This is a “film” that I watched in two parts over the period of well over a month so maybe I can’t judge it fairly. But it’s fair because the actual “movie” is actually two episodes of a 1968 Japanese TV show, released in the US in 1986 because reasons, which were combined together out of sequence. Learning this fact does help explain why the plot makes no sense and how I felt like I had no idea what was going on. Turns out, nobody who has seen this movie seems to.

This is not the first “film” assembled, for some reason, from multiple episodes of a Japanese TV show into a TV movie for the US. There must have been some kind of economic model here:

• Buy US TV rights to bad Japanese TV show for cheap
• Spend a little bit of time splicing the tapes together and dubbing into English
• Sell to some US TV network that’s desperate for filler (or, I guess, somehow air it yourself and reap the advertising revenue).

But though it isn’t the first it could be the worst. I mean, I don’t know what was going on. Mighty Jack appears to be a team of international secret agents and also the name of a submarine. And there is Q, the equivalent of SPECTRE. And there is, um, hot ice. There’s this ability to use heat to create ice for, um, reasons and that’s what everyone is fighting over. It’s hard to know why.

And the whole thing just plods along. It’s hard to imagine watching this without the help of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I think I just would have turned it off or forgotten it was on and started doing something else. The gang literally play a song at the end about how slow the film is and how little happens.

I have seen movies with worse budgets and worse effects than the TV show that this was made out of. I have definitely seen many movies that would make my Worst Movies of All Time list that looked worse than this, that arguably made less sense, and that were delightfully awful, or horribly awful, in some kind of way that made them feel like they were among the Worst. But they were actual films. This is actually two TV episodes combined, without regard for the missing episodes that would have (hopefully) connected the plot from the first one to the second (sixth) one. It’s not even a movie.

1/10