Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

This darkly photographed fantasy adventure created four new high-kicking heroes and blitzed box-offices everywhere.

What's afoot? The Foot Clan, that's what, terrorising the New York streets (as if they weren't terrorised enough).

Their dodgy malarkey incurs the wrath of the sewer-dwelling, pizza-eating, giant-sized (mutated by radioactive waste) turtles, who swing into action.

Aided by young TV reporter April O'Neil and self-appointed vigilante Casey Jones, the Turtles must battle to save the Big Apple from the evil Shredder.

The result is the demolition scores of oriental extras with a degree of violence that alarmed guardians of the children at whom the film is aimed.

While raising the temperatures of alarmed parents everywhere on release in 1990 the non-PC antics look positively revolutionary in today's moral climate.

The headbanded amphibians also prove better actors than most of the human cast, although that's not too difficult.

Their constant stream of in-lingo wisecracks amuses or annoys according to taste in this hardly awesome, but passably bodacious slice of tongue-in-cheek, half-shelled action.

Tim Evans