Or as I like to call it, "Teenage Mutant Samurai Frogs"!~
The Turtles are back... in time!
The Turtles are back... in time!
Find more TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA REVIEWDS on this very same blog!
Movie: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
Directed by Stuart Gillard
Release date 1993
Genre Chanbara/Science-fiction comedy
Country USA/Hong Kong/Japan
Back in the 1990s, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage. The comics was deemed a cult classic from the 1980s, the toys were selling like no other and by the mid-90s the cartoon was at its highest popularity.
After an amazing first live action movie and second successful sequel, we had to wait two years before we saw another TMNT movie. The hype was unlike anything else, rumors to what stories from either the comic books or the TV series was to be used as a basis for the film ran wild.
What a joke this turned out to be...
There were some ideas to use Shredder's return, as the Super Shredder in TMNT 2 left the idea opened. But in the end, the movie was handled by a whole different crew from the first two films.
This film just goes to show that the rule of most trilogies always apply in Hollywood blockbusters - exceptions aside. The 3rd one always suck.
Japan, 1603. The movie opens with some samurais fighting. This is gonna be a different TMNT movie...
The Turtles hit the screen dancing to ZZ Top!
The story follows our heroes in half shell, as they are sent back in time to the Edo era of shoguns and samurais. Our heroes were about to go on some vacations (?!). April O'Neil comes by to drop some presents to them, she's got hold of some ancient Japanese scepter at the flea market. But turns out that scepter is magical! As much as I'd have preferred to explore where that scepter came from or if that was the plan of some evil bad guy, April disappears into thin air to let place to some Japanese dude from 1603.
Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michaelangelo go to her rescue and follow suit into the "Open Wide the Gates of Time" immediately, and off they go.
The Ninja Turtles arrive in Japan and get separated, find April, get reunited while fighting the local villain Lord Norinaga and an English trader named Walker.
Oh, and Michaelangelo has a sort of romance with a local native Mitsu. Why? Don't even ask...
Okay, let's be honest, the movie isn't "that bad".
There were some good ideas in there. But...
The movie feels like it was written by a kid. I mean, I know it was mostly aimed at children at heart, but that doesn't mean not even trying to make a good film. The first one was great for everyone, the second was a bit cornier, sure, but still decent and simply closer to the cartoon series.
This movie just seem full of missed opportunities.
For starters, why make our heroes cross-time travel with samurais to begin with? Why not ninjas? And I mean, PG ninjas. Not R-Rated ninjas necessary! I call plain lazy writing on this. At least with ninjas you could have used the situation to show the origin of The Foot clan in Japan, but noooooo...!!
The story isn't also very interesting. It feels like a cheap cliché Samurai movie. Not a full blown feature length big budget production. The budget behind this one was about $21 million. That means bigger than the budget from the previous two pictures.
The story seems to be "loosely" inspired by a filler issue from the original Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics. The crossover issue with Dave Sim's Cerebus! In which someone using a very similar scepter to the one in TMNT 3 sent our heroes back to Europe's feudal times. Why make that spinoff story the basis for an entire movie!?
The movie doesn't seem to follow neither the cartoon series nor the original comic books. At least if they weren't going to use any of the zillion popular villains of the franchise, with Shredder's return it would have been miles better than Norinaga and Walker, two uninspired stereotypical villains!
The movie does have some good going for it.
It features Paige Turco (April) and Elias Koteas (Casey Jones) back. The voice cast is also pretty good despite the awful script and lines. Corey Feldman is back from the first movie as Donatello. Brian Tochi (Leonardo) and Robbie Rist (Michaelangelo) are also present, they're the only two to have stayed throughout the entire movie series.
Sadly, most importantly, Jim Henson's studio wasn't behind the costumes and animatronics on this one. The "Samurai Frogs" look specially cheap. All four turtles are identical from the color of their skin to their respective faces. Ugly. They look bad, the animatronics are so off, they're cheesy and the costumes are way too simple for such a big budget production. They look fake and miles away from the more realistic Turtles from the first film. Those awful surreal teeth...
Heck, Splinter wasn't probably even completed since we only see his upper body the entire film!
There's only 3 big battles the whole movie, which is strange considering they're samurais and the villains are also samurais and soldiers,
The film was directed by Stuart Gillard who barely made any movies apart from this one. What a hack! He was also behind the awful RocketMan from 1997 with comedian Harland Williams.
The musical score sees the return of John Du Prez once again. Since this one contains so little 90s song, it's his epic "feudal" composition that carries much of the film.
Overall, such a bad film...
Which is sad to say, there were some good ideas at its core, and it probably is still a funny flick for kids (you might even like it depending on your own nostalgic memories), but...
The movie is filled with so many bad recurring jokes. And it would have made more sense as a filler episode in a TV series or something (why not an episode in the actual cartoon instead?), but absolutely not as a big motion picture "feature length" story!!
TMNT 3 does have a beautiful love story between Mickey and Mitsu going for it.
... Who am I kiddin'?! What were they thinking?!
This one is the worst entry of the TMNT trilogy. Awful costumes, cheap production values. Not many thoughts or production values were put into this one, obviously just a quick cash-in to tie with the popularity from the cartoon and toys.
I give it:
1 / 3 Films!
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