Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.
First of all, kudos to whatever marketing whiz came up with that title. I love the modest little shrug it implies. “Yeah, it’s a Power Rangers movie. Whaddayagonnado?”
Your question, assuming you missed a crucial stretch of mid-90s pop culture while on a Peace Corps mission, is “What’s a Power Rangers?” Unfortunately I’m not the best guy to ask. I always associated the Power Rangers with the Teletubbies: Both were programs that, although intended for children, held great appeal for the 420 crowd. Both centered on a group of color-coded characters, one of whom was gay. (At least, I think one of the Power Rangers was gay; I do know that fellow Screengrabber Andrew Osborne and I once hired a Red Power Ranger stripper to perform at a gay friend’s birthday party.)
More specifically, the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers series that debuted in 1993 was a kiddie show that spliced new scenes featuring American actors with existing footage from the Japanese Super Sentai Series. This was part of the appeal, particularly to stoners: you’d have these five Saved by the Bell-type teens who would morph into a team of superheroes, at which point the show itself would morph into wacky Japanese action sequences. What I didn’t realize until my consultation with Wikipedia is that, although the original Mighty Morphin series ended in 1996, an endless number of spinoffs has kept the Power Rangers on the air ever since. The current series, Power Rangers: Jungle Fury, is the fifteenth variation; Power Rangers: Turbo was the fourth, and was preceded by this 1997 feature film.
Sadly, none of this information has aided my appreciation for Turbo, a truly pathetic money grab that surely resulted in many parents vowing never to take their kids to the movies again. The needlessly cluttered story – the main points of which are repeated ad nauseam just in case anyone in the target audience really gives a crap what’s going on – concerns the villainous, cleavagey Divatox, whose plot to free her fiancé Maligore from an invisible island in the Nemesis Triangle entails kidnapping the dwarfy wizard Lerigot. Only the Power Rangers – now equipped with snazzy new TURBO! powers - can rescue Lerigot and his family and prevent the release of the lava-monster Maligore.
Aside from its Saturday morning production values and acting, Turbo suffers from its mid-90s origins. It’s not old enough to be campy fun, just old enough that the special effects and dork-rock soundtrack (“There’s hope for the world…hope for the world…as long as I exist, there’s hope for the world”) have completely putrefied. Worse than the charisma-free stars and the puppets Sid and Marty Krofft would have rejected and the shots of volcanoes spliced in from ‘60s nature films…worse than all of that is the fact that the creative minds behind Turbo apparently decided it wasn’t pandering enough, so they disable the Blue Ranger in a martial arts match and replace him with an obnoxious little pre-teen turd who spends the whole movie screechin’ at a frequency that nearly gave my dog a seizure. And for that crime, it deserves four Maurys.
Previously on Unwatchable:
63. Alone in the Dark
64. Angels’ Brigade
65. Meet the Browns
66. Jail Bait
67. Nine Lives