Charridy Shop Cinema #3 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Chariddy Shop Cinema #3: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) Saddled with the epithet “The Movie”, this live-action evocation of a comic book phenomenon is actually quite a hoot. I’m glad I waited until now to see it, because, back in the day, apparently it suffered from Head Brit Censor James Ferman’s nanchuk-phobia and had a lot of cuts. Allegedly he even removed a few frames from the 1980s big-screen version of Dragnet because there was a poster for Enter The Dragon displaying the offending martial arts weapons visible in the background of a scene. Mr Strict! So I got to see the ETD homage, and poor old Splinter being tortured. The whole thing is quite violent for a kids film, I thought, and then remembered the bits of Home Alone I’d seen, or even rolling around, helpless with laughter at Laurel and Hardy suffering all manner of undignified injuries when I was a pre-teen. This farrago includes all kinds of weirdness - nods to film noir, Humphrey Bogart, kung-fu cinema (I was a bit stunned to see Golden Harvest films logo come up at the start), there’s loads. The New York being a hotbed of crime at the start suggests not only Batman but also Death Wish, there’s a jeer at Critters, but what’s with the negative image of punks? Huh! Utterly ridiculous but a whole lot of fun. Anything that celebrates junk culture is fine by me.