The Screengrab : turbo: a power rangers movie

Unwatchable Recap: 61-70

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

Welcome to part four of the Unwatchable halftime report. New Unwatchable content is coming soon (watch this space tomorrow for a special announcement), but before we tackle the 50 worst movies of all time according to you, the IMDb voters, we’re taking a moment to look back at the horrors we’ve already survived. And remember, when I say “we,” I really mean me. I’m the one who actually has to watch that stuff. Your part of this process is simply to read what I write and laugh at my expense. Join me now for another ten classic moments in the annals (or perhaps anals) of Unwatchable.

70. Epic Movie. “The only good news is that, much like Spartans, Epic Movie barely crosses the 60 minute mark before the extended credits, complete with dance sequences and hee-larious outtakes, begin.”

69. The Perfect Holiday. “So far so bland, but on the family holiday movie scale, there’s nothing out of the ordinary to justify The Perfect Holiday’s place in the Bottom 100. Except…I haven’t mentioned Queen Latifah and Terrence Howard, have I? Well, they’re in the movie too, although I’m not sure I could tell you why. I guess they’re angels or magical elves or…some sort of shape-shifting Greek chorus, anyway.”

68. Kazaam. “To his credit, Shaq does an admirable job of convincing us that he is, in fact, seven feet tall. Honestly, I would place little of the blame for Kazaam’s failures at the big man’s big feet, even if they are encased in goofy pointy-toed genie shoes for much of the running time.”

67. Nine Lives. “As a blizzard swirls outside, the very, very boring young people drink wine and exchange snooty quips. One of them – it’s either Tim or Tom or Pete or Paul or Andy, I’m not sure – finds a musty old tome telling the tale of the ancient Scot warrior whose name alone evokes the most primal of terrors: it is he who is called…Murray.”

66. Jail Bait. “Wait – the gun is jail bait? Oh, Edward D. Wood, Jr.! I see what you did there! You got me again.”

65. Meet the Browns. “Basically what we have here is another bowl of Tyler Perry’s usual tepid gumbo of sermonizing, self-help platitudes and ham-handed ensemble comedy.”

64. Angels’ Brigade. “Reasonable people can disagree as to the film’s moment of greatness. Some would single out the beach scene in which the gals strip down to their bikinis and seduce a couple of yahoos responsible for bringing a drug shipment ashore, or perhaps the slow-moving rooftop chase in which Palance barely breaks a sweat in his leisure suit. I would point to the white supremacist group led by Jim Backus in a Sgt. Pepper outfit.”

63. Alone in the Dark. “Of the many fine and noble reasons to take on this Unwatchable project (a paycheck, an outlet for repressed hostility, an excuse to put off watching Berlin Alexanderplatz), the chance to familiarize myself with the oeuvre of Uwe Boll certainly ranks…somewhere.”

62. Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie. “I always associated the Power Rangers with the Teletubbies: Both were programs that, although intended for children, held great appeal for the 420 crowd. Both centered on a group of color-coded characters, one of whom was gay.”

61. Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie. “There are episodes of He-Man from 1983 that are more artistically accomplished.”

71-80
81-90
91-100

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Nov. 8-14, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Lazenby. George Lazenby. You know, I like to think I’m a good sport. I played James Bond once forty years ago, and I’ve never heard the end of it. How would you like to wake up at 3 a.m. to answer a ringing phone and hear “You suck, Lazenby!” Not just once, but many, many times. And just this week, the Screengrab abounds with Bond material. James Bond’s Top 007 Cocktails. Quantum of Solace review. Bondage Bloggage. And the Best and Worst James Bond Movies of All Time (Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five). And in all of that, I get only one mention – where I’m referred to as “an Australian underwear model.”

I’ll have you know I have a distinguished acting resume that extends far beyond Bond. I played Jor-El in the short-lived 1990 Superboy series, and a burglar on an episode of BJ and the Bear. I starred in The Man from Hong Kong, coming soon to Ozsploitation! And I’ll almost certainly appear in one of The Top 50 Movies of 2009.

Ah well, no sour grapes on my part. Just to show what a good sport I am, let me direct you to a few of my favorite Screengrab posts of the week:

John Belushi’s Screen Test

John Cusack: Political Poet

Unwatchable #62: “Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie”

Take 5: Character Actors Who Take The Lead

Russell Crowe Will Not Wear Tights

Yesterday's Hits, Veteran's Day Edition: The Best Years of Our Lives

Star Trek Showdown III: The Search for Shatner’s Sanity

Unwatchable #62: “Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie”

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

First of all, kudos to whatever marketing whiz came up with that title. I love the modest little shrug it implies. “Yeah, it’s a Power Rangers movie. Whaddayagonnado?”

Your question, assuming you missed a crucial stretch of mid-90s pop culture while on a Peace Corps mission, is “What’s a Power Rangers?” Unfortunately I’m not the best guy to ask. I always associated the Power Rangers with the Teletubbies: Both were programs that, although intended for children, held great appeal for the 420 crowd. Both centered on a group of color-coded characters, one of whom was gay. (At least, I think one of the Power Rangers was gay; I do know that fellow Screengrabber Andrew Osborne and I once hired a Red Power Ranger stripper to perform at a gay friend’s birthday party.)

More specifically, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series that debuted in 1993 was a kiddie show that spliced new scenes featuring American actors with existing footage from the Japanese Super Sentai Series. This was part of the appeal, particularly to stoners: you’d have these five Saved by the Bell-type teens who would morph into a team of superheroes, at which point the show itself would morph into wacky Japanese action sequences. What I didn’t realize until my consultation with Wikipedia is that, although the original Mighty Morphin series ended in 1996, an endless number of spinoffs has kept the Power Rangers on the air ever since. The current series, Power Rangers: Jungle Fury, is the fifteenth variation; Power Rangers: Turbo was the fourth, and was preceded by this 1997 feature film.

Sadly, none of this information has aided my appreciation for Turbo, a truly pathetic money grab that surely resulted in many parents vowing never to take their kids to the movies again. The needlessly cluttered story – the main points of which are repeated ad nauseam just in case anyone in the target audience really gives a crap what’s going on – concerns the villainous, cleavagey Divatox, whose plot to free her fiancé Maligore from an invisible island in the Nemesis Triangle entails kidnapping the dwarfy wizard Lerigot. Only the Power Rangers – now equipped with snazzy new TURBO! powers - can rescue Lerigot and his family and prevent the release of the lava-monster Maligore.

Aside from its Saturday morning production values and acting, Turbo suffers from its mid-90s origins. It’s not old enough to be campy fun, just old enough that the special effects and dork-rock soundtrack (“There’s hope for the world…hope for the world…as long as I exist, there’s hope for the world”) have completely putrefied. Worse than the charisma-free stars and the puppets Sid and Marty Krofft would have rejected and the shots of volcanoes spliced in from ‘60s nature films…worse than all of that is the fact that the creative minds behind Turbo apparently decided it wasn’t pandering enough, so they disable the Blue Ranger in a martial arts match and replace him with an obnoxious little pre-teen turd who spends the whole movie screechin’ at a frequency that nearly gave my dog a seizure. And for that crime, it deserves four Maurys.

Previously on Unwatchable:
63. Alone in the Dark
64. Angels’ Brigade
65. Meet the Browns
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives