Almost all of the early beats in Mutant Mayhem’s script from Rowe, producers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez, and Benji Samit feel like the movie checking off a list of TMNT basics for newcomers. But it breezes through them with a swift and stylish precision that telegraphs Rowe and co-director Kyler Spears’ razor-sharp sense for crafting the bigger, busier action sequences that come later on and brilliantly showcases Arthur Fong and Tiffany Lam Almack’s absolutely stunning art direction.

While the Ninja Turtles have been varying degrees of cute, “cool,” and alarming, throughout their almost 40-year-long history, there’s always been an innate ick factor to them that’s a big part of their appeal. Mutant Mayhem’s Turtles are still a gaggle of sewer-dwelling teenage boys who don’t clean behind their ears because they’re not entirely sure if they have them. But one of Mutant Mayhem’s most brilliant moves is the way it parlays the TMNT brand’s classic grossness into a more expansive grotesque aesthetic that defines the entire world around the Turtles, but — interestingly — not the Turtles themselves. 

Unlike the Turtles, who — despite being unique in small ways — all share a recognizable symmetrical wholeness, basically every single human who appears in Mutant Mayhem is rendered as a kind of artfully bizarre nightmare person whose faces all feel like reflections of the city (and humanity’s) ugliness. It’s as true of the innocent strangers the Turtles sneak by during their bodega runs as it is of ​​Cynthia Utrom (Maya Rudolph) — the villainous head of the research lab desperately trying to replicate the process that led to the mutagenic ooze’s creation. But it’s not at all the case with high school student April O’Neil (Ayo Edebiri), whose chance encounter with the Turtles one evening gives them all hope that they might finally have a shot at making some real new friends.