BLOCKBUSTER HISTORY: TURTLE POWER

Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie about turtles. They have mutated, lived to become teenagers, and are trained in the arts of ninjutsu. Let us return to a more bodacious time, when this combination of traits was last seen in live-action cinema.

1990's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is among the very highest grossing independent movies ever made. Something about that just sounds quite absurd, right? Not that it was a hit - for those of you not alive in 1990, or too young to remember, the Ninja Turtles franchise was an unbelievably pervasive kiddie cultural juggernaut of a sort that comes along literally once a generation - but that it was an indie production. Nothing about the brand name screams indie, nor does the entirely run-of-the-mill action movie narrative covered by that brand name, nor does the actual onscreen evidence of the money spent making it: the hugely impressive animatronic suits developed by the Jim Henson Creature Shop (it was, in fact, the final project with Creature Shop creations that Henson himself lived to see released) alone seem like they'd be far outside of anything that normally gets referred to as an "indie production". The broad strokes of the design are a bit unpleasant, but that's inherent to the Ninja Turtle concept; and the highly articulated, flexible mouths don't necessarily move in anything like perfect accord with the words the characters are speaking. But as an effect, the range of expressions, maneuverability, and plausibility of the turtles could hardly be improved on if the film was made with all the might of all the studios put together backing them up.

The surprisingly costly and impressive suits are emblematic of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a whole: it resembles a real movie far more than you'd ever think it would, given how it was made, and for what reason. Cashing in on a children's television fad that was even more impressive as a toy line than a cartoon series would suggest not merely a bad film but an absolutely unacceptable and aesthetically offensive one, and TMNT is... I hesitate to say "good". No, no, I can't go on and say something absolutely stupid and silly like that. This is a not-good movie. But it's not good more because of the masters it has to serve than because the filmmakers decided to put their very least amount of effort into making it. Broadly speaking, the film wants to be a strict adaptation of the comic book by Kevin Eastman & Peter Laird, which was a light parody of the then-new Dark Age of comic books, but it also knows that it owes its existence and its audience to the long-running cartoon that started up in 1987, and adopted a vastly more frivolous, afternoon adventure tone than the comic book ever did. It cannot have been a very pleasant job for writers Bobby Herbeck and Todd W. Langen to hammer the material into a shape that served both ends equally, and in the end it feels like exactly the unwieldy hybrid it is: goofy, kid-pandering characters and jokes crossed with a surprisingly dark view of pre-Giuliani New York and enough "damns" and "hells" to make an easily-offended 1990 parent rush for the fainting couch. It's like a movie that couldn't decided between being G or PG-13, and thus ended up at PG mostly by accident and attrition.

The writing is pretty much helpless; adapted from a couple different comic arcs, the screenplay can never quite manage to keep all its subplots and conflicts heading in the same direction at the same speed, and we thus end up with a movie that has the appearance of a story structure more than the fact of one. The plot concerns April O'Neil (Judith Hoag), a news reporter trying to embarrass the NYC government and police administrators into doing something about the weird rash of crimes lately, which rumor and fear have credited to an East Asian crime syndicated called the Foot Clan. She's close enough to truth that the Foot begins to throw assassins at her. Meanwhile, in the sewers, a toxic spill 15 years ago (depicted in a grainy flashback) created mutants out of a five animals: a wise man-sized rat named Splinter (Kevin Clash providing the voice and leading the puppetry team) has trained four man-sized turtles that he has named Raphael (Josh Pais), Leonardo (David Forman in the suit, Brian Tochi voicing), Michaelangelo (Michelan Sisti in the suit, Robbie Rist voicing) and Donatello (Leif Tilden in the suit, Corey Feldman voicing) to practice ninjutsu. Raphael, the angriest and most impetuous of the turtles, is eager to go out and save the world from violence and cruelty, which is how he ends up rescuing April from the Foot in an empty subway station, making her aware of these odd heroes-in-waiting. The downside is that it also brings them to the attention of the Shredder (James Saito, voiced by David McCharen), leader of the Foot, who has splinter kidnapped. This is about as far as a normal plot synopsis can take us; from here on, the film is broadly in the wheelhouse of " the turtles hunt for Splinter and fight the Foot Clan with April and the hockey-themed vigilante Casey Jones (Elias Koteas)", but it's really not the case at all that it follows this arc with anything like dramatic momentum or even, necessarily, clear-cut scene-by-scene causal relationships.

The good news, then, is that for all its shortcomings as a story, TMNT is actually better as an atmospheric light action film set among the grottiest corners of New York that North Carolina could manage to portray. The names of director Steve Barron and cinematographer John Fenner are not likely to be familiar to you (they certainly weren't to me), though Barron spent a healthy chunk of the '90s helming mildly prestigious TV effects showcases, and Fenner shot the decade's first two theatrical Muppet films; but a lack of fame doesn't mean that they didn't have some measure of talent and artistry to throw around, and it's honestly a little surprising just how handsome parts of TMNT end up looking. And even more surprising (though in light of both men's work on the Henson TV series The Storyteller, it shouldn't be), the framing of shots and the blocking of scenes doesn't ever obviously feel like the movie is slowing down or standing back to accommodate the turtle suits. On the contrary, the camera whips around and past them, adding a real sense of excitement to the action that needs all the excitement it can muster; the fight choreography, alas, isn't quite as able to work around the suits as the cinematography proves to be.

The action is bad and the plot is rough and rocky; not the ingredients for a great action film, and TMNT isn't one. But the unapologetically hokey humor and dialogue and characters have their charms for sheer late-'80s kitsch value, though these charms are often meager (Pais playing Raphael as a full-throated Noo Yawker is a pretty regrettable development; and a little bit of the surfer dude vocabulary goes a long way), and the depiction of kid-friendly squalor is impressive; just dark enough to have some real weight to it, without any seriously damaging violence or bleakness. So let's call it a push: not a good movie, but perfectly harmless and soothing. I have no nostalgia for this one, despite being the perfect age for it (I stopped at the cartoon), but worse films have stayed alive in the cultural consciousness for purely nostalgic reasons, and the top-tier creature effects haven't lost an ounce of their effectiveness after nearly a quarter of a century. It's not really worth seeking out, but at least there's nothing to be embarrassed about for those who choose to do so.

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Nosir, you want to know what embarrassed nostalgia looks like, you need to take a peek over here. Though while Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles certainly has its share of grown-ups who do in fact know better still appreciating it, if with abashment, I don't know that anybody really has terribly warm feelings towards Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, a sequel which commits all of the same sins as its predecessor to a worse degree, while sharing none of its strengths.

Secret of the Ooze opened just 357 days after the first movie, which is your first sign of a problem right there. Not even a full year to develop, produce, and complete a sequel leaves precious damn little time to actually make something beyond the most crassly commercial play imaginable, which pretty thoroughly describes this film. Everything about it feels desperately reactionary: in response to widespread complaints that the first film was too violent, even the limited amount of action present in that film has been pared down and sanded off - the titular characters barely use their weapons in combat, and most of the setpieces are dealt with using the rules of animated slapstick, in those occasions when it is permitted to exist at all. The rushed, largely implicit staging of the final confrontation between the turtles and the film's ultimate villain is so perfunctory that it verges on self-parody.

Beyond the issue of violence, the sequel is obviously interested in taking a step or two closer to the cartoon, far more popular than the comic could ever fantasise about being: the humor is broader and noisier, and the original intention was to bring in the mutant animal baddies Bebop and Rocksteady from the TV show, though when Eastman and Laird vetoed that, the characters were retrofitted with some success into a pair of giant mutant animal babies that are close to being the only part of the movie that works in any particular way; there's a puckish sense of humor to them, both at the level of design and performance, that feels like the influence of the Jim Henson Company was stronger than it had previously been - there are echoes of both Fraggle Rock and The Dark Crystal in the new critters, and I, for one, am unlikely to ever invoke either of those titles in a negative sense.'

The film takes place vaguely after the first one ended: the sequences with April (Paige Turco, in a flat, syrupy performance that suddenly makes me realise how much grit and depth Hoag brought to the part) letting the turtles and Splinter (still Clash) bunk in her new apartment while they hunt the sewers of New York for a new safehouse, suggest weeks or months, but the re-introduction of the Shredder (François Chau, with McCharen returning for vocal duties) implies that it's the next day. Whatever the case, April's latest news story is on the massive clean-up by the shady biotech company TGRI, which has apparently been shamed into environmental friendliness after years of nasty, anti-social behavior. A certain Professor Jordan Perry (David Warner) is overseeing the clean-up, which we learn soon enough is related to the toxic ooze that initially mutated the turtles, 15 years ago. Splinter wants answers, but the Shredder wants more mutants, and kidnaps Perry, forcing him to great an accelerated version of the ooze to transform a snapping turtle and wolf into the giant but mentally infantile Tokka (Kurt Bryant) and Rahzar (Mark Ginther - both animals are given their nonverbal vocalisations by Frank Welker). With the help of local karate student and pizza boy Keno (Ernie Reyes, Jr.), Raphael (Ken Troum, voiced by Laurie Faso) infiltrates the Foot Clan, but is immediately captured. Leonardo (Mark Caso, with Tochi returning as his voice), Michaelangelo (once again Sisti and Rist), and Donatello (Tilden again, with Adam Carl providing the voice) go to rescue him and are captured themselves; upon escaping, they recruit Perry to help them stop the Foot before Tokka and Rahzar destroy New York, one block at a time. This involves a fight at a dance club where Vanilla Ice is performing.

I wonder if The Secret of the Ooze could possibly have been going well enough to survive a climactic fight scene set at a Vanilla Ice show, in which he improvises the song "Go Ninja, Go!" at what he thinks to be some kind of complex costume-based performance art piece erupting in the middle of his club. I doubt it - Vanilla Ice represents everything most shameful and happily forgotten about the early 1990s, and what he doesn't represent is covered by the club's purple and blue color scheme. As it stands, that scene represents the moment at which the film tilts from a determinedly mediocre live-action cartoon with all the stakes carefully removed (think of the children!) into "what combative, awful motherfuckery am I watching?" Not in a "so bad it's good way", either; for that we must look elsewhere in 1991, to find Mr. Ice, vindicated from his cameo here, appearing as the lead in the romantic comedy Cool as Ice. Which you need to see, because it is amazing.

Not amazing: The Secret of the Ooze. It's stuck in one mode of constant bouncy comedy that wants badly to strip away all the reality that comes from translating animation into live-action (and if the first film is a hybrid of the comic and the TV show, make no mistake: the sequel is an adaptation of the show with some nods to the comic), and which clashes weirdly with the far more expressive, mobile turtle suits the Jim Henson Creature Shop whipped up this time around, and while it has a more complete "A leads to B leads to C" screenplay than the first one (Langen handled this one all by himself), it's no more compelling for it, with a dull, low-key villainous plot that makes Shredder absolutely unpersuasive as an antagonist.

But why should it have a decent plot? This is an obvious attempt to increase the wackiness and back off on any kind of depth or stakes, with director Michael Pressman indulging all the comic bits and encouraging his actors - especially his turtles, both the suit actors and the voice actors - to go bigger and sloppier and more squirrelly (Warner, an actor whose proportion of terrific performances to shitty films is among the highest in film history, is an exception). It's a brighter film, to its considerable demerit: the sets look more like sets, the suits more like foam rubber, and there's never any sense of danger. Which was the point, of course; but not even a little kid wants to watch something without a sense of danger. The Secret of the Ooze is hellbent on being innocuous, high-spirited fun, but it just comes off as shrill and shallow and dimwitted, and even the superiority of its turtle suits to the first movie can't hide the fact that whatever sleepy charms the original possesses have been completely sandblasted away here.

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1993's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III sure is goddamn bad, but it achieves at least on very important thing that The Secret of the Ooze didn't: it has fighting scenes where the turtles use their weapons in relatively interesting ways. And I'm generally more impressed with the physicality of the suit acting in this film than its predecessors, if not from the standpoint of acting, then at least from the standpoint of martial arts choreography (as Leonardo, Mark Caso returned from Secret of the Ooze; Matt Hill as Raphael, Jim Raposa as Donatello, and David Fraser as Michaelangelo are all new).

But outside of that (and for an action film to actually have, y'know, action, is a pretty big thing, so I don't meant to sound dismissive when I say "outside of that"), TMNT3 is pretty well awful. It fails in exactly the way that the first movie signally did not: it looks cheap as all hell. This is most ruinously the case with the turtles themselves, no longer produced by the industry-leading wizards at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but by All Effects, an effects house of very little special note. For all that, the differences are rather small individually, mostly a matter of facial mechanics that aren't quite as supple and expressive here as in the previous movies. The eyes aren't engaged quite as fully with frowns or smiles, which gives the turtles a distinctly insincere look ("hmph, those robot turtle faces look insincere" is probably not a sane thought to have, but I had it anyway). The way that the turtles' masks crinkled on the Henson suits, looking like cloth being flexed by skin moving underneath, is gone, replaced by far simpler eye gestures that make the masks look exactly like foam that just happens to have been painted a different color than the skin next to them, which is also foam. The skin itself has been bit less texture and a bit more obvious paint, contributing to the impression that it's not real. The mouths have a smaller range of lip movements; not that there was much synchronicity between the turtle mouths and the sounds they were ostensibly making in the first two films, but there was a broader spectrum than "open" or "close".

Again, these are all mostly little things; but cinema is an accumulation of little things. And in the case of TMNT3, all those little things combine to make creatures who are not even a little bit physically persuasive, and if you don't believe in the man-sized turtles interacting with the human characters, then you have no hope left for your film titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the problem with the film's lower production value only begins with the turtle suits; just as worse, this film takes place mostly in feudal Japan, and so instead of making a city look like a slightly more fantastic, grimier city, it's obligated to make sets look like lived-in structures of centuries past. The sets aren't up to it, though, and the movie has enough bright, sunlit scenes to make sure we get a good long look at them, and the crisp, Ren Faire-quality costumes. It's almost sweetly ineffectual, a desperate, plasticky attempt to do Ran on pocket change and hope, but it never comes within a mile of convincing us that it's at all real, and so the film's time travel elements feel artificial, as if it wasn't already enough of a problem that the whole scenario reeks of creative floundering.

And oh, such floundering it is. Writer-director Stuart Gillard, whose background in television prepped him for neither a period piece nor an action movie, can't come up with anything better than April O'Neil (Turco again) buying an ancient Japanese time-travel device by accident at a flea market, and managing to send herself back to 1603, a critical moment in Japanese history that's totally misrepresented, but it is a kid's movie, and a certain bullshit historical inaccuracy is one of the pitfalls of the territory. This movie's time travel rules require that two people swap places with each other to maintain the amount of mass in each time period, meaning that April is replaced with Kenshin (Henry Hayashi), son of the corrupt warlord Lord Norinaga (Sab Shimono) seeking to use English weaponry provided by the trader Walker (Stuart Wilson) in his attempt to subdue the local peasantry. The turtles jump back after her, taking the space of Norinaga's honor guard, and with 60 hours until technobabble space-time continuum, the turtles have to find the time scepter, save April from Norinaga, and help the peasants led by Kenshin's sweetie pie Mitsu (Vivian Wu) fight off the despot, all while being helped and hindered by Whit (Elias Koteas), who bears an uncanny resemblance to their hockey thug buddy Casey Jones (Koteas also) back in New York. As a sign of its clever structure, the film opens and closes with the turtles rocking out in a dance party - more than double the awesomeness of crap kids' films that only have the lack of inspiration to end on such a dance party.

My head says that the rinky-dink production values, and the sheer mindlessness and creative bankruptcy of the time travel scenario are enough to make TMNT3 even worse than its immediate predecessor; my heart says, "but at least it's not mostly a retread of the plot of the first one again". And my very angry spleen at this point starts bellering that my heart and head are goddamn fuckwits for trying to rank the relative quality of the Ninja Turtles sequels. Both of them, in fact, are terrible, though the third one doesn't even have scraps of fun-bad: no newly-commissioned Vanilla Ice rap songs (indeed, no rap at all, just recycled rock), for one thing. It's just a sad little tromp through a peculiar, flailing story, and it looks like absolute hell on the way there. Anyway, it's not half the satisfying "time-traveling Ninja Turtles" experience as the contemporaneous arcade game Turtles in Time, and when you can't make a movie with as much personality as an arcade game whose style and gameplay are functionally identical to multiple other arcade games from the same period, you damn well deserve to have your cinematic franchise puke itself out and die.