RIFFTRAX LIVE: SAMURAI COP

The Rifftrax folks love to make snarky comments about terrible movies -- and there's oh so much to make fun of in Samurai Cop, a bit of 1990s cheese that pretty much fails at every level.  So Rifftrax Live: Samurai Cop was a great evening of fun.

The movie opened with fake movie trivia, comments (including New Cop Movie Cliches), and comedy songs.  Then Mike Nelson, Bill Corbett, and Kevin Murphy took the stage.  They began with a black-and-white short film -- Manners in School -- where an animated chalk stick figure teaches an obnoxious kid about manners.  Fun as that was, things really kicked into high gear when the trio took on the feature.

 It's hard to describe just how terrible Samurai Cop really is -- and Nelson, Corbett, and Murphy jumped on virtually all the movie's flaws.  The "hero" gets nailed for everything from his long flowing hair ("Cher wig") to the banana hammock he sports through far too much of the end of the film.  His partner seems to specialize in making goofy faces; he's also the butt of a lot of ethnic "jokes," but as the hosts reassure us, "It's not racist if it's incoherent."  There's some sort of police war on Japanese gangs, and the body count is amazingly high.  Apparently samurai cops will ignore their guns to fight bad guys with martial arts or swords.  A villain is brought into a hospital room hidden in a hamper.  There's painfully sexist and explicit "flirting."  Lion heads appear for... some reason?  And the phrase "shoot him!" takes on hysterical meaning.

Rifftrax Live: Samurai Cop was a delightfully silly evening at the movies, from the opening fake credits to the final song about the feature.

Overall grade: A-
Reviewed by James Lynch