This months B Movie Haikus find me in good cheer. In recent times I have seen a few half decent films, and I am still basking in the glow of watching the team I had favoured win the NBA championship for the first time since the mid 90s.
(I am not a Maverick’s fan nor a Rocket’s fan, but as my team the Knicks have not won a title since BEFORE I WAS BORN I reserve the right to pick a team in each conference at the outset of the playoffs to root for. )
Over the years I have seen the Iverson lead 76ers, the Jason Kidd lead Nets and the Stockton/Malone Jazz nearrrrrrlyyyyy get there, and my Knicks made the finals twice only to fall at the final hurdle. Tough 20 years really.
Anyway Mavs won – Kidd and Dirk get a title – OGR happy.
So I head back to the DVD store content in the knowledge that I am almost impervious to pain at this point, so dodgy cinema is the least of my worries…
That’s not to say that these crappy affairs didn’t try to shake my unshakeable mood.
Now before I get into this month’s titles I might enlighten us all with a definition:
Ninja: A member of a class of 14th-century Japanese mercenary agents who were trained in the martial arts and hired for covert operations such as assassination and sabotage. With that in mind…
Mask of the Ninja
Quite often I make my haphazard choices at the DVD rental emporium and head home with no idea of which films might mildly surprise me and which will end up as B Movie Haikus. In general terms I know in advance which will be good or bad, but it takes a special film to be ‘B Movie Haiku bad’, sometimes I’m half an hour into the movie before I make the call.
With Mask of the Ninja it was around the 4 minute mark that I stopped jotting down bullet points and started to hyphenate my comments…
This shiny example of misguided talent finds a man so desperate to be James Van Der Beek that on top of looking sorta like him he also has one of those ‘I’m so handsome and mysterious I need more than 2 names’ names.
The Plot
Big Biz Man dies by nin-ja
Jack must save his girl
Who is the key to the case
The Action
Nin-jas run round in o-pen*
Ig-nore nin-ja ways
Sil-ent and un-seen? Nuh-uh!
In Summation
I re-ally won-der some-times
At what point does it,
Be-come a-bout the pay-cheque???
Final Rating – 3.5 / 10. Perhaps next time the filmmakers might do more research than wikapedia-ing ‘ninjas’ before slapping together 84 minutes of dire laziness? (Perhaps next time I might read the back of the DVD cover to see that this was ‘Made for TV’, and therefore wouldn’t have the nudity I was secretly expecting?)
Clive Barker’s: The Plague
As I wrote recently in my review of Midnight Meat Train the phrase ‘Clive Barker presents’ isn’t necessarily a guarantee of quality.
Here is a film that single-handedly dilutes the descriptor for all such films that follow.
The Plot
Kids un-der 9 all pass out
All cat-a-ton-ic
Len-non-esque ‘In-stant Ko-ma’
The Action
10 years la-ter. All wake up.
And get to kil’lin’
Dawson and buds must stop them
In Summation
A gen of dumb help-less kids
Force fed and nose-wiped
Just how is that diff-er-ent?
Another film that I later found out was a made for TV special. Though I should have guessed with James Van Der Beek in a lead role.
Perhaps the only people that should be scared by an entire generation of kids ‘skipping a decade’ are The Wiggles and Dora the Explorer, who would only have stoners and people too lazy to find the remote as their audience.
Final Rating – 4 / 10. Another dumb film where people fall for the same zombie convention cliches: “But it’s my kid. I can’t shoot it in the head.” (CHOMP) and “I don’t understand. I just shot it in the chest!” (DEATH).
Ninjas Vs Vampires
Finally we have the dream pairing of two of the more celebrated characters in film. Together at last on the one crappy film by someone with a limited imagination.
By the way, as we are told frequently in the early goings that gent is Justin Timpane. Way to go (nowhere) Justin!
The Plot
Vam-pires are bad. Nin-jas rule.
Vamps have deep voi-ces
Like vamps, nin-ja is dis-ease
The Action
They tried… O-K pro-duc-tion
Cre-a-tive (flawed) script
Jokes and ac-tion bad… but there
In Summation
Not a good e-nough i-dea
To bag out Twi-light
By ma-king stuff e-ven worse
Final Rating – 3.5 / 10. A film that is almost as terrible as it is earnest, and it is quite earnest. Points at least for trying, but ultimately to be a decent film you’ve gotta do better than the ‘best’ SFX that a cheap laptop can come up with and some near nudity.
Well that’s another month or so gone. We scraped the barrel this time but with three flicks averaging an awful but not all-time awful 3.5ish what we have here is three crappy films without anything memorably bad.
For some reason watching simply uninspired badness is almost worse than genuine ‘worst ever’ films. All of the pain with none of the incredulous laughs…
Until next time.
OGR
