Written Reviews

Legend Or Rehash – Some Thoughts On Karate Kid: Legends

Karate Kid: Legends is a movie that came out of nowhere.

Not necessarily in the sense that nobody saw it coming because we’ve already had a couple trailers for it and I’ve even commented on the film a couple times… but rather in the sense that a couple weeks ago, a buddy invited me to join them and some pals to watch the new Karate Kid movie and my immediate reaction was “What new Karate Kid movie?”

Yes, despite having made a mention of this thing once or twice on this blog, the news that this movie was out in theaters threw me by surprise. Regardless, though, I said sure. They were kind enough to pay for all the tickets while I offered some drinks from the concessions which may have cost more than the tickets, but I digress. So after having seen this movie, what were my initial impressions of Karate Kid Legends?

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QUIET! (or… Why Cobra Kai Works)

Cobra Kai ended its six-season run last month… and while the possibilities exist for further stories to be told with these characters, the main story – for all intents and purposes – has come to a close.

For those unaware, Cobra Kai is a spiritual successor to the original Karate Kid trilogy of films – by which I mean the first three films. There’s also a fourth movie with Hillary Swank and a “remake” of sorts with Jackie Chan and Will Smith’s kid, but neither of those are referenced or even touched upon in this series. In any event, the main character of this series is Johnny Lawrence, former All-Valley champ who once ate a crane kick in the face at the end of the first film and his life has gone downhill since then. So the crux of this series is basically Johnny getting his life back on track by bringing back the old Cobra Kai dojo and… stuff happens, afterwards.

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25 Years Later And Ready To Rumble Is (Still) The Worst Movie In Human History

Twenty-five years ago, on this very day, Ready To Rumble was unleashed onto the world.

I never watched this thing in theaters, but even back in 2000, I’ve heard about how bad this film was. Not just in terms of being a bad wrestling movie, but also just a bad comedy in general. It wouldn’t be until a couple years later that I’d eventually get around to renting a copy of Ready To Rumble from the video store and see for myself what I was missing. After pressing PLAY, I bore witness to what everyone else had been raving (or raging) about these past few years. Shortly afterwards, I opened up Frontpage on my computer, started a new document, and proceeded to write the words “Ready To Rumble is the worst film in human history.”

This would have been back in 2003-2004 when I was still renting videos and also when I was first putting up stuff on the IMDB site. At some point, I was going to post this little write-up on there until I realized that I had more than whatever the usual word limit was for IMDB user submitted reviews… and also there was more than a fair share of colorful metaphors… so it never saw the light of day… well, until the move to this blog, which you can find here.

About a decade later, I’d revisit the movie as part of my Slideshow Movie Review series and I’m not quite sure that I truly vocalized my disdain for this film. So now, here we are and… listen, I am not going to try and convince you that this is a misunderstood masterpiece. That much is obviously when the title of this post is “25 Years Later And Ready To Rumble Is (Still) The Worst Movie In Human History.” And to this very day, I have yet to see a movie that I would consider to be worse than Ready To Rumble. I’ve seen plenty of juvenile films in my day. I’ve seen plenty of utterly terrible films. But none of them were as bad as Ready To Rumble.

Hell, if the day ever comes and I break my long-standing moratorium on Ghostbusters 2016 to give that a watch, you know what? Yes, that movie is gonna suck, but I can guarantee you that it won’t be as bad as Ready To Rumble.

(Maybe that’s why I don’t want to watch that movie now that I think about it. Imagine the horror I’d feel when the possibility exists of a movie that is WORSE than Ready To Rumble. I don’t even want to contemplate that.)

Look, I’m sure there are movies. People can come up and tell me that the Deuce Bigelow movies are the nadir of comedy films. And yeah, those are bad… but you already know going in that those movies are aiming for the lowest common denominator. Ready To Rumble aims a little lower than that. It’s a terrible movie that is so unfunny and yet reprehensibly stupid that it somehow makes you stupider with each passing second that your eyes and brain are exposed to this vapid piece of garbage. Now would I have had this same kind of contempt for this film had I not been a wrestling fan? And the answer would invariably be yes. In fact, if I had not been a wrestling fan or if I had downright hated wrestling, I probably would’ve despised this movie even more.

Look, I just rented a painfully dull and unfunny film called Leonard Part 6 from Amazon for the expressed purpose of watching a movie other than Section 31. Yes, the one with Bill Cosby… and yes, it is every bit as bad as people made it out to be. But you want to know something? The worst thing that I could say about this movie was that it was BORING. None of the jokes landed. None of the bits worked. All the actors were phoning it in. It was deathly dull. And yes, I would have considered this a big ol’ waste of time… but on the flip side, I did not walk away from Leonard Part 6 with the same kind of contempt and utter bile that I got from watching five minutes of Ready To Rumble.

Some time ago, F4WOnline guy Bryan Alvarez teamed up with former wrestler Lance Storm and indy wrestler/former MMA guy “Filthy” Tom Lawlor to review this movie. Alvarez, a former wrestler and a normally intelligent fellow, had claimed that this movie is not the worst film ever made. When pushed to name a worse one, he admittedly couldn’t name one, but maintained that this was not as bad as people say that it is. This proves that Ready To Rumble has the capability of rotting brain cells of any person who willingly exposes them to repeated viewings of this thing.

Anyhoo… here we are.

Twenty-five years later AND STILL the absolute worst movie in human history… Ready To Rumble.

See you all in another twenty-five where we get to do this shit all over again.

I Watched Leonard Part 6 Instead Of Section 31

Last week, I posted on this blog that I had an epiphany of sorts when someone asked me about that Section 31 film. The epiphany was that I would much rather watch Leonard Part 6 – the much reviled box office bomb starring disgraced comedian Bill Cosby – than the Section 31 film. I had then teased that I would have something special for today… I didn’t say what, but smart readers who read that post and then read yesterday’s semi-monthly proclamation that I did not watch Alex Kurtzman’s Section 31 film starring Academy Award Winner Michelle Yeoh should have been able to put two and two together.

And when you did, you probably thought, “Oh, sure. Yeah, sure. You don’t want to watch the newest Star Trek thing on Paramount Plus because it looks like shit, BUT you have no problem spending money on a shitty comedy movie from the eighties starring one of the shittiest men in the world. HAR! HAR! GOOD ONE, PAL!”

You fuckers thought that I was joking. Hell, you figured that after a whole afternoon of radio silence, there was nothing to this whole deal and my little tease was an early April Fool’s joke.

Well…

Turns out the joke was on me…

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COMIC REVIEW – Death In The Family: Robin Lives (DC 2024 MiniSeries)

Shortly after publishing the previously-unseen edition of Batman #428 – the alternative third chapter of the controversial “A Death In The Family” storyline that depicted the non-death of Jason Todd a.k.a. Robin – DC put out a four-issue mini-series dubbed A Death In The Family: Robin Lives. They claim this to be from the DC Vault, which implies that this was a previously shelved story that never saw the light of day because readers voted for Robin to be put down.

But instead, it’s a whole new story. A whole new What If story… that gave me pause because I am always weary of these continuations of vintage properties written and illustrated by people who were probably babies when these things first graced the public consciousness. What gave me hope was that this was being written by J.M. DeMatteis, a veteran who’s been doing this for decades and should have a good idea on how to tell a follow-up to a previously unearthed 1988 comic book. That’s the only hope I had going into this, since the overall art quality is… less than stellar.

And you want to know something? At first, this series had promise. Opening the series up with the Joker shot dead in the head and then having the story bring us up to that point is not a bad idea on paper, though it did spoil things for me. I knew where they were going with this and I was almost dreading it, but the story up to that point had been pretty solid. Jason Todd struggling with how to move on after suffering a horrific beating at the hands of the Joker as well as the loss of the mother he barely knew, Batman struggling with his lack of experience in fatherhood in trying to comfort the boy, and… well, the shrink felt a bit excessive and the narration is a bit much, but for three issues, this was a somewhat solid story with some decent character moments.

However, once we hit that fourth and final issue, that’s when things fall apart. I’ll try not to spoil too much here, but the way that final issue played out gave me flashbacks of Return Of The Joker, the Batman Beyond animated movie. If you know the plot to that film, then you’ll get a sense of dejavu here, except with a chance in player pieces. And when all is said and done and we get to that final epilogue… let’s just say that it only took a couple pages to kill off any goodwill that the first three issues brought up.

That’s the best way to sum up Death In The Family: Robin Lives. It starts off great, goes along smoothly, and then eventually falls off a cliff before landing headfirst onto a block of concrete. Maybe there’s a better ending stashed away in the DC Vault that got sidelined in favor of what we got here. Hopefully, it doesn’t take four decades to have that see the light of day.

COMIC REVIEW – Batman #428: Robin Lives!

Here’s an interesting piece of business that DC put out last year; the alternate version of Batman #428 from 1988 that served as the third chapter of the much controversial storyline “A Death In The Family,” that saw readers call in to vote for the demise of the second Robin, Jason Todd. Now, we’ve already seen that story and we’ve also seen that story’s importance minimized with the subsequent resurrection of Jason Todd back in the mid-2000s.

However, if callers had voted for Robin to live, this would have been the issue that would continue the story. And if you were expecting any drastic divergence from what was already published, you’re probably going to come away disappointed. Part 3 of A Death In The Family – The Robin Lives Edition plays out in pretty much the same way as the version we got, except this time, Robin… well, you know, lives. Beyond that, he doesn’t play much of a role afterwards and the story continues as it had before.

Batman #428 – The Robin Lives Edition could easily be slotted into the rest of the story without compromise if you want to imagine this story in a world where readers voted to let Jason Todd live. It’s not much of a big deal from a story standpoint, but being able to see what could have been after all this time is still a pretty sweet deal and something that I’m sure would be included in future TPB editions of this particular storyline. I’m rather pleased to see that this exists.

Now, the follow-up miniseries that DC begat afterwards… that, I could do without…

Captain America’s World That’s Neither Brave Nor New

Captain America: Brave New World came out a week or so ago and by chance, I got to see it recently. This fourth movie in the Captain America series is the first to feature Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson in his first big adventure after assuming the Captain America mantle in that Falcon and Winter Soldier miniseries, which was probably the last real Marvel thing that I actually watched with any semblance of interest or enjoyment.

There’s been a lot of noise surrounding this film beforehand. It was originally titled New World Order before someone figured that we might offend someone – mostly the Orange Goblin, brother – and then there were the reshoots and all the talk about “how dare they replace Steve Rogers with Captain Falcon” or the usual nonsense. My only real concern here was whether the people behind the creative for this thing was capable of crafting a story that was worthy of the films that came before it. The previous Captain America films have been – in my book if no one else’s – the best films out of the MCU. Good storytelling, fantastic performances, and .

Brave New World had a lot going on its shoulders. It needed to convince the world that Sam Wilson was a worthy successor to the Captain America lineage and it need to live up to the standard that past films have established… and I think it’s safe to say that Brave New World fails on both counts.

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I Finally Saw Tetris

After what seems like ages, I finally resolved this whole Apple TV business for the expressed purpose of watching one movie and one movie alone. It’s the movie that’s been teased on every video I’ve done of every interpretation of the game that this film is based on to the point of it becoming a running gag.

So after all this time, what did I think of Tetris: The Movie: The Game Game game?

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BOOK REVIEW – Doom Guy: Life in First Person (2023)

So I recently came across John Romero’s autobiographical book called Doom Guy: Life In First Person. The book delves into the obvious talking points; Romero’s early career, the formation of id Software and the subsequent creation of the many landmark games produced, his later career, and other things. There’s also the personal side of things that make the autobiographical stuff worthwhile; his upbringing, his view on things today, stuff like that. That stuff… well, your mileage is going to vary on that stuff, but the insights into the gaming stuff is what sold me on this book.

This is a better book than I was expecting. Part of it has to due with Romero possessing such keen insight and recollection of past events that very few people have. Oftentimes, whenever someone is pressed on past events, they’ll either provide a fuzzy recollection or they claim that they simply don’t recall. Romero doesn’t have that problem. Everything is written and retold with such detail that it’s almost as though he’s been writing this book his entire life. The only other book I could think that comes across as similar is the Bret Hart bio from ages ago.

Is there a possibility of some things being embellished or perhaps told from a certain point of view? Always, but that’s always the case with these things. I’ve read bios that were completely full of shit from page 1. I didn’t get that case here. I got Romero’s side of the story, it felt genuine, it felt like it came from the heart. And for what it’s worth, I’m on my fourth reading of the book. I don’t say that often for something I’ve read fairly recently.

All in all, Doom Guy gets a thumbs up from me. Tremendous read. Well worth checking out.

COMIC REVIEW – MMPR: The Return (2024 Miniseries)

So while a bunch of old-timers were revisiting past glory in New Zealand – resulting in the 30th anniversary special, Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Once And Always – OG Pinky Amy Jo Johnson was busy crafting her own anniversary story… out of beeswax. The kind that’s none of ours.

Nobody is going to get that.

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