You Get What You Pay For

Several years ago, I spent some time in New York City....
I was dating a lady who lived there. It was a long distance relationship, and she was way out of my league; let's just say that it didn't work out so well. However, a few good things DID come out of the ordeal, including the experience I gained with cheap snack foods while visiting the Big Apple. If you search the shelves of the crappier convenience shops in New York, you can find some real gems. For me, one of them was the line of low-quality cookies made by a company called Uncle Al's.

Ah, good ol' Uncle Al's. I remember stumbling across a 50 cent package of Uncle Al's Butter Cookies one fateful summer day somewhere in Queens, and I immediately thought they were hilarious. "Look! UNCLE AL'S! 50 cents! Hey now!" I exclaimed to my then-GF, who was less than impressed. Ignoring her attitude, I bought several packages and took them home.


The dog wouldn't even eat them. Seriously -- I gave an Uncle Al's butter cookie to the friggin' DOG, and he just kind of licked it for a few seconds before moving on. Uncle Al's butter cookies were truly that bad; I couldn't even chew them....

Anyway, the other week I was at a local gas station, and you'll never guess what I found. Yup, UNCLE AL's COOKIES! They're a little different this time around -- softer, in a different packaging, and with a new shape (the New York Uncle Al's cookies were shaped like rocks, whereas these are more traditional-looking). Heck, I don't even know if these are the same Uncle Al's as the ones I found in NYC, but it really doesn't matter. I declare Uncle Al's cookies the Snack of the Month!


(**BTW, I noticed that when I eat more than one of these things, my hands start shaking. That's how you know they're good!**)

Hey, while I'm on the subject of low quality products, here's a fun little no-budget comedy that almost no one will enjoy.

Cheerleader Ninjas (2002)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235280/



Netflix description:
When a cluster of religious women wrongly accuse the local high school cheerleaders of producing and disseminating smut over the Internet, the girls must try to reclaim their reputations. The Happy Valley High pep squad soon discovers that unbeknownst to them, they've been used as pawns in an Internet scheme. Armed with newly minted kung fu skills, the girls set out to clear their names and squelch the trash in this campy spoof.


You know, of all the no-budget, straight-to-the-discount-bin, brainless-exercises-in-immaturity, total crapfest movies that I have seen, Cheerleader Ninjas may actually be the best. It's basically an amateur production, along the lines of several other pictures I've reviewed here, but slightly better in the comedy department.

The concept is simple: a bunch of cheerleaders do battle with a bunch of reform school girls. See, the reform school girls are led by a gay Christian fundamentalist who's determined to bring the cheerleaders down. Why, I really don't know. Perhaps he's jealous of them. Either way, the bad girls do whatever he says -- also for reasons unknown.

So, the reform school chicks attack the cheerleader chicks. The cheerleaders then enlist the aid of some sci-fi nerds and a martial arts guru in an effort to defend themselves. Stuff happens...they do things...nudity is depicted...yada yada yada.

Cheerleader Ninjas SHOULD be a total throw-away movie. It's obviously intended to be stupid, and no one should go into this one expecting it to be anything other than vulgar (I didn't count how many flatulence jokes this picture had, but I assure you, the number is quite high). Coherent plot is apparently of little importance to writer-director Kevin Campbell, and the film's production values reside somewhere below the basement level. Nevertheless, I kind of enjoyed Cheerleader Ninjas because...well...it's funny.


This movie revels in its lack of class, and almost every scene is a wink to those of us who get the joke. Really, everything the audience for such a picture could have wanted is graciously covered by Mr. Campbell, as our clueless cheerleading heroines are thrown into repeated scenes of unadulterated raunchiness. The gags just don't stop coming, and some of them are a shade more clever than what one would usually find in such a picture. I mean, in MOST movies like this, the writer is content to simply fire off an F-word every few minutes, but in Cheerleader Ninjas, we actually get a few honest to God jokes.

I liked the gang of sci-fi rejects best of all. This group of Trekkies hides out in a subterranean computer lab most of the time, and whenever the cheerleaders pay a visit, they immediately adopt the mannerisms of a Star Trek expeditionary unit. One of them acts as Captain Kirk, narrating the group's confusion while the girls stand just a few feet in front of them. "Strange. The females appear to be pleading for our aid. Reading: suspicious," he says into his sleeve. The laughs in this movie are slightly more thought-out than I expected them to be.

Now, despite my words of lukewarm praise, one should certainly keep in mind that Cheerleader Ninjas is, by no stretch, a GOOD movie. It's downright disgusting at times, and as a film, it's as cheap as they come. A serious fan will regret spending any money or time on this picture (hey, it ranks Number 54 on the IMDB Bottom 100, for God's sake). I'm merely saying that if you want to see a campy C-Grade trashfest to mindlessly pass 90 minutes on a rainy day, then this one is a pretty reliable bet. It's gloriously low-brow; bad in all the right ways. And considering that Cheerleader Ninjas can be instantly streamed on Netflix, there's no need to even waste a physical rental on it. To the curious, I say check it out.

3 out of 5.

b.