(I can’t be bothered with a banner, so here’s a Lord Zedd facepalm that sums up my feelings more than adequately.)
In 2017, someone gathered a bunch of his closest buddies and did a Power Rangers fanfilm called MMPR: The Last Ranger Parody VII… I would have to ask where I can watch Parodies I through VI, but I don’t think they exist.
It’s the usual tired premise; post-apocalyptic Angel Grove plays host to the battlefield between Rita Repulsa and the last remnants of humanity lead by army dudes. But there’s one other player still active and that’s Jason – the last of the Rangers, who has a new overdone suit that looks super clunky and ugly, to the extent that even the 95 movie suits look more comfortable and flexible in comparison. Apparently, all the other Rangers are dead… except for a couple. And then stuff happens and we get a cliffhanger ending that get no follow-up because we never got a sequel… or something.
What amazes me about this thing is that it somehow made it to paid subscription services like Prime Video or Apple TV. Somehow, this guy got his little fan film (er, I mean, parody) on these services. What dirt did he have on the industry to allow them to host his parody film? (Although given some of the other “questionable” films featured on Prime Video, I’m wondering if maybe the bar so low that even I can throw together a cheap movie and get it on a paid service. Couldn’t hurt to try.)
I can almost… just almost… forgive some of the unusual diction or dialogue on account of maybe these aren’t native English speakers; sometimes, that even accounts for the stiff acting. I can almost forgive some of the stilted action of people standing around and looking awkwardly at things because everything is done entirely on blue or green screen sets to fill in for completely CG-generated sets that look… quite awful, if I’m being honest. Hell, I’ll even forgive some of the minor quibbles in terms of details, such as why Zordon has a five o’clock shadow or why Tommy and Kimberly are both the same height. Amy Jo Johnson was always a head shorter than JDF – a noticeable height difference. You’ve got a small budget to work with. You work within your means. Fine, I get that.
And look, kudos to the fact that you nabbed Alan Palmer – the guy who played one of the Aquitian Rangers on MMPR/Zeo – onto your fanfilm. I’m sure that’s a bit of a get. All that said, it doesn’t excuse some of the other issues I have with this parody.
Here’s the thing. Action in Power Rangers is often fast-paced; blows fly by quickly and fiercely. Parody VII’s action is slow, cumbersome, and exceedingly unexciting. I’ve seen porn parodies execute action better than this thing does; that’s how bad it is. Again, I can understand budgetary constraints, but that doesn’t mean your fights have to be in slow motion. I’ve seen Hollywood Hogan matches move at faster speeds than the fights in this film do. You could at least speed up the footage to make it seem like these are duels to the death rather than a sparring contest among friends. Iyo Sky flying around in a trash can landing on top of a bunch of waiting wrestlers is more realistic than the fights here.
This movie clocks at a little over an hour, but feels like I’ve been watching for ten. When I mention almost forgiving the weak acting, it’s only under the guise of, again, maybe English is a secondary language. Choice of words, how people speak or dictate this verbiage. Fine, I can almost forgive that… if it didn’t take up a huge chunk of the run time. Aside from the poor fights, we have huge chunks of people standing around and having awkward conversations in these ugly CG settings. And then the movie comes to an absolute dead stop when we get to the middle portion, which takes place in the “Command Center” and we get a massive infodump of fanfiction lore that nobody could possibly care about.
Dude, I’m pretty sure the only people who would consider watching this thing are Power Rangers fans. I’m pretty sure they know all about Power Rangers. You can fill in some blanks, but if I wanted an infodump on background information, Wikipedia is right there.
Had this been a thing on Youtube and available for free and all to see, then I’d be like, “Yeah, this kinda sucks, but it’s a fan film put out for free. Cut these folks a bit of slack.” Sometimes, it’s easy to lose perspective of that when you have some of these higher quality fanfilms that knock it out of the park. But this thing somehow landed on Prime Video, which is a paid service with your Amazon Prime subscription (and a little extra to remove the ads, too!) On that note, you want something a little higher quality and this ain’t it.
So yeah… no buys for The Last Ranger Parody VII Version 1.928 Turbo Accelerated Zeo Supercharge Mega Win. On the bright side, it’s nowhere near as bad as some of these other grimdark MMPR parody things I’ve seen in the past. This might actually be somewhat better than those… so it’s got THAT much going for it.
Not high praise… but sure, let’s go with it. I’ve got nothing else to say, anyway.
Later.
