5. It can’t be as bad as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III
And speaking of something much worse, one thing we can all agree on is that Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will not be as bad as the awful, horrendous and downright insulting Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.
Every franchise has black marks on their record and nothing has a flawless run, but some don’t come quite near as bad as the 1993 third entry into the live action franchise.
Because the dark tone of the Steve Barron’s 1990 movie, New Line (pushed by angry parents) felt that the movies needed to be a lot lighter and fluffier. Its sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, was just that. The Turtles didn’t swear, they didn’t use their weapons and the whole movie was more comedic – even leading to a music performance with Vanilla Ice.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III however took things too far.
It’s hard to know where to begin with how bad the movie is. The costumes are worse, the story is stupid, the jokes are lame and the action flat out sucks. It was the Batman and Robin of the Turtles franchise and it killed their movie business dead until it was resurrected in 2007, which was mostly down to the success of the 2003 series.
This new version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles might not be great. It might even be horrible. But they will have to do something pretty spectacular to be as bad as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III.
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So there you have it. You won’t find many articles praising the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie and quite rightly so. It has a director with a poor track record and a producer known for treating his explosions with more care than his characters. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to be excited about
It might still be garbage – and it probably will be, but as Master Splinter once said, “have patience my sons, it might be good”.
Okay, so he only said the first half of that.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published June 26, 2014. Updated December 13, 2019.
