After the surprise success of the 1990 live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Chinese studio Golden Harvest rushed out a sequel to hit theater screens less than a year later, hoping to cash-in again before Turtlemania subsided. From a business perspective, that was probably a smart decision. Although nowhere near as big a blockbuster, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze made a comfortable profit off its small budget. As for the quality of the movie itself, sadly, the quickie follow-up is a pale shadow of the original, which was hardly any great artistic triumph in the first place.
If I’d felt some embarrassment buying a ticket for the first Ninja Turtles, the film turned out to be pretty appealing to other 15-year-olds after all. However, the sequel was much more overtly kiddie-oriented, and by the ever-so-mature age of 16 all my friends had decided they were too old for movies based on cartoons. In those days, it was no problem at all for a teenager to walk into an R-rated movie, and everybody was still buzzing over The Silence of the Lambs and New Jack City that spring, while eagerly awaiting Steven Seagal to kick some butt in Out for Justice a couple weeks later. That time we all liked Ninja Turtles felt like a million years in the past.
Nevertheless, I indeed went to see The Secret of the Ooze in the theater anyway, and was so humiliated when I ran into a girl I knew from high school working the counter that I bought a ticket for the John Hughes comedy Career Opportunities instead and snuck into the Turtles auditorium. I’m pretty sure she figured out what I was doing, but she was kind enough not to say anything. I’ve still never seen Career Opportunities.
| Title: | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze |
| Year of Release: | 1991 |
| Director: | Michael Pressman |
| Watched On: | Paramount+ |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray Max Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Despite being churned out so rapidly, The Secret of the Ooze makes several significant changes from the first film. Most prominently, the role of reporter and Turtle-ally April O’Neil is played by a new actress (Paige Turco) who looks nothing like the last one. Less noticeably, villain Shredder – who unsurprisingly survived his fate at the end of the prior movie – has also been replaced by actor François Chau (later of Lost and The Expanse), but we never fully see his face under the mask anyway. Corey Feldman had been arrested on drug charges between the two films and couldn’t reprise his voice acting for the Donatello character. Meanwhile, the stunt actor who’d previously been inside the Donatello costume (Ernie Reyes, Jr.) was promoted to an on-camera role and gets significant screen time as a kung-fu-fighting pizza delivery boy named Keno.
Per its title, the sequel delves into the backstory origins of our Turtle heroes when the mysterious toxic ooze that irradiated them as hatchlings is dug up from a construction site by the corporation responsible for creating it. Still alive and now extra-pissed, Shredder orders his Foot Clan underlings to kidnap the company’s top scientist (David Warner from Tron and this same year’s Star Trek VI) and forces him to use it on a new pair of animals, for the purpose of creating two super-monsters to fight the Turtles – “freak against freak.”
That’s about all the relevant plot the sequel has to offer. The most notable quality about the film is that any traces of the edginess or grittiness of the first one (such as the profanity and wallowing in the dirt and grime of the city) have been stripped out to make this entry more appealing to younger kids. Even for as silly as the first Ninja Turtles could be, Secret of the Ooze is far sillier. The new monsters, called Tokka and Rahzar (because the producers were prohibited from using the Bebop and Rocksteady characters from the comic and cartoon), are very goofy-looking and behave like babies, even imprinting onto Shredder as their “mama.”
The consequence of targeting an even younger audience like this, of course, is that the movie has almost nothing to offer anyone over age 12. As ridiculous as it may seem to complain that a movie based on a cartoon is too “cartoonish,” that’s exactly how this one feels. Countless scenes are dragged down by lame jokes and Three Stooges gags. The sequel also has much less action, and what we do get is blandly staged by journeyman TV director Michael Pressman. Its brief 88-minute runtime can feel endless.
Ironically, the most memorable scene in Secret of the Ooze – and the only enjoyment I got out of rewatching it so many years later – is also its most dated and cringeworthy. The movie climaxes with a cameo from flash-in-the-pan music sensation Vanilla Ice, at the height of both his career success and his douchebaggery (the two things being perversely tied together), playing himself to deliver a musical number for a song called “Ninja Rap” written for the film. The song is hilariously awful, and watching him perform it in a kids’ movie while a bunch of stunt actors in rubber monster costumes pretend to fight each other in front of him is pure camp delight.
That scene brings back so many wonderfully awkward memories of being a teenager in the early 1990s that I felt my time watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze was ultimately well spent. All the same, I doubt I will ever do so again. Nor do I have any desire to watch 1993’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, which I’ve never seen but by all accounts is even worse than this one. Nostalgia has its limits.
Video Streaming
I can’t seem to win with this franchise. I streamed the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on Max and was greatly disappointed with its video quality, only to discover a day later that Paramount+ also picked up the movie and has a better-looking transfer for it. Naturally, when I decided to watch the sequel, I went straight to Paramount+ first. The results there are hugely underwhelming. After finishing, I checked Max to see how much worse it might look there, but it turns out that both platforms are using the same video master for this one, and Max actually has better streaming quality. How frustrating.
The copies on both Max and Paramount+ are slightly letterboxed to 1.85:1, which suggests that they come from a source master different than the 2009 Blu-ray edition that had been opened up to full-screen 16:9. Regardless, the transfer looks old. The HD image is very grainy, dim, and drab, with dull colors and a mediocre at best sense of sharpness or detail. Some of that may be the fault of the movie’s photography, but Paramount’s copy of the first film looks better than this one.
The graininess becomes a big problem due to the heavy and sloppy digital compression on the Paramount+ platform, which regularly causes grain to freeze in place on screen while the action beneath it continues to move. In dimly-lit indoor scenes, character faces are smudgy and indistinct. While the copy on Max shares most of the other failings of this dated master, the compression quality is more stable there overall, and yields a marginally more tolerable viewing experience. Neither one looks good, but Max looks less awful than Paramount+ in this case.
The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack is also is a big letdown, equally so no matter where you stream it. The audio is flat and bland, with weak dynamics and limited surround use. That’s the case on both Paramount+ and Max. Both of them sound worse than the first movie, so I’m inclined to assume that the sequel just has a poorer sound mix than its predecessor.
The Video File Blog 
‘while eagerly awaiting Steven Seagal to kick some butt in Out for Justice a couple weeks later’ haha, it seems silly today that one could be excited for a Seagal movie.
As a kid, I preferred ‘Secret of the Ooze’. It was my favourite of the trilogy. Haven’t seen it in YEARS, so it’s probably a childhood memory best kept locked up (I rewatched ‘Spy Hard’ last month for the first time since 1996, and was very disappointed. I saw it TWICE in theatres and loved it!).
Part three is quite funny/crappy, so I’d suggest you give it a spin. You can’t do two reviews, and ignore the third one. Do it for our (and completionists’) sake.
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