martial Arts, Kids’ Movies, Unnecessary Sequels, Daring Talking Animals
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