Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret Of The Ooze Gets Incredible Honest Trailer
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It’s impossible to be a fan of the Ninja Turtles without a feeling of ironic detachment entering into at some level. Case in point: this Honest Trailer for one of the most ridiculous sequels ever conceived, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Secret of the Ooze, a movie that had Vanilla Ice and wrestler Kevin Nash in its credits. I absolutely loved this movie as a kid, as it lifted some of the darkness off of the original film and filled it with jokes simple enough to have been written while projectile vomiting. It’s completely ripe for ridicule, and the video above tubular-ly trashes all the right parts.
For one, they point out how American parents essentially cut the balls off of the Turtles franchise immediately, forcing New Line to cut out a lot of the more “extreme” violence from the first film. Most of that violence also included giant costumed feet pushed into costumed men’s faces, but they kept the use of bladed weapons to a minimum in the sequel, even when a bladed weapon is exactly what would have saved the day. Other changes included a different April—the “April’s mom” joke slayed me—a new extremely annoying sidekick named Keno, and a pair of infantile mutated enemies in Tokka and Rahzar. These were supposed to be Bebop and Rocksteady, but there were rights issues that kept the characters out of the cinematic universe.
But this video isn’t just about what was different from the first film, it also touched upon problems like villains who just stand around doing nothing instead of hopping in and fighting the Turtles when they can. Also, the fact that Shredder is beaten by bullshit and circumstance instead of any actual ninja actions performed by reptiles. And of course, the Vanilla Ice-ness of it all that led to choreographed dancing. I guess we can thank our lucky stars that they chose to go with this song instead of that Splinter performance of “Skipping Stones,” by far the worst song on the Coming Out of Our Shells album.
If Honest Trailers ever decided to take on the second sequel, when the Turtles when to Japan, we’d never see the end of that video. Thankfully, there’s another full-length pile of nostalgia-abusing crap hitting theaters this weekend in the form of Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Can that movie possibly be more beside-the-point than Secret of the Ooze, with its appallingly boring scientist lead? Uh, can pizza be made with nacho cheese, spinach, and chocolate malt balls? Of course!
