3 ninjas: high noon at mega mountain

Unwatchable #34: “House of the Dead”

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. More or less. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Eagle-eyed readers will notice I skipped over #35 on our little countdown to the worst of the worst. My rebuttal is this: What difference does it make now? I’m not going to make it to the top (that is, the bottom) of the list by the time the Screengrab signs off forever, and I had no success tracking down that #35 movie, Santa with Muscles. It doesn’t appear to have warranted a DVD release, and my attempts at tracking it down through unofficial channels have proven fruitless.

I can tell you this much about it: It’s a family-friendly comedy starring Hulk Hogan. Since I’ve already gone through the pain of reviewing such an animal for you – 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain, if you’ve already forgotten – I’m not terribly saddened that I couldn’t find Santa with Muscles. However, we can at least take a moment to enjoy the trailer together, no?

In Other Blogs: Swing and a Drive

As I write this, we’re 72 hours from Opening Day and I can practically taste the peanuts and Cracker Jack. OK, that’s because I had a bowl of peanuts and Cracker Jack for breakfast, but you don’t want to hear about that. You want to hear about the Beyond the Multiplex interview with Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, directors of what Andrew O’Hehir calls the best baseball movie ever, Sugar. “One of the things that drew us to this story was this really staggering statistic,” says Fleck. “If you look at the '80s, the percentage of African-American players in baseball was around 22 percent. That has gone down to somewhere around 8 or 9 percent now, while the Dominican population in baseball has risen dramatically….Major League Baseball has taken money out of the inner cities, partly because baseball is an expensive sport to play. It's not like basketball, where all you need is a ball and a hoop. You need lots of equipment, and you've got fields you have to take care of. They've taken money out of the cities and flipped it into the Dominican Republic, where they can sign players much cheaper.”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson wonders whether Blu-ray has gone too far.

Unwatchable #46: “3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain”

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.

Our unprecedented weeklong survey of Unwatchability comes to a merciful close with what I was astounded to discover is the FOURTH movie in the 3 Ninjas series. These are, after all, movies about kids, the smallest of whom can’t be more than eight years old in High Noon at Mega Mountain. How could they possibly have had three movies worth of adventures already?

Well, for one thing, the three ninjas have been recast for the fourth installment – in fact, two of them have been recast for the second time. It’s the Menudo principle at work, ensuring a long and glorious reign for the 3 Ninjas franchise. Since these kids are no-names, however, we need an actual trio of big stars to headline the picture. I have placed the names of 732,891 members of the Screen Actors Guild into this hat. Please choose three. Let’s see…Loni Anderson…Jim “Ernest” Varney…and Hulk Hogan! Perfect!