It’s a tough job to watch all the crap the network puts out, but somebody has to do it. And by ‘somebody’, I typically mean the intern. A pretty huge part of my job was logging footage for these old kung-fu movies the network airs. About 98% they’re terrible- they make no sense, they’re dubbed over in English terribly (often by non-English speakers, if that makes any sense), and they’re at least an hour and a half, without question. But they have to be watched- every minute, every second. Because as the post-intern, it’s my job to look for breaks in the movie to put in handy commercials. And I have to find every single line of profanity in the movie to bleep it out- which basically means I now have to watch some of these terrible moviestwice– once to find everything, and a second time to check my work. It gets miserable sometimes.
Sometimes though, you find movies that are so terrible it’s hilarious. Here’s the end of one of the movies I had to watch- “The Ninja Squad”. I’ll let the clip speak for itself.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-f-1-YVBuXE]
Clearly all kinds of things went wrong with this movie- there’s white people ninjas everywhere in China (totally normal). There’s this wacky 80s music playing at all times. The costumes are shoddy, with headbands that HAVE THE WORD ‘NINJA ON THEM. They’re filming in random locations (usually a public park or a rock quary) with no permit. All of the music is justblatantly stolen from other movies or tv shows, because Hong Kong didn’t care at all about copyright in the 80s. Half of these director’s films aren’t even real ‘films’- he’s cut together multiple movies and dubbed over the dialouge to make completely different plots. Also, I did some digging, and it looks like half of the actors were strong-armed into doing the films against their will for NO MONEY by the Triads. It’s literally absolutely INCREDIBLE that so many things went this wrong in some of these movies.
I’m literally just speechless some days.
So yeah, this is what I do, for like 15 hours a week. And I’d call this one of the better films I had to watch.
Good times.