by Steve Barron, 1990.
Starring: David Forman, Judith Hoag, Elias Koteas, Josh Pais, James Saito, Michelan Sisti, Leif Tilden, Michael Turney.
Rating: 7.5/10, 2/10.
Wow, I saw this on my birthday (May 7, send presents), and now it’s June 4 (coincidentally—or IS IT?—my mother’s birthday, send presents), which means I’m almost an entire month behind on my reviews. Oopsadilaisy.
So, on my birthday, my good friend Anne surprised me by calling me up and saying, hey, come over, I want to give you presents and maybe we can watch SpongeBob Squarepants. And I was like, hey, whee, presents and SpongeBob, two of my favorite things. So I went over, and got my second surprise of the day when all of my good friends (at school, that is, I mean, Matthew and Julie, say, didn’t fly out to Ohio to be there) yelled surprise and jumped out at me and gave me presents and soda, which I then spilt (the soda, not the presents). And then Anne picked up the phone and surprised me for the third time when she said, what do you like on pizza? And then the biggest surprise of all came when the pizza guy came and did a sexy striptease for us all. No, just kidding. The biggest surprise of all came when the pizza came, and Anne pulled out a tape from somewhere and said, wanna watch the Ninja Turtles movie? And we all did!
This wasn’t just some random thing, by the way. We’d been planning an order a pizza and watch Ninja Turtles day for a long time, only no one ever had free time all at the same time. So that was way exciting, that they all took time out to do it for my birthday.
And Ninja Turtles...well, it was great. It should get higher than a seven and a half for entertainment, really, but I felt odd doing that. Because the entertainingness of it wasn’t a result of any effort of the filmmakers, really. It’s all in the horrendousness of it. So I don’t know.
What more is there to talk about? The plot’s unimportant, the acting’s unimportant. There are some really funny lines, like when one of the evil punk kids, being shown around the evil punk hideout, says, "Do you have cigarettes here?" and the elder evil punk kid who’s showing them around whips out two cartons and says, in an "I’m a troubled youth" voice, "Regular...or menthol?" Which made me laugh for a good five minutes. Cos menthol smokers, they’re hard. Or how about this exchange, when Casey Jones, faced with the prospect of staying overnight at the Turtles’ sewer hideout, starts getting nervous.
April, or maybe one of the Turtles: You’re claustrophobic.
Casey: Hey! I never even looked at another guy!
How the writers even thought to go from claustrophobic to homosexual is beyond me. Not to mention the puzzling fact that they felt the need to insert this line into a kid’s movie. Odd.