Awfully Good Movies: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (Video)

June 1st 2016, 10:14am

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

In the words of Winston Churchill–or maybe it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, I dunno, I always get those two mixed up–"To improve is to change," and we definitely believe that here behind the scenes of Awfully Good, where our own Jason Adams writes a review of an infamously bad movie every Wednesday and rates it on a scale of how fun it is to watch rather than how good the movie actually is. And in 2014, we started up a video version of this column by the name of Awfully Good Movies, as written/narrated/edited by yours truly, Jesse Shade, which comes out every other Wednesday alongside the column. Well, now Jason will now be doing his column on a bi-weekly basis as well, which means you'll get an Awfully Good review one week from him, then get an Awfully Good Movies video review from me the next week. Now that we've got that out of the way, it's time to present this week's review…

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993)

Director: Stuart Gillard
Stars: Paige Turco, Elias Koteas, Corey Feldman

This weekend marks the arrival of another Michael Bay-produced Ninja Turtles flick, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS, so it's time to put down that pizza and pick up your time-traveling Japanese scepter, cause we're going back to 1993 to revisit the flick that killed off the original Turtles film franchise: TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES III! Though Jason's already reviewed this flick in time for Michael Bay's last TMNT movie, it's such a fascinating disaster that it deserves a second look. The last two movies, Ninja Turtle fans got kick-ass fight scenes, witty humor, great animatronic costumes from Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and bad-ass villains straight from the comics and TV show. But the third time around, they had to settle for half-hearted fight choreography, lame pop culture references, animatronics straight out of Chuck E. Cheese, and the Turtles going back to ancient Japan…to fight a long-haired British gun trader. So for those claiming Michael Bay "ruined your childhood", don't forget that this movie ruined it long before he got involved. COWABUNGA!