The cosmic space ninja must fight his way off the planet Chernobourg in Mike Martinez's homage to chop-socky cinema and Italian gore. As usual, Mike has enlisted the help of the worst high school actors in the country to construct this wobbly minstrel show of missed kicks and unsynchronized dubbing. I must give kudos to some wonderful snowy, dirt block and waterfall location work. It brings a sense of class and visual panache to this grimy production which was apparently shot on the budget of food stamp.
In between the rubber mask storyteller and pirated stock footage, the flick is loaded with punching, jumping and general mayhem. The lead shows some impressive back flips and karate chops but falls flat during his dirt-eating performance. This totally offensive and downright tasteless scene looks like an outtake from Salo, and if Mike had any brains, he'd make his actors eat chocolate milk powder instead of real mud. About thirty minutes could be trimmed from the running time including all the audio-distorted narrative and gentle tapping of plastic swords. The henchmen look so much like a bunch of fairies in their physical prowess that I was begging for another disembowelment of empty costumes and caramel syrup. The comedy has a failure rate of about 90 percent, with an endless brother joke that may garner some chuckles from the viewing audience of Friends, but not from any individual with a knowledge of cinema beyond Quentin Tarantino and Boondock Saints. The fact that it's delivered by an actor who looks like a fluorescent skunk with anorexia only adds to the inhumanity.
Mike's direction, if you can call this direction, is basically non-existent. Actors look lost and wander, the 180 degree axis is broken numerous times, there's about ten feet of headroom in countless shots and any action choreography is uneven within every editorial cut. Maybe this was his attempt of disguising the horrible script, but anything short of burning every copy of the movie could not do that.
Final note: The pre-credit music cue from High Crime is totally out of place and unnecessary.
In between the rubber mask storyteller and pirated stock footage, the flick is loaded with punching, jumping and general mayhem. The lead shows some impressive back flips and karate chops but falls flat during his dirt-eating performance. This totally offensive and downright tasteless scene looks like an outtake from Salo, and if Mike had any brains, he'd make his actors eat chocolate milk powder instead of real mud. About thirty minutes could be trimmed from the running time including all the audio-distorted narrative and gentle tapping of plastic swords. The henchmen look so much like a bunch of fairies in their physical prowess that I was begging for another disembowelment of empty costumes and caramel syrup. The comedy has a failure rate of about 90 percent, with an endless brother joke that may garner some chuckles from the viewing audience of Friends, but not from any individual with a knowledge of cinema beyond Quentin Tarantino and Boondock Saints. The fact that it's delivered by an actor who looks like a fluorescent skunk with anorexia only adds to the inhumanity.
Mike's direction, if you can call this direction, is basically non-existent. Actors look lost and wander, the 180 degree axis is broken numerous times, there's about ten feet of headroom in countless shots and any action choreography is uneven within every editorial cut. Maybe this was his attempt of disguising the horrible script, but anything short of burning every copy of the movie could not do that.
Final note: The pre-credit music cue from High Crime is totally out of place and unnecessary.
