From the desk of The Movie Snob.
Rifftrax Live: Samurai Cop. (B+) This is a solid effort by the riffers at Rifftrax. (I saw the live show last night, but you can catch a rebroadcast next Tuesday night if you like!) They started with an amusing short, an old black-and-white educational film in which a surly student learns about good manners from a preachy chalk drawing come to life. Samurai Cop itself is a terrible 1991 knock-off of Lethal Weapon and other buddy-cop movies. A Japanese gang with almost no Japanese members is getting into the L.A. drug scene, and a muscle-bound samurai cop with long, flowing hair and no discernible martial-arts skills comes up from San Diego to help out. He and his African-American sidekick mostly drive around shooting people, but the samurai cop occasionally takes a time out to awkwardly hit on or make out with various women who are unfortunate enough to cross his path. The riffing was very funny, and the movie was amusingly inept in its own right, so I give it a solid thumbs-up.
Be aware, however, that the Rifftrax show is rated R. I was surprised to see that on my ticket, and it turned out to be because the movie has a lot of profanity in it–also some clumsy sexual banter, and some scenes in which the hero and heroine make out while wearing very small swimsuits. (According to IMDB there is nudity in the original movie, but the Rifftrax folks deleted that out.)
To my surprise, the red-headed gal who runs with the bad guys in this movie was Gates McFadden’s stand-in on Star Trek: The Next Generation and actually had small parts herself in no fewer than 43 STTNG episodes! How about that?
The Movie Court 