Every week this summer, we'll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend's wide releases. This week: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is a movie about turtles. They have mutated, lived to become teenagers, and are trained in the arts of ninjutsu. Let us return to a more bodacious time, when this combination of traits was last seen in live-action cinema.

1993's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III sure is goddamn bad, but it achieves at least on very important thing that TMNT II: The Secret of the Ooze didn't: it has fighting scenes where the turtles use their weapons in relatively interesting ways. And I'm generally more impressed with the physicality of the suit acting in this film than its predecessors, if not from the standpoint of acting, then at least from the standpoint of martial arts choreography (as Leonardo, Mark Caso returned from The Secret of the Ooze; Matt Hill as Raphael, Jim Raposa as Donatello, and David Fraser as Michaelangelo are all new).

But outside of that (and for an action film to actually have, y'know, action, is a pretty big thing, so I don't meant to sound dismissive when I say "outside of that"), TMNT III is pretty well awful. It fails in exactly the way that the first movie signally did not: it looks cheap as all hell. This is most ruinously the case with the turtles themselves, no longer produced by the industry-leading wizards at the Jim Henson Creature Shop, but by All Effects, an effects house of very little special note. For all that, the differences are rather small individually, mostly a matter of facial mechanics that aren't quite as supple and expressive here as in the previous movies. The eyes aren't engaged quite as fully with frowns or smiles, which gives the turtles a distinctly insincere look ("hmph, those robot turtle faces look insincere" is probably not a sane thought to have, but I had it anyway). The way that the turtles' masks crinkled on the Henson suits, looking like cloth being flexed by skin moving underneath, is gone, replaced by far simpler eye gestures that make the masks look exactly like foam that just happens to have been painted a different color than the skin next to them, which is also foam. The skin itself has been bit less texture and a bit more obvious paint, contributing to the impression that it's not real. The mouths have a smaller range of lip movements; not that there was much synchronicity between the turtle mouths and the sounds they were ostensibly making in the first two films, but there was a broader spectrum than "open" or "close".

Again, these are all mostly little things; but cinema is an accumulation of little things. And in the case of TMNT3, all those little things combine to make creatures who are not even a little bit physically persuasive, and if you don't believe in the man-sized turtles interacting with the human characters, then you have no hope left for your film titled Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But the problem with the film's lower production value only begins with the turtle suits; just as worse, this film takes place mostly in feudal Japan, and so instead of making a city look like a slightly more fantastic, grimier city, it's obligated to make sets look like lived-in structures of centuries past. The sets aren't up to it, though, and the movie has enough bright, sunlit scenes to make sure we get a good long look at them, and the crisp, Ren Faire-quality costumes. It's almost sweetly ineffectual, a desperate, plasticky attempt to do Ran on pocket change and hope, but it never comes within a mile of convincing us that it's at all real, and so the film's time travel elements feel artificial, as if it wasn't already enough of a problem that the whole scenario reeks of creative floundering.

And oh, such floundering it is. Writer-director Stuart Gillard, whose background in television prepped him for neither a period piece nor an action movie, can't come up with anything better than April O'Neil (Turco again) buying an ancient Japanese time-travel device by accident at a flea market, and managing to send herself back to 1603, a critical moment in Japanese history that's totally misrepresented, but it is a kid's movie, and a certain bullshit historical inaccuracy is one of the pitfalls of the territory. This movie's time travel rules require that two people swap places with each other to maintain the amount of mass in each time period, meaning that April is replaced with Kenshin (Henry Hayashi), son of the corrupt warlord Lord Norinaga (Sab Shimono) seeking to use English weaponry provided by the trader Walker (Stuart Wilson) in his attempt to subdue the local peasantry. The turtles jump back after her, taking the space of Norinaga's honor guard, and with 60 hours until technobabble space-time continuum, the turtles have to find the time scepter, save April from Norinaga, and help the peasants led by Kenshin's sweetie pie Mitsu (Vivian Wu) fight off the despot, all while being helped and hindered by Whit (Elias Koteas), who bears an uncanny resemblance to their hockey thug buddy Casey Jones (Koteas also) back in New York. As a sign of its clever structure, the film opens and closes with the turtles rocking out in a dance party - more than double the awesomeness of crap kids' films that only have the lack of inspiration to end on such a dance party.

My head says that the rinky-dink production values, and the sheer mindlessness and creative bankruptcy of the time travel scenario are enough to make TMNT3 even worse than its immediate predecessor; my heart says, "but at least it's not mostly a retread of the plot of the first one again". And my very angry spleen at this point starts bellering that my heart and head are goddamn fuckwits for trying to rank the relative quality of the Ninja Turtles sequels. Both of them, in fact, are terrible, though the third one doesn't even have scraps of fun-bad: no newly-commissioned Vanilla Ice rap songs (indeed, no rap at all, just recycled rock), for one thing. It's just a sad little tromp through a peculiar, flailing story, and it looks like absolute hell on the way there. Anyway, it's not half the satisfying "time-traveling Ninja Turtles" experience as the contemporaneous arcade game Turtles in Time, and when you can't make a movie with as much personality as an arcade game whose style and gameplay are functionally identical to multiple other arcade games from the same period, you damn well deserve to have your cinematic franchise puke itself out and die.

Reviews in this series
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Barron, 1990)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (Pressman, 1991)
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (Gillard, 1993)