JoelSchlosberg

As per The Breakfast Club, we could call it prude-shaming: It somehow both reinforces the madonna-whore dichotomy, and looks down at both extremes.

The pants need to have lots of room for the part where Basinger notes, when she kissed him, that "suddenly there was a lot more of him down there."

The thing that gets me about the movie not being from the POV of the stepdaughter is that there was a childen's book published the next year (so written around the same time) which not only has a nearly identical title, but which famously takes the child's-eye perspective (both figuratively and literally) on its cover: In contrast, both this movie and its poster most definitely do not:

Siskel and Ebert disagreed on whether or not Lovitz is funny in the movie, in fact that makes up most of their debate in their review:

Speaking of James Bond villians, I couldn't help but be reminded of one with a neckbrace due to below-the-neck health issues, making for a less than intimidating opponent in vehicular combat (although the lack of a threat was a deliberate statement):

Here ya go:

And the killer is not anesthetized when his head is being sawed off, which would seem to clearly be a case of cruel and unusual punishment! It seems like a big coincidence, unless that is intended as further evidence of Fahey as an unreliable narrator. I initially assumed that him waking up from the vision of decapitation was just a typical "it was all a dream/apprehension" fake-out.

Wouldn't the ultimate item of clothing symbolic of mind-body separation be the sort of tie/collar/neckband thing that most Hanna-Barbera characters had, so that the head and body could literally be animated (as in both "moved" and "brought to life") separately?

That's far from the first. The "killer's transplanted body part" plot, with the body part even specifically being a hand, goes all the way back to the 1924 silent movie The Hands of Orlac:

Those below-the-neck body parts being more proactive would also justify why Fahey expends all the shotgun ammo on them. All the time he keeps blasting away at them over and over with the shotgun while they're just hanging around, I wonder why he doesn't send just one shotgun shell straight into the killer's head at point-blank range and blow it to smithereens.

1950 is the same year that Lindsay Duncan, who plays Dr. Webb, was born! John Walsh, who plays Fletcher, was born in 1949.

Just realized that Leslie Nielsen has a cordless phone receiver! (Two years before Home for the Holidays built a sequence around trying to keep a phone cord untangled.)So even though he doesn't have a cell phone, he can just keep the receiver, which is the exact size of an early cell phone, on his person rather than on the rest of the phone, and not have to run to it when he gets a call. Sure the receiver would need batteries, but it can't use them more than the Game Gear.

OTOH, giving the brothers license to grow up "John Connor style" would be the only way to make their early-'90s California lingo even more obnoxious.

Hey video store owners: get the hot new PG RATED movie by "the director of Bachelor Party" starring "Saturday Night Live's hilarious copy room guy Rob Schneider" ("and his two friends") and "Wild Thing Tone Loc, star of Poetic Justice and Posse"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ2Z2-mddq0 (And yes, as it says, Tone Loc is actually on the soundtrack album, despite being conspicuously absent from the musical performances in the movie itself.) You also gotta love the originality in saying that "It's 3 Ninjas meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!" Especially since 3 Ninjas called itself a mix of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with another movie, Home Alone. Couldn't they have referenced a recent surfing movie like Point Break?

Heck, most of the surfing scenes are in the trailer. As in, not just clips from most surfing scenes, but most of the entire surfing footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlLWmFpEouI

There's also the crystal-clear voice in the Game Gear of the princess saying "help!" Digitized speech clips in video games existed as early as , but were uncommon. Early synthesized voices were low-quality due to the crude state of the tech (as with the announcer's voice in of Bloodsport fame) and even as that improved, they had to be low-quality to fit in limited storage space. The sound clip saying "SE-GA!" at the beginning of the first Sonic the Hedgehog game was 1/8 of the entire size of the game! Voices in 1990s portable games particularly , even more so than on (both of which were less powerful than 1980s arcade machines). Does the actual Surf Ninjas game have voices, and if so, of what quality?

One WTF line I haven't seen discussed: the Game Gear-playing brother saying "I've played this level before." On its own, that would be at odds with the game only showing stuff immediately before it happens. But just a few shots earlier, a close-up of the game screen clearly shows that it just arrived at level 2. So everything before then would have been level 1. Especially since the level 2 opening screen says that it takes place at the restaurant which they just arrived at.

The off-hand mention of finding out about Leslie Nielsen's method acting via the IMDb message boards is kind of sad, since said message boards were shut down last month! So it must have been towards the end. For all their flaws, having a place set aside for discussions of virtually any movie no matter how obscure or dated has its uses!

Maybe some reviewers are deliberately avoiding 5 stars to avoid being features on HDTGM? (Not this one, given that it's from 2000. But there's always the possibility of precognition. Or time travel.) Gotta love the lineup: "a one-eyed warrior, a beautiful fiancee, an LA cop, and an annoying friend."

There's even more inappropriate sexual innuendo in the movie than discussed in the podcast! After the “pick up the pace” line, Schneider says “if she’s afraid to show it she’s… probably not very attractive.” Which is clearly implying that he was going to say "gonna blow it", which is even more suggestive in its possible meanings than "pick up the pace". Even his substitute term "attractive" is more sexually oriented than, say, "pretty". And then the little brother says “way to close the deal, Casanova”! OK, Playboy was something that would be in the culture at the time and even relevant before the Internet (it played a prominent role in the PG-13 Disney movie Adventures in Babysitting!), and a historical figure like Caligula had some name recognition from the notorious Penthouse movie, but why are up-to-the-minute '90s California youth name-dropping an 18th century Italian contemporary of ?

I would say that the Phantom's nation was more vaguely African than vaguely Asian, but Wikipedia says that “In the 1996 film, Bengalla is located in Asia instead of Africa.” Still, it's too landlocked to be the island country of Surf Ninjas, even though (as pointed out in the HDTGM episode for The Phantom) an island would be the obvious location for the base of someone dedicated to fighting pirates!

^ Heh, as chance would have had it, I had to be somewhere yesterday and had just a bit over an hour to watch the movie before I left, so I watched much of it 50% sped up. It helped that there were lots of pointless sequences where nothing much happened! I thought that there would be parts with action too fast to follow at that speed, but there were surprisingly few in a movie about surfing and ninja-ing, two usually fast-paced activities.

Heck, given the reality-altering properties of the video game, why can't they just travel to the island by moving their avatars there in the game, like how the Muppets travel by map? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIQKVITyaMI

The whole time they were doing the running gag with Leslie Nielsen scrambling to answer his phone, I was thinking "surely caller ID must have been around by the early 1990s?" I mean sure, it took time for it to be as ubiquitous as answering machine messages, but surely a super-villain would have ways of getting cutting edge tech he particularly needs. And he does have call waiting! Indeed, here's a news article from a full year before Surf Ninjas came out about the early caller ID services that were already available, and which were even prompting anti-caller ID countermeasures: http://articles.balt...-call-rejection Then again, why doesn't he just have a cell phone? If Robin Williams in Hook can have a cell phone as part of his job as an attorney two years before Surf Ninjas, why can't someone who controls the resources of an entire country obtain one? (Insert joke about the lawyer being the larger-scale evildoer.) Or why not a pager, a technology which was in use as early as the 1950s? Also, if he communicated orders via pager codes, he would avoid saying them loud and clear in front of all the henchmen and prisoners within earshot who could potentially offer ear-witness testimony about his criminal plans. Then again, Leslie Nielsen feels the need to blab to everyone about his one Achilles' heel weakness. Having it be water is kind of non-intimidating (as the Agony Booth review of Santa With Muscles sarcastically tells that movie's main villain, "My compliments on hiring a henchwoman who can be defeated by a bucket of water. Very menacing. While you’re at it, maybe you oughta call up the Wicked Witch of the West, I hear she’s looking for work.") But it works when it's (although the witch's weakness is set up in the book version). Or with , which is odd come to think of it. But then Dracula never ran to answer phone calls.

With the issue of how they could have made the trees into surfboards so fast, why wasn't there a montage? It worked for another comedy where a community just happens to have the one traditional skill they can use in an unconventional way to defeat a villain menacing them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COxA9rhGddo But then again, depicting the surfboard-creating process would require showing them chopping down the trees, which would be ill at odds with '90s environmentalism. Even if there was some sort of line about replanting the trees like the line about quitting smoking. Just as the Jurassic Park sequel The Lost World took its title and dinosaurs from Arthur Conan Doyle's book of the same name, but left out the part where the heroes reach the dinos by cutting down a tree: