Live-Action Ninja Turtles Short ‘Fight the Foot’ Brings the Essence of Raphael [Video]

Are we living through a renaissance of geek short films? Perhaps the most auspicious of a recent crop of unofficial productions is the Mortal Kombat short directed by Kevin Tancharoen and starring Michael Jai White and Jeri Ryan, which may one day evolve into a feature-length film. We also wrote recently about the fan-made title sequence for The Walking Dead and Michael Ashton's short film Lazy Teenage Superheroes, which eclipsed the quality of the entire Heroes television series with just a $300 budget.

Well, we can add to that list of high quality homemade productions a new live-action short film called Fight the Foot, a darker and more dramatic take on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than we've seen on screen for some time.We're presently unable to identify the creators of Fight the Foot, but they should be proud of the work they've done here. While the story is pretty simple -- April O'Neil runs afoul of the mysterious and violent Foot Clan while pursuing some kind of journalistic endeavor and gets rescued by Raphael -- the overall mood of the piece is very sophisticated and even exciting. The closing moments (underscored by beautiful Underworld music from Sunshine) cast Raphael in his classic, tortured idiom.

As we're sure former Donatello performer and martial artist Steven Ho would agree, the fight choreography in Fight the Foot leaves something to be desired. But some awkward pauses and a few too many shadows aside, it's really quite cool and we definitely hope to see more TMNT action from these filmmakers.

[Via i09]