Bad Movie Club: Pocket Ninjas

1997 action comedy

Bad Movie Rating: 4/5 (Josh: 4/5; Lisa (who actually bailed midway through to watch meteors instead): 5/5)

Rating: 3/20

Plot: Some pocket ninjas try to stop bad guys from doing something.

This was the 200th Bad Movie Club meeting. There was little fanfare, and only three of us showed up for this one with one leaving early to look for meteors, but I'm still strangely proud that we've done 200 of these now. I mean, why wouldn't I be? That's like 18,000 hours we've spent watching bad movies together, and if my math is right, that's 750 total days.

My math is not right. I'm not sure where I messed up.

I know where the makers of Pocket Ninjas messed up though. It's where they tried to make a movie--even an 80-minute one, without having a real story. Seriously, I would say somewhere around 65% of this movie consists of training montages. I didn't think anything could compete with the montage/non-montage ratio in Kindergarten Ninja, but this one very well might beat it. I'd have to be better at math and willing to watch both of these again to figure all that out.

About 1/10th of the movie was also the opening credits, by the way. I'm telling you, there was barely any movie here.

This tries to combine slapstick comedy and action, but it does it about as ineptly as I've seen anything done lately. And I see myself attempt to educate the youth of America every single day, so that's saying something. Even some of the training montages have the bad guys hamming it up, complete with some slide-whistle and cartoonish percussion sound effects. The most comical scene takes place in some sort of funhouse/warehouse hybrid with all these balloons. Robert Z'Dar, criminally underutilized in this, and a foe are bouncing up and down on balloons as they battle, and effects to speed up Z'Dar as he throws out these one-man Stooge moves make the whole thing baffling. The titular ninjas aren't particularly skilled (not enough to be showcased in countless montages anyway), but they do have roller blades on during them. That's something. All of the fight scenes are very slow. I doubt there was any fight choreography actually, probably just instructions to "not hurt each other" or something. The sound effects make the whole thing even more ridiculous with a sound guy utilizing a library of over three impact sounds to accompany the punching and kicking.

Did I mention that Robert Z'Dar and his mighty chin are in this movie? It's only in a pair of scenes though--both completely inconsequential. The first is a fantasy sequence (the infamous balloon scene I mentioned up there) that comes from a comic book the Pocket Ninjas are enjoying while spending quality time together in their treehouse. The second is a ludicrous virtual reality sequence that is tacked after the movie has already ended when the director realized he didn't have enough montages to make a feature-length film and needed some filler. 

This was directed by Dave Eddy, and it's his only movie unless you count a TV movie documentary he made after somebody decided that the guy who made Pocket Ninjas is the best choice to make a documentary about 9/11.