Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: rifftrax, Rifftrax Live, Samurai Cop

Losing Oxygen To My Brain While Laughing At Rifftrax's Take On 'Samurai Cop'

Samurai Cop is by far one of the worst '90s B-Movies you can find, if you can find it. It's also one of the best films for is someone asks "What's it about?" To which you can reply "Well, it's about a cop, but he's also a samurai…." Just talking about the main film without adding in the Rifftrax end of things would make you question how this movie got made in the first place. Short version: Long-haired white cop who uses guns a lot (you know, not a samurai) with chiseled body sleeps with all the blonde women in the film while cracking wise with his cool-headed partner and killing another samurai who is also white and kinda chubby. The film kills multiple people in dumb ways with lots of squibs while swearing and making more sexual references than your average porn.

Which made it the perfect film for Rifftrax to latch onto, first as a downloadable episode and now with Rifftrax: Live. If you've never been to a live show, the basic concept is that the trio of Kevin Murphy, Mike Nelson and Bill Corbett get together in front of a live audience at a local theater and perform a two-hour show for you. This particular show was at the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, Tennessee, which was then broadcast live to theaters across the country. But unlike the home versions you can get from their website, the group will change things up by adding in different jokes than before so you're getting an entirely different experience. Plus you get to experience a short before the feature with them giving it the "love" it deserves.

In the honored tradition of having a short where an inanimate object comes to life to teach you a lesson, the 1958 short "Manners in School" has a character named Chalky magically become coherent and try to teach a kid named Larry how to be a decent human being. The shorts are honestly where Rifftrax does their best work as they're compact pieces of outdated garbage that are easy to pick apart. You get great jokes about Larry being the god who brought Chalky to life, and how in the hell a creature made five minutes ago is the perfect person to teach a boy how to behave. Here's hoping they release this short soon on their website, it was one of their better efforts.

Then we get to the main film, which is so ridiculous that sometimes they guy remain quiet just so you can soak in the hilarity. Like listening to a nurse talk to the samurai cop about dick size only to turn him down. Or how the woman helicopter cop is always asking him to come over. Some of the best parts included two minutes of riffing on a giant lion head mask sitting inside a business where the leading woman lived, and a constant thread about someone's "black gift" that kept resurfacing at just the right moments. We also get treated (I think that's the word to use here) to a fat guy who almost gets laid and then gets kicked in the junk, all the way to a Japanese mafia boss with a mullet and a porn-stache giving orders like he's reading the McDonald's breakfast menu. Priceless stuff!

The Rifftrax: Live version of Samurai Cop is pretty funny. It isn't their best live work compared to other works like The Room or Starship Troopers,  but it's a solid effort that does an amazing job of taking a snoozer of a film and making it almost watchable. You can see it again in theaters on April 18. Just be sure to take a snack and prepare to be out of oxygen from laughing at the really funny tangents.

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