Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : Apocalypse! - The Unreleased Film
In the Mid 90’s, at the height of Ninja Turtle fever, Italian director Vittorio Marino pitched his vision of the next instalment of the TMNT film franchise. It was pitched to the film executives during a cocaine fuelled weekend trip to New York. No one quite remembers why they signed a multi-million dollar deal with Marino or why they also signed complete creative control over to him, but such were the times.
He went on to create one of the most ostentatious interpretations of the franchise, resulting in an epic sixteen and a half hour rough cut that’s only ever been seen by a handful of people and is sadly lost to time.
The production was an unmitigated disaster. The script was constantly being rewritten, designs changed while shooting, whole new sets and side stories were developed and destroyed on a weekly basis. The production hemorrhaged money, going into an unpayable debt by the time production was halted.
At one point the production had nearly 15 additional ninja turtles, 12 additional mutant groups, three musical dance sequences, over 1500 extras and 37 separate units shooting scenes in parallel to keep up with the constantly changing story. One sequence involved an epic battle in a flooded New York in which they really flooded 10 square blocks of Manhattan to shoot it. The resulting damage was in excess of 30 million dollars.
During the production Marino felt that the costumes were not living up to his vision so he traveled to Sweden to meet with some scientists willing to perform genetic experiments on the actors with mixed results. Many involved went missing or fled to non-extradition countries to avoid human rights charges.
Fun Fact : Many of the surviving mutations have started a colony in the Galapagos islands and can be found there along with their descendants. It’s funded by the lawsuit they were able to levy against the production company.
Below you'll find the surviving production stills. It's impossible to parse what storylines are being portrayed but some versions of the script are around and they contain sequences involving time travel, romance, dance numbers, elements that verge on copyright infringement, parallel universes, outer space and no less than 4 raps about sandwiches. Oddly, there is never any mention of Pizza.
