Previously on My Troma Summer

What happened was this: while filming the second Toxic Avenger sequel on location in Japan, Troma, Inc. co-founders Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz somehow got hooked up with Toxie fans Tetsu Fujimura and Masaya Nakamura, big wheels at Namco, the Japanese video game company responsible for Pac Man, and the foursome entered into a deal to create a Kabuki-themed superhero movie with a $1.5 million dollar budget, the most lavish in Troma history.

Of course, I didn’t know any of that at the time. I’d only just received a call from a guy named Andy (soon-to-be First A.D. of the project, then titled Kabukiman), who’d invited me to come down to Hell’s Kitchen and join the Troma Team for the princely sum of fifty dollars a week.  In New York City.   

Fortunately, I had a friend from the Harvard Lampoon who lived on the Upper East Side with his beautiful wife from Spain, and they offered me room and board in exchange for my help writing text for a coffee-table book featuring artistic photographs of feces.  It was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

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As a professional film critic, it is my most sacred duty to deliver honest, truthful assessments of the films I am assigned to see — and to review them fairly without prejudice or favor.  It would be a betrayal of my professional and personal standards to review, positively or negatively, a film without actually seeing it. Having said that, here’s a prediction: Saw IV, which opens today nationwide after having been completed approximately three days ago, is going to suck. Now, I say this without having seen Saw IV; for that matter, I say this without having seen Saw I, Saw II or Saw III. For all I know, they’re cinematic masterworks the likes of which Orson Welles could never dare to dream. But let’s face it: the fourth installment in any series, let alone one as misbegotten as the Saw series, has the deck stacked against it from the jump-off. The number of Part 4s that have been worth watching can be counted on one hand; it just so happens that I have five fingers on my left hand, so here’s five fours that aren’t complete wastes of time.

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