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Surf Nazis Must Die - So bad it's not good
Date of Review: Jun 8, 2008
The Bottom Line: Bad movies can be fun, but this one wasn't.
Surf Nazis Must Die is a really bad B-grade (more like C-grade) movie from Troma. I've heard about this movie for years, but never saw it until recently when Netflix made it available for online viewing. This is one of those movies that is so bad that some people consider it good. I've enjoyed my share of bad movies, but this one was just too bad for its own good.
As the story goes, an earthquake has taken out most of the coastline and the Surf Nazis have decided to take control over the beaches. This sets off a gang war between them and the other surfers, and their only hope is a retired older black lady who goes all Charles Bronson on them. You can tell the story is based very loosely on The Warriors, but devoid of all historical or literary references. It really is just a dumb movie about surfers.
You'd think that with a title like this movie has, it would be a big gory action comedy. In fact, there's hardly an action at all. There are a few bad little fights and some softcore porn, but mostly it's just a bunch of surf footage mixed in with idiots saying one-liners and trying to act tough. This movie runs about an hour and a half long, and I swear 30-40 minutes of that were just surf footage. Some of it looks like stock footage and the other seems like it was made for the movie.
I think the most entertaining part of this movie is the 80's look of it all. From the weird hair to overdone make-up, a lot of this movie looks like some kind of lame heavy metal video from back in the day. You could splice in footage from this with some hair band playing and it would work quite well. It'd be a lot more entertaining, too.
There weren't any actors in this who I recognized, nor did any of them every go onto anything bigger or better. In fact, many of them only made a handful more movies before getting out of the business. I guess there is no money in making really bad direct-to-DVD movies.
I like Troma movies when they are over the top and crazy like The Toxic Avenger. I knew going in that this was a low-budget goofy movie that plays more like a comedy than action or horror movie. The problem I had with Surf Nazis Must Die was that it was too stupid. It wasn't funny enough to be "so bad it's good" and it borrowed too much from other movies without being enough of a parody.
