Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze 1991

It’s Wednesday night, we had just watched the first live action Ninja Turtle movie the night before and I thought it would be easy to get Jena interested in watching the next movie in the series, The Secret of the Ooze. And at first she seemed really into it, but about halfway through the movie she lost interest, and then towards the end we convinced her to come back to finish the movie with us. Like before, she liked all the fighting and overall thought the movie was “great”, her favorite turtle was “the red one” also known as Raphael. Compared to the first movie, I thought the fights were much better, I could tell that it had a larger budget, though I wasn’t quite as fond of all the humor in this movie, especially the Vanilla Ice cameo. Maybe the nostalgia is starting to wear off. I imagine it will be almost completely gone by the time I finish the last movie.

This movie continues pretty much exactly where the first movie left off. The turtles are staying with April O’Neal who got replaced with a different actor. I thought the last April was fairly mediocre, but passable. This April is down right boring. Casey Jones is also no where to be seen in this movie. There is an introduction of a new character, the pizza delivery boy who knows martial arts: Keno. I thought he was generally annoying and I much preferred Casey Jones over Keno as the human fighting companion to the Turtles. They also start off fighting random thugs wearing pantyhose over their heads instead of heading straight into the Foot Clan again. I imagine that it was supposed to be a surprise that the Foot were still around, and it would be a reveal later on, but I would have rather seen the Foot clan from the beginning instead of these random thugs that don’t come into play ever again.

Seriously, why the heck didn't they use the Foot here?

The turtle costumes in this movie were a small step up from the last movie, they were pretty good before, but in this movie they felt sleeker and just generally higher quality. I also liked the look of the two Ooze created monsters Tokka and Rahzar, though I wasn’t as fond of the mouth on Rahzar. I also thought it was kind of funny that every time someone said Rahzar’s name, it seemed like they were making a huge effort to pronounce it correctly instead of just calling him Razor. It would have been nice to seen Bebop and Rocksteady, but these were a decent alternative. I also liked the fact that they held the reveal of exactly what animals they were created from until the end. Unfortunately, most of the fight scenes with the big guys were pretty tame compared to the fight scenes with the regular foot soldiers or the thugs at the beginning.

The biggest problem I have with this movie is mainly just one scene, the Turtle rap. The Turtles get knocked through a wall into a dance club with Vanilla Ice headlining. Everyone thinks the mutants are part of the act and Vanilla Ice starts rapping about them. It’s ludicrous and while Ice Ice Baby holds some nostalgic value, Ninja Rap does not. The jokes are hit and miss, for me they usually hit, but in this scene they mostly missed the mark. And it segues into the final face off against The Shredder, again. And it’s extremely anti-climactic. Oh, did I forget to mention that being crushed in a garbage truck didn’t kill him? It just scarred him even more than usual, and he is dispatched in what seems like an even less lethal manner, and yet the Turtles are sure that he’s gone this time.

How cute, they think they're people.

Aside from those couple of quibbles, this movie was just as much fun as the first one. The formula was kept pretty much the same, and yet the action was ramped up. The humor was pretty much the same as the first movie, with a lot of teenage level humor and slapstick comedy, and once again I enjoyed it. I don’t really have a whole lot else to say that I didn’t already cover in my review of the first movie. As a sequel, it covers a lot of the same ground as the first movie, while touching a little bit more on the Turtle’s backstory. One thing that I didn’t mention in the first movie, is that I thought it was unfortunate that Leonardo’s weapon of choice is dual katanas. In a kid’s movie, he can’t really use them without doing a lot of damage, so he’s forced to use them in other ways or not at all. I don’t really have a better solution to that problem, but it still irked me nonetheless. On Thursday, I’ll be finishing up the live action Turtles trilogy when I watch Turtles in Time. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.