Pretty Good

Powerful

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

I read about this on 4chan and ended up getting the DVD. I can appreciate this movie for it's sheer fuckupness and ambition. Imagine power rangers fan fiction made by a perverted mind on a lot of drugs & I think you'll get the idea. It's a complicated mix of a lot of crazy ideas. Some of the scenes are baffling and the characters kind of all speak in a type of coded language of internet hyperbole. Some scenes are hilarious and won me over. Its sort of like the Japanese superhero clichés are explored in a psychological and fetishistic context. Closer to a weird lowbrow art book, or a visual poem, than your average indie film, I can honestly say it's one of the strangest movies I've seen. For that alone, it deserves some credit.

I'm writing this many moons after having somehow survived the screening, so I'm short on details... But I found I had to counter all the 7 star and above reviews...This flick was AWFUL... It was essentially a group of pretentious hipster fucktards rubbing my nose in the fact that these kind of assholes can afford to live in San Francisco these days, and I can't. They made something that they seem to be proud of, but it was quite honestly the most godawful thing I've ever seen. I went on a 6 hour twitter rant that evening about the pain I suffered... I can only refer you to that (as immortalized in Jason's review in jasonwatchesmovies.blogspot.com).Ugh.... Now I hope to never think about this abomination ever again.pt

I have just enough ambient recollection of the Power Rangers to get this movie. I admit my vague memories don't fully equip me for a full appreciation of all this movie holds, but I am betting that folks who glued themselves to the set every afternoon during the height of Power Rangers popularity will fully appreciate this spoof of the low budget Japanese, sci-fi action series. And, for those folks, Cosplay Fetish Battle Drones (nee Struggled Reagans) is a grown up version of those morphin' evil battlers. From what I recall, the Power Rangers had a bunch of teenagers doing typical US teen things interrupted by battles to save the world from invading, evil monsters while wearing colorful stretchy jumpsuits. The shows were decidedly low budget. Cosplay Fetish Battle Drones has a bunch of young adults doing not so typical young adult things and sometimes battling evil invaders while wearing colorful stretchy jumpsuits. The movie is decidedly low budget. The parallels are drawn.After viewing it, I needed to think about the movie and discuss it with others. It's not a movie that I could appreciate fully without first dissecting it – it's thought-provoking in its own strange way. How did that scene fit with the others? How does a dripping faucet tie into the powers that a Struggled Reagan receives? Who was that blue man and how did he fit into the whole of the movie? Did the bad guy win or lose? What are the Power Ranger parallels beyond the obvious ones? For me, a movie that leaves me wondering is a good movie.Is it low budget? Yes. Did I get all of it? No. But it left me wanting to watch it again and to see more from this team. Would it help if I were more versed in the Power Rangers? Definitely. But, I challenge you to give it a shot. You might find yourself in a Blue Velvet kind of moment - you don't know what you just watched, but you know you liked it.

Like many people in the theater after its world premiere, I struggled with a way to parse and internalize what i had just seen. The director - an eccentric man by any standards - apparently was also into the idea of a struggling audience: when they failed to engage with him during the Q&A, he basically forced them to pass the mic down the line (to which many responded by leaving). Now, no one should be forced to badmouth something they don't like...but I find it hard to believe that most people were truly prepared to discuss a film such as this - especially in public - right after watching it.In any case, this is not an easy piece of work to critique on most standard cinematic objective measures of "quality", "fun", "watchability", "art", etc. Like a furtive sex act in a dark alley with a total stranger of indeterminate gender, this one sort of has to be evaluated on its own merits.Firstly, know that the budget for this film must have been low to nonexistent, and that the actors were probably compensated with bus fare and burritos. Know that if bad sound design and even worse mixing bothers you, you should avoid this like the plague. But also know that, despite these factors, this film seems to have taken a long time to make and it is essentially someone's cinematic vision realized from start to finish (to the best of their financial constraints). I can safely say that, if you can listen closely - or if the director touches up a few (erm, let's be honest...a lot) of the dialogue overdub issues for the DVD release - you will sorta kinda get what the intent was. Because the other thing to realize about this film is that it's kinda oblique! As in, dangerously approaching Godard or Beckett levels of oblique. An accurate synopsis of this film is possible, but unless you are hip to a confused stew of Japanese TV, Hindu mythology, 80s sitcom tropes, self-help lingo, and dozens of other fragments of global cultural detritus, good luck figuring out the whats and the whys. There are some great ideas buried in all this stuff, and it has some moments of genuine, uncomplicated humor. (Look for the scene where the tongue fetish guy borrows a random girl's cellphone on the street.) Some weird cgi keeps things interesting visually, as well as a healthy heaping of no-budget sex and violence.Not sure how many people will actually see this film, but honestly, this could easily be one of those weird cult debuts that people start lusting after...years later, when the director/writer/star of this film is an established figure, having finally received that lucky break in the form of a budget to make something truly mindblowing. The odds are against him - aren't they against us all, though? - but that's just part of the bargain.