Kindergarten Ninja

I saw this movie whilst working on a movie shoot. We had finished for the day and one of the actors insisted on showing us just how bad a movie can be. This is it folks. THIS is a piece of utter excrement THIS is the worst movie ever to be made and not in a fun ED WOOD way. Chan's direction is incomprehensibly poor. It's the sort that the worst, homemade porn movies would reject. We actually found it in a bargin dump bin in a market running as a double feature for £1.50! Yes 75p or about $1.00 a film. That's about 20 times what it must have taken to make this garbage. Presumably Chan approached the city council to make the film as part of the DARE anti-drugs programme so that he could get his first feature on his show reel. After seeing this, you'll probably need some drugs. You might even want to take a fatal overdose.

And, it's one of the funniest, most outrageous B-movies you'll ever see! I pity MetalMike for not finding the humor in this. Of course the acting is terrible and the plot deranged and the action scenes silly, but that's the humor in it. What's even funnier is that it may have been a serious attempt at making a decent movie. There are so many classic scenes it's so hard to know where to begin. The karaoke scene, the fight at the end, the three nearly identical montages and various points in the film, and the list goes on and on and on. This movie was far more entertaining than most of the crap put out by Hollywood. Again, if you can't find this funny, then I feel sorry for you... stop taking yourself so seriously! Jeez...

In his first directing role Anthony Chan gives us Kindergarten Ninja. An anti-drug (DARE) film that forces you to indulge in a vast array of mind-altering substances just to make it bearable. Kindergarten Ninja is the anthesis of a family movie; e.g. drug use, womanizing, violence. It's more like a comedy, one which you laugh at. The film has an unclassified rating (UN) as no sane person could probably sit through the entire coma-inducing mess. I suspect the review board simply deny its existence and see the whole premise as a joke on them and all Americans. It's important to remember that even though this is a US anti drugs film it was brought by a Hong Kong based distributor (Panorama Entertainment). God only knows what they saw in this diabolical mess, maybe cheap laughs at the expense of a nation.

OK, so what is Kindergarten Ninja about I hear you ask? Well, football "mega-star" Blade Steel (Dwight Clark) is sentenced to 90 days community service for being a drunken sex addict. What is Blade's punishment? Well, being the model citizen that he is, he's forced to tutor kids at his local community center. But Blade is bored, then suddenly a kung fu teaching angel; "Bruce" appears. He's tired of hanging out with Elvis and Charlie Chaplin in heaven so begins to teach Blade useless kung fu moves whilst sacrilegiously uttering memorable lines from movies such as Enter The Dragon. Blade then teaches the kids his kung poo, and that's about it - coupled with poorly staged fights along the way. The fights themselves look like they were choreographed by a mentally handicapped chimpanzee. Credit must also be given to the writer, George Chung (not to be confused with the famous 70s cocaine smuggler). A man who took all the worse parts of Kindergarten Cop, Hustler Squad, Young Dragons - The Kung Fu Kids, Bad News Bears, etc and made them significantly more unbearable.

Overall, Kindergarten Ninja feels like a low budget homemade porno. The poor camera quality, bad sound and womanizing lead actor, but no porn. Just 90 minutes of z-grade kung fu trash. Chan's lack of direction is shocking. I'm guessing he couldn't afford a boom mic so was forced to use the camera's inbuilt one. I really hope he doesn't direct another movie. Chan should stick to producing nauseating kiddy fodder like "Adventures with Kanga Roddy".

To conclude, I think that the purpose of movies is akin to music. Both enhance your life and provide entertainment. Having this in mind, Kindergarten Ninja cannot be classified as a movie. Words cannot describe how mind-numbingly banal and tedious it was. Having said this, I do have to congratulate Anthony Chan on making, possibly, the worst kung fu production I have ever seen. It's so bad it's bad.

According to the IMDb, the length of this film is 82 minutes. That's 81 minutes too long. It should be only a 30-second P.S.A. for D.A.R.E.; and a 30-second message suggesting that adults listen more to kids. Besides these two topics, everything else is pure garbage. The movie is so named because an obnoxiously-successful football player is convicted of D.U.I., and his sentence is 90 days of being a teacher's aide. (Hmmm...I wonder if that's saying something right there?) His own martial arts learning is imparted at school, and the rest of the picture is about the students and him acquiring the skills and conditioning necessary to defend themselves against nefarious dope peddlers. The dialogue is mechanically recited, and the limited action is sickeningly staged. It has that tell-tale sound of a cheap production, and the effort to fill time (with two dangling tunes and by repeating certain video) is offensively blatant. How ironic that the main character's punishment is also ours.