Month: September 2017

Ok. I watched this alone and it wasn’t as entertaining as it would be with other brain damaged friends.

Nothing makes any sense in this movie. There is the main guy, Bradley, from American Ninja 3 that almost immediately gets captured by the bad guy and is stuck in prison the whole movie. Then Dudikov, the main guy in American Ninja 1 and 2, only appears about 50 minutes into the movie. Naturally he saves the day on his own. The plot about Bradley is of no consequence. But who cares? Nothing makes sense.

The bad guy is an Arab guy that doesn’t talk or look like an Arab. Obviously he is a terrorist. He owns a crew of ninjas and they do terrorist things in some fictional country that supposed to be based in Africa. He trains his ninjas all the damn time. Part of the training is the event called death where you can easily die when doing a regular chop maneuver. So why would the Arab want his own men to die for no reason? Who knows? Nothing makes any sense. He makes them dress up in different colour ninja uniforms for no reason. They also happen to own a prison and captured 4 people recently. Who knows what they were doing up to now.

For no reason there is a bunch of S&M hoodlums that live in a quarry with shitty cars. Like Mad Max. They get some random kid to find Dudikov and he must lead them to fight the bad guys. There was no explanation of why they have beef with the Arab or the ninjas. No explanation of why Dudikov was their main guy and why Dudi needs to help them. He was (badly) teaching kids English in some nearby African country.

All weapons were obvious bad props. The stick were made from paper towel rolls that were sprayed silver. You could see the diagonal lines where the roll joins itself. Then there was a guy with a thick club. It was floppy and had the same diameter of a pool noodle. I wonder how they made that prop?

Most of the scenes where: someone searching for someone else and encountering an enemy while doing it. Nothing that anyone does is of any consequence to the other teams. Why was this movie even made? I took $300k USD. Who knows the budget? Dudikov was popular and probably expensive. They saved a bit by not having Jackson. He was my favourite character in the series. Always kicking ass. They probably saved a ton of money by doing everything in one take. You know its one take when the actor forgets his line and they leave it in. They didn’t need to make this because there is no continuation of the series or build up to a grand finale. They’re basically the same movie as American Ninja 1 but with a different background and a slightly different cast and script. Maybe the script is identical and no one noticed.

So. I don’t know why it was made, but I know for sure that no one should watch this.

30 seconds of establishing shots, 30 seconds of line delivery, rinse, repeat.

1996’s Tiger Claws 2 is a celebration of bad editing. It’s about some cop in New York that hears of murders in San Francisco where the bodies has claw marks. He knows about the murderer because he was the arresting cop. The murderer is found to have been broken out from jail. So the cop is now going to SF.

The guy that broke the murderer out is some rich crime boss and he wants to open up a portal to some place. Obviously, the only way to open the portal is to stage a martial arts tournament in the parking lot of his restaurant. Also, all the participants are his soldiers. Also, they will have a final fight with the murderer.

The murderer is played by Bolo Yeung. He’s the massive asian bad guy in the final fight of Blood Sport. He must have been paid by the word because he was quiet throughout the movie and had a terrible display of action at the end. This must have been shot during his holiday in SF. According to IMDB he was the main bad guy too in Tiger Claws 1. This is probably the tale of how the cop first arrested him.

So the plot is pretty thin and the acting is terrible and editing is awful. Why was this made? Cynthia Rothrock is the lead but she pretty forgettable in the role. I was expecting and epic fight between her and Bolo but it wasn’t going to happen. She was also the lead in the first movie, maybe it was done there. So it’s not to display the fighting ability, no data on revenue and it didn’t look like they were closing plot holes of the first movie, even thought I didn’t see the first movie. I don’t know why this movie exists. I might be that it was very cheap to make. Like if they paid the actors during the first movie and they get two sequels for free. It would explain why they have so little footage and script and padded it out with establishing shots. But this is just my guess. I’m sure there’s a better story.

Nothing can prepare you for how bad this movie is.

The Bye Bye Man is about a ghost-like guy called The Bye Bye Man. That kills people that say his name. Why? If he was good at killing, there would eventually not be anyone that knows his name and he would cease to exist. Also, why does a living person saying your name mean that you have to kill that person? What does it mean for you that someone says it?

Throughout the movie we’re never told about the backstory of Bye Bye. I don’t understand his motivation to kill. He doesn’t do anything to the bodies and it is of no consequence to him whether or not someone is dead or alive. And another thing, his name, The Bye Bye Man? That is the least scary name every made for a ghost. Its like a child came up with the name and the writer stuck with it. Then there are scenes about trains and his ghost dog that doesn’t have skin. I don’t know why they are there. They do nothing.

This movie was made in 2017 and I thought we’ve come far in quality of movies. Obviously I’m wrong. Everything was terrible in this movie. Acting, cast, script, scenes, editing, sound, you name it. I’m pretty sure some scenes were out of focus but hopefully it was intentional. You would think it was a commercial failure, but no, it made money. Probably watched by stupid kids. $7m budget and $22m earnings. Greedy cash grab. I hope more shit movies are made like this so it drowns out the market.

The movie starts with some guy shooting up his friends and family because he told them the name of Bye Bye. So if you kill them, Bye Bye doesn’t kill them? How is he making the situation better? He might as well just do nothing. Bye Bye will still kill them. This was about 5 minutes into the movie where the premise broke beyond repair.

Now in present day, this group of three students rent some shitty apartment near their school. They go about the usual motions and tropes like random noises, jump scares, summoning the dead, you know, horror movie shit. So now the three people and some random friend all know the name. For some reason, they hallucinate that the other friend is doing something out of character and for no reason, they believe it. About half way in, Bye Bye appears. So you know he has arrived. Why didn’t he kill everyone right there and then? Why does he feel the need to disappear when someone turns on a light or has a friend entering the room? Bye Bye supposed to kill everyone right? What a shitty bad guy.

Among the three friends, one of them was a girl that was British that tried to play an American. Obviously, she’s not very good at it. For no reason, Bye Bye’s effect on her is to make her sick in addition to hallucinate. The others are left healthy but she just coughs throughout the movie. They don’t do anything with this sub-plot. She just coughs and thats that.

There’s one scene where the new friend, the one that summoned the dead, ran across railway tracks and got hit by a train. One of the protagonists liked her and was with the police to give a statement. Carrie Anne Moss, Trinity from The Matrix, is the cop and he hallucinates her winking at him. He should have asked her why is she winking at a time when his girl just died and they are at the scene of the death. Nope, he winks back. Trinity doesn’t know that he is hallucinating and she’s taken aback.

I could go on and on about how every scene doesn’t make sense in our world and the world that was created by the premise. But I’ll stop here. There is nothing good about this movie.