New York Ninja (1984/2021)

The idea of a genuine “lost” 80s ninja movie is every ninjologist’s dream. There’s a certain kudos attached to obscurity when it comes to these movies (entirely in keeping with the shadowy, mysterious ways of the ninja themselves) and, as this blog name has always suggested, even when you think you’ve found them all, there’s still more ninjas to come racing in from the darkness. Ninjologists rejoiced when Y.K. Kim’s Miami Connection, a 1987 film that was screened once and never released or seen again, was rediscovered and re-released by Drafthouse in 2012. But New York Ninja tops it for obscurity. Miami Connection was restored with the full participation of its creator and the print was at least complete. New York Ninja was not. It was a long-abandoned unfinished project with no sound, no credits and no ending. No one knew anything about it. The reels had sat there unopened for some 35 years and the seller’s suggestion was to just throw away them away as they were useless. Vinegar Syndrome, understanding they must fulfil the vision of the Supreme God Ninja, did no such thing…

I know, this sounds like fiction. This sounds like it’s all part of an elaborate gimmick but it’s not, it’s 100% legit. New York Ninja was originally the project of martial artist, actor and filmmaker John Liu. He was one of many Taiwanese hopefuls pumping out films during the late 70s kung fu boom and is probably best known for appearing in the seminal Secret Rivals films. Like most stars of that epoch, he directed a couple of films himself. He plays a character called “John Liu” in all of them, clearly trying to carve himself a brand, but they weren’t really successful. It’s a shame because Liu and so many of his peers were insanely talented by most people’s standards. Taiwan was Hong Kong’s scrappier little brother when it came to filmmaking but there was nonetheless an abundance of skill and creative energy there. Liu, with just one lucky break, could have been a superstar.

His last shot at worldwide stardom, prior to retiring from film and apparently moving to a shack in rural Vietnam, was New York Ninja, an American production funded by 21st Century Film Corporation. They clearly thought they had a good shot at finding if not the next Bruce Lee then at least the next Sho Kosugi in John Liu, who would write, direct and star in the film. Sho Kosugi had proven that, at last, an American film could be successful with an East Asian lead just so long as he was a ninja, so why not?

Unfortunately, for reasons mostly lost to time, the production halted and never restarted. Even though the majority of the film had been shot, the footage was left on the shelf, unedited, unloved. Kurtis M. Spieler from Vinegar Syndrome – in a decision that can be only described as both heroic and insane – took it upon himself to not just restore the footage that existed but actually edit it into a movie. Considering there was no sound, no script, no obvious running order to the scenes and no one around to ever explain the film’s intentions, that’s a Hell of a feat. He admits that when he edited a soundless rough cut based on the scene numbers, it “made no sense at all”. So he had his work cut out.

Spieler wrote a whole new script based around the footage he had and hired a bunch of exploitation and kung fu movie luminaires to dub it, including bonafide legends like Don “The Dragon” Wilson (who voices John Liu), Cynthia Rothrock, Linnea Quigley, Michael Berryman and the incomparable Ginger Lynn. His intention, rather than going the easy way and creating a Shaolin Dolemite style comedy dub that roasted the movie’s weak points, was to stay true to the spirit of the footage and complete it as best he could. Liu himself was apparently uninterested in revisiting his previous career at all and wouldn’t talk to anyone about it. Spieler therefore was on his own trying to reinterpret and revitalize the spirit of New York Ninja but he knew there’d be an audience for it if he could. The result is… surprisingly great.

Liu plays, as is customary, “John Liu”, a mild-mannered newsman whose beloved wife Nita is murdered by the thugs terrorising New York. They wear preposterous make-up and outfits somewhere between the Village People, The Warriors and The Legion of Doom and the police are powerless to stop these dayglo punks. So there’s only one thing for it. Liu straps on his ninja suit, lights a few candles, and grabs his shuriken. Although New York Ninja may cashes in on the grimy but enduring New York vigilante craze (ala Death Wish and The Exterminator), it’s a surprisingly wholesome plot. “The Ninja” becomes a local hero, beloved by children, including his Short Round-like protege The Kid, who legit assembles an army of mini-ninjas to step in when they’re needed. Less wholesome is what’s behind all the killings and kidnappings of young women in New York. It’s preposterous pervert in sunglasses with a Repo Man/Kiss Me Deadly briefcase that gives him some kind of gooey plutonium-enhanced powers…!

Yes, New York Ninja blends the ninja craze with vigilantes, little kids, sexy 80s babes, nuclear paranoia and a dash of supernatural gore/horror. Characters tote signs, t-shirts and badges (bearing the 21st Century Distribution logo!) with “I ❤ New York Ninja” on them, in a clear merchandising bid. There’s no doubt that John Liu had scanned the culture and made a valiant attempt to give the people what they want. But the lack of budget shows. While Liu himself is a good-looking lead with formidable martial arts skills, the rest of the cast are a mix of long forgotten non-actors, NYC weirdoes, porn stars and – surprisingly – real life news anchor Adrienne Meltzer (who was apparently trying to get an acting career going but only seems to have ever acted in the roles of news reporters!). She’s a really good sport in the role of Randi Rydell though. Her character keeps trying to cover the New York Ninja story with her cameraman Jack, but is constantly being attacked, molested, groped, kidnapped and otherwise menaced for her troubles.

Being fair on what remains of the source material, New York Ninja has enough charm to warrant cult status. It’s unlikely it would’ve been a hit because it’s just so cheap but I’m sure it would’ve won fans in ninjologists, just because it has SO MUCH bokken for your buck. The ninjing in it is really fun with lots of weaponry and Liu’s trademark tae kwon do style kicks. It’s always a pleasure to see iredeemable perps in bad fashions getting duffed up and this offers scene upon scene of duffings. Liu also hits the jackpot with the classic iconography of ninjas and skylines. There’s a ton of guerilla-style outdoor filming of New York and Randi’s nocturnal trek through Times Square is gorgeous (it’s no coincidence that Ninja III : The Domination is one of the films on the playbill though!). There’s some decent footage here despite the cheapness but Enter The Dragon it ain’t.

However, a phenomenal amount of respect has to go to Kurtis M. Spieler. I’ve said it before but actually ‘getting’ these kind of films is so rare. There are so many Godawful 80s pastiches that just lampoon all the flaws and make fun of people who, for the most part, were trying their best, but Spieler plays this entirely straight and creates something sublime. What’s particularly beautiful is that by re-editing it, rewriting it and dubbing it with totally made-up dialogue, he’s staying very true to the ultimate ninja spirit of Godfrey Ho and his cut and paste films. It all feels genuinely authentic, which in an age defined by reference and irony and artifice, is a thing worth celebrating. That said, this is a far slicker (ninja) operation than anything Ho did, made with a lot of care, love and technical skill.

If you ever want to truly understand the craft and effort that goes into B-Movies, New York Ninja is an essential watch. On account of how it was assembled (and the myriad extras on the Blu-Ray that talk you through it), you can really appreciate the level of work, as well as the quality of it. The voice cast here are fantastic. While the dubbing obviously doesn’t result in the performances being conventionally “good”, the voice work itself is exemplary. They’ve completely captured the style of 80s ADR without ever lapsing into parody and do a great job of matching new dialogue to lips that were often saying something completely different. It’s so convincing that Adrienne Meltzer (the only original cast member they could track down to interview) thought they genuinely found her audio when she watched Linnea Quigley’s dub of her and was shocked to find it was someone else! Don “The Dragon” Wilson is great here too, giving John Liu exactly the right level of camp that his exagerrated, very Taiwanese-style performance inspires but also keeping the emotional core of the film intact.

The emotional core is key to the film’s ultimate success. A movie like New York Ninja, in both original intention and remixed form, relies on a visceral response. Much like the visceral art of any combat sport, martial arts based narratives have to use a certain physical language to provoke such seemingly simple emotions as love and hate in the viewer. New York Ninja paints in absurdly broad strokes at times but anything more nuanced would mess it up. For example, it opens with a scene in which John tells Nita repeatedly how much he loves her. He gives her a special gift. She tells him she’s pregnant. It’s also her birthday. AND THEN she gets killed! Knifed up by a despicable thug called Freddy Cufflinks (!). John sits surrounded by balloons, wrapping paper and gifts, screaming “WHYYYYYY?” to the rooftops. He cuts up his hand with the broken glass from the smashed photo of them that he intended to give her as a gift. After that relentless outpouring of grief, how can you NOT want to see Cufflinks and his horrible mob die the slicey, dicey deaths they deserve? It’s a simple emotional core but it exists and Spieler feels it.

The best B-Movies are aware of their own absurdity but refuse to acknowledge it and New York Ninja sits squarely in this canon. It works on two different levels – firstly, as a superb example of the form, an 80s ninja movie that delivers what it promises with no nonsense and a few mental twists (the plutonium deaths are wonderfully OTT), but also as a unique artefact. A film that was a product of its time that has somehow been completed, a lifetime later, by absolutely no one involved in the original shoot. Lovers of 80s cinema are always chasing that dragon, trying to find something that delivers the thrills of the most excessive decade and most things never will. But this, this is the real deal. Moreso even that Miami Connection, New York Ninja is a bonafide oddity, a tremendous feat of care and attention and just a really good time.

Recommended to ninjologists at all levels.

[Tip of the Bokken to rockshockpop.com whose screencaps I stole!]

The VelociPastor (2018)

This is maybe a little departure from the usual ninjology covered on this blog but I believe The VelociPastor (2018) deserves its place in the ninja canon. Not only do you get plenty of bokken for your buck (I’ve seen films with Ninja in the title that have far less ninjing than this) and direct references to deep ninja cuts but it also is full of SUPREME NINJA SPIRIT. Like, genuinely, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking this looks like one of those depressingly ironic joyless CGI messes that litter the streaming services but it’s not. There’s knowledge and real heart behind this and I highly recommend it to ninjologists at all levels of study.

Greg Cohan stars as Doug, a priest whose parents were killed in a freak car bombing. Although a devout Christian, Doug has grown up feeling a sense of displacement and is haunted by bizarre dreams/flashbacks where he walks the forests of China and has his hand cut by a mysterious dinosaur tooth relic. What he doesn’t know is that he is actually the Dragon Warrior, and can turn into… a deadly velociraptor! He finds this out by chance when he saves a prostitute named Carol (Alyssa Kempinski) from being murdered in a park. She has no issue with the fact that he turned into a dinosaur and ripped a man’s head off before her very eyes. In fact, she loves it and wants to see more criminals meet the same fate, so Doug must face some big questions. Will he follow his heart, break his vow of celibacy with Carol and embrace his new role as a prehistoric vigilante? Or will he stay with the church and suppress his innate dinosaurness? And what of the strange ninjas who keep breaking into his apartment? Could the death of his parents be traced back to an ancient ninja conspiracy? Why YES. YES IT COULD.

I have to admit, I avoided this film for a long time because I HATE the aforementioned ironic movies that are “intentionally bad”, from Asylum all the way down to the micro-budget Disco Exorcist style nonsense. Those movies irritate me more than most because they just get it all so wrong. I have an entirely unironic love for B-Movies, especially those from the glory days of the 80s VHS boom, and with most of those new ones, the joke is laughing at how “bad” the old ones were. Which totally misses the point.

I didn’t watch movies like Eliminators or Ultimax Force or No Retreat No Surrender 2 (to name a comparative handful that spring to mind here) because I thought they were bad or I wanted to laugh at them. I watched them because I thought they were the most awesome shit I’d ever seen. Yes, I was a kid when those movies first went into my brain and maybe you can’t get it if you’re coming to them new as an adult but they gave me everything I wanted. They were technically movies for adults, in that they were loaded with sex and violence and bad language, but they had a unique “kid logic” that worked on the basis that it wasn’t worth making something realistic when instead it could be cool. Arguably, the less realistic something was – be it a fight, an explosion, a monster or a plot – the cooler it was because reality sucked then and sucks even more now. The makers of these gonzoid movies wrote ideas way beyond their monetary means and just went with it. Maybe the fact that VHS picture quality was so much worse than theatrical made them bolder. Maybe they thought “yeah, we can shove in some papier mache here and no one will even notice unless they pause the tape”? What you got was more than just a cheap effect though. It was an IDEA made flesh. It was something onscreen that you’d never seen before that was cool.

The VelociPastor is one of those rare 80s homages that actually ‘gets’ it. Like, REALLY, gets all of it. To make an truly funny parody of something, you need to know it inside out and I’m convinced writer/director Brendan Steere has wasted as much of his life as I have on this stuff. The film builds in so many of the popular video tropes of the 80s – ninjas, monsters, magic from the exotic Orient, occult antics (courtesy of surprise Aurelio Voltaire no less!), Vietnam flashbacks, irrational gore, kung-faux fights, split screen, workout montages, pounding rock tunes… It apes the IFD/Godfrey Ho/Filmark ninja films (Caucasians with headbands? check!), the Cannon films, the sub-Cannon films and even throws in a direct reference to the classic DIY ninja epic Miami Connection with its closing epigraph (delivered with immaculate comic timing).

What it does with these tropes is escalate them until they become a gag and then escalate them again until they become an utterly absurd gag. Like how the split screen sex scene (a gag) goes from being two split screens to about twenty-four screens by the end (an utterly absurd gag). It’s not humour that everyone will get, I suppose. On IMDB under Goofs, someone has included a scene where Doug delivers Bible quotations like Levitcus 24:25 and Matthew 32:6, calling it out because both verses that don’t exist. That, as Rainer Wolfcastle would say, is the joke. It pokes fun at 80s B-Movies never caring for fact-checks or cultural sensitivity but also lampoons those whole use out of context Bible quotes to justify absolutely anything (in this case, being a dinosaur vigilante). It’s a great multi-layered gag. I’m not trying to say The VelociPastor is a feat of towering intellect but it a lot smarter and funnier than people who don’t get it seem to think it is. It plays everything with an ultra-straight face the way classic Zucker spoofs like Airplane! or The Naked Gun! did and this is probably my favourite kind of humour when it’s done right. It’s long fallen out of fashion but this is what makes the VelociPastor feel like such a warm, big-hearted movie – how profoundly unfashionable it is.

I spent most of the film laughing, all the way up until the gloriously silly final fight sequence: so simple, yet so effective, as the VelociPastor is revealed in all his glory. They could’ve opted for CGI effects like the Asylum, but that would’ve looked soulless and shit and not even remotely 80s. I love that instead they opted for bargain basement FX with SOUL. The dinosaur costume looks nothing like a real dinosaur and it looks like it probably cost $100 to either make or buy, but it looks INCREDIBLE and if you don’t get a surge of joy when it’s revealed, we’re very different people.

I’ve said before I’m very much an ’emotional’ film watcher and perhaps more and more lately, with 2020 being such a tough year and the future looking bleak, I find myself chasing the emotional dragon of when I first discovered film; in the 80s, on VHS, via the outrageous, OTT, wonderful action/fantasy/horror movies of the day. It’s a high that’s nigh on impossible to get again nowadays, especially in the 2020s where everything already feels so cynical, so gloomy, so OBSESSED with dreary realism. There’s a slavish adherence right now to being literal over everything truly cinematic. I imagine the internet has something to do with that. In the 80s, there was no way for an audience to really feed back, beyond not renting something. They certainly weren’t going to lambast a direct-to-VHS movie for factual inaccuracies. Whereas now, online, no matter what your movie is, there’s thousands of people waiting to either correct you or – in the case of the aforementioned IMDB “Goof” – think they’re correcting you while getting it massively wrong. Either way, that instant sea of would-be critics dissecting every last detail has made filmmakers afraid to take risks, to be abstract. Instead we get Christopher Nolan – who wants his audio to be so “realistic” it’s inaudible – or an insistence that every horror film be a dry representation of grief and anxiety rather than a wild metaphor for them. The VelociPastor is probably the best time I’ve had with a film all year because it GAVE me that emotional high again. That feeling of being a spellbound child, watching stuff I just couldn’t believe was unfolding before my eyes. It’s nothing BUT cinematic. It couldn’t work in any other medium and it makes the most of this one.

The dawn of VHS was an exciting time because the stabilisers were off the bike and the kid riding it was going downhill at 100mph. It was a free for all, an opening of the floodgates to a world of mad ideas. Straight-to-VHS films were about giving the video-buying public what they wanted and the public wanted big loud escapism. They wanted to rent stuff they probably wouldn’t be seen in public watching, stuff that channeled their innermost desires and fantasies. They wanted broad strokes of heroes and villains and if the heroes were dinosaurs and the villains were ninjas – OR VICE VERSA – that just made it all the better. These films were reassuring in the best way and subversive by being so camp, so unrepentant in their trash tastes and so against the status quo of sophistication. The VelociPastor, through its clear deep love and knowledge for the genre, CELEBRATES these films and, as a result, becomes a great one in itself. It is also, I am confident, the only film you will ever see on this blog where the ninjas fight A DINOSAUR.

Ninja Operation : Knight and Warrior (1986)

“Damnit, Gordon, you can’t just go around killing people!”

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll be aware that the 1980s video market was flooded with “cut and paste” ninja films, predominantly from two production companies, IFD and Filmark. Their M.O. was to buy bulk rights to Korean, Taiwanese or Thai films that were unsellable on the international market, then re-edit and re-dub them into whole new plots involving ninjas. Some 10 – 15 minutes of newly shot footage – mostly caucasian actors in ninja suits yelling at each other – would then be dropped in at regular intervals throughout the film. The whole thing would be retitled something snappy and modern like Ninja Terminator or Full Metal Ninja and worldwide rights were sold for megabucks. Ninja Operation : Knight and Warrior, however, is a little different. Here, there’s just 20 minutes of scenes from a 1984 Taiwanese clanger called A Girl Rogue (dir: Chao Chen-Kao) and the rest of the film is original footage, directed by the king of cut and paste ninjas, Godfrey Ho himself.

If you’re a veteran of these films, the sheer volume of original Ho footage in this is a rare treat and a curious insight into the kind of gonzoid masterpieces we could’ve had if he’d made more like this. It’s hard to know the exact chronology of when each IFD film was made (experts have argued you can date an IFD film by grading leading man Richard Harrison’s hairline, which would put this somewhere around late ’86 for when it was shot?) but this shows an ambition beyond both the early “will this work?” efforts and the later “will this do?” ones. The problem is that shooting your own footage requires a budget and that wasn’t something IFD had. Well, they had it (God only knows how much money they made from the lucrative distribution deals they secured), they just didn’t want to inject it back into the films. More cost meant less profit and why bother when there’s another unuseable reel of Korean family drama right there that you can splice and dice for less than the cost of a new bicycle?

The reason for Knight & Warrior’s unique status among IFD ninja films is that they had a little help from their friends. Alphonse Beni was an actor/writer/director from Cameroon who also dabbled in distribution. Legend has it that he ran into Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho from IFD at Cannes one year and, seeing how much ninjabread they were raking in, decided he wanted a piece of it. More than that, he wanted to star in it (he also worked his way into some French softcore films around the same time so was clearly a man who knew what he liked in life). Ho and Lai said OF COURSE! They’d be happy to shoot an Alphonse Beni ninja opus…! Just so long as he paid for it. The rest is history. So that’s why you get a good 60 – 70 minutes of Godfrey Ho bokken for your buck here!

The plot is undiluted Ho. Beni plays Alvin, a cop living in Paris who’s working on busting up “the biggest heroin connection in Europe”. We know we’re in Paris because it opens with a drug deal in which the dealers are selling heroin stuffed into baguettes.

Yes, baguettes.

However, Alvin and his colleagues have bitten off more heroin baguette than they can chew because the leader of the gang is a son of a bitch named Rudolph (Stuart Smith). He’s furious because not only has Alvin busted up his deal but he’s talked one of his men into snitching. In fairness, the guy didn’t want to snitch at first but when Alvin said “think of your wife, your kids and your 70 year old grandfather”, the guy did just this and accepted a deal for a new ID, $500,000 and a home in the Bahamas. Such humble demands are no problem at all for the Parisian police. However, he never makes it to the Bahamas because Rudolph – in full ninja garb – rocks up, shouts “BETRAYER! BETRAYERS MUST DIE!” and ninjes him up. While he’s there, he sends a couple of evil ninjas to kill Alvin’s wife Donna, on the eve of their 4 year anniversary no less, proving once and for all he is a fiend.

This pushes Alvin over the edge. He’s thrown off the case because it’s now too personal but decides to pack his bags and head to Hong Kong, where he will meet with his friend Inspector Gordon (Richard Harrison playing his mainstay character) and together they’ll bring down Rudolph’s empire. Some 22 minutes into the film, we finally get some of the footage from A Girl Rogue, seamlessly stitched in to a scene where Ma Sha (from Girl Rogue) talks to Grant Temple (from Knight & Warrior). Ah, the magic of cinema. Temple is working for Rudolph and they’re trying to diversify their trade. They need the help of Tiger (Sha), a small-time thug looking to get more responsibility. He must infiltrate the fishing union at Aberdeen Harbour. It’s a complex plot but basically involves getting heroin from Hong Kong to Russia. When his business acumen is questioned, Rudolph simply states “the more risk we take, the bigger our profits!” (so clearly not a man who’s ever studied risk analysis).

We cut to a Hong Kong police briefing where we learn that Gordon is a maverick cop who plays by his own rules. His boss warns him that they can’t afford any more “cowboy cop” behaviour because they – like the Parisian police – are looking to bring down Rudolph. They have an operation already in progress. A young girl called Vivian is “not a cop, she’s straight out of reform school, but you can trust her, she has everything to lose” (okay) and undercover man Jackie is “posing as a doctor”. You can tell Vivian is a rebel because she rides around on a motorcycle wearing an actual Nazi SS cap. Complicating matters, a young guy called Edmond (Chiu Ming-Hsian) is seeking vengeance on Tiger for killing his father over a union affair. Phew.

It’s not as convoluted as it sounds. It’s basically two straight revenge plots for the price of one – Alvin wants to kill Rudolph for killing his wife, Edmond wants to kill Tiger for killing his father, Vivian wants to ride her motorcycle hard – and by using so little footage from A Girl Rogue, Ho creates a film that is pretty much wall to wall mayhem. Most of the scenes he uses are fights or nutty stunts so the pace is off the scale fast. I don’t know what happened to Chiu Ming-Hsian as he only seems to have a handful of credits to his name but I sure do hope he didn’t die in the line of duty. Some of the stunts we see him do here – riding on top of a moving car, leaping off a very tall bridge into water, dropping onto concrete from a wall, flying through the back window of a van into the street – are pretty reckless to say the least (but very cool looking)…

The Ho footage here is very heavy on ninjing as most of the main characters are secret ninjas. I mean, we kinda know they will be but it might surprise new viewers when they waggle their fingers, magically apparate ninja suits, then start cartwheeling their way across the park. Unfortunately, if you’re watching the old UK VHS print, some of the ninjing is censored by the BBFC who – at the time – didn’t want kids copying their ninja heroes like Gordon and Alvin. This makes some scenes in the film appear even sillier than they really are; for example, a scene where two evil ninjas attack Alvin and his cop buddy John in the park sees the ninjas dramatically strap on their masks, gambol towards their targets and get shot dead immediately with just one gunshot finishing both of them off, making them the most inept ninjas ever filmed. In the full version, they do at least attempt some shuriken attacks and Alvin kills one of them with a shuriken… a more honorable end for a ninja, I’m sure you’d agree.

The whole thing ends with a mass brawl from Girl Rogue and an inevitable ninja showdown (preceded by a Ninja Challenge – also censored out of the frame on the UK print because it’s in the form of a tiny sword!) by the reservoir.

By this point, Gordon and Alvin – in matching super-natty canary yellow ninja suits with sequinned collars and shoulderpads (WHERE ON EARTH WERE THEY TRYING TO BE STEALTHY IN THESE?) – have started calling themselves the Knights of Justice and are ready to kick ass.

What makes this so entertaining (beyond, obviously, those outfits)? Well, I think for many ninjologists, we discovered ninjas as children and a film like Knight & Warrior really plays into a child-like view of the world that’s appealingly simplistic. There are no shades of grey here. Rudolph is a total bastard. Alvin is a hero cop. It’s classically Manichaean. When you’re a little kid, you don’t dream of being a complex anti-hero with a shady morality, an alcohol problem and a pain-filled past, you just want to be the Good Guy. And if that means impractically wearing a natty suit of bright yellow fabric and a headband that proudly states “NIN – JA” for all to see, then that’s just what being Good is all about. These films channel the spirit of that inner child like few others. Detractors might argue it’s because they play like they’ve been written by a 6-year-old but I think if you’re tired of the complications, pressures and downright exhausting responsibilities of adult life, it’s nice to be able to put your mind somewhere like this. Where there’s no red tape, no bureaucracy, no need for paperwork, no need for anything approaching a dreary desk job. Where Tiger’s “toughest guys” hang around at the adventure playground. Where every unnecessary death is avenged in full by magical dayglo ninjas. Where the Knights of Justice always triumph. Who wouldn’t want that for 90 minutes once in a while?

Unmasking The Idol (1986)

You might look at the amazing painted cover for Unmasking The Idol and think there’s no way the film itself could live up. The 80s were, of course, the golden age of box art that promised helicopters, explosions, ninjas, goddesses and beefcakes that only existed in the artist’s imagination. Simply watch any of the IFD films I’ve discussed on this blog to realise how little the covers related to the films, so for truth in advertising alone, Unmasking The Idol should be treasured by ninjologists. Everything on the cover is in the film here, unbelievably. And if that doesn’t trigger multiple ninjasms, you’re on the wrong website.

Being honest for a moment, if you grew up in the 1980s it can be hard to separate an objectively adult appreciation of ninjas from a pure adolescence nostalgia trip. When I was a kid, ninjas were the coolest thing imaginable and artwork, movies, TV shows and magazines of the time played into this. It wasn’t about the art of Ninjutsu. It wasn’t about authentic Japanese history. It was who could look the coolest and how. As I’ve grown older, I have of course come to appreciate the rich and varied ways in which ninjas can be presented but sometimes that classically superhuman, ridiculous, “NINJAS! THEY CAN DO ANYTHING” approach is the one I like the most. And it’s the one Unmasking The Idol takes.

The opening scenes are magnificent and will have the ninjologist’s inner child bouncing like they’ve shot up a concoction of undiluted E numbers. We begin with some classic ninja safecracking from a guy wearing one of those groovy chainmail-enhanced hoods (ripped off from Sho Kosugi in The Master Ninja). Some guys with guns rock up and interrupt the ninja mid-theft. Mayhem immediately ensues – throwing stars to the face, acrobatic jumps and kicks – and eventually the ninja ninjes off the side of the building into a swimming pool (turning into a very obvious mannequin in the process). The gun dudes follow him and shoot into the pool but it’s a trap. He lets off some poison gas, inflates a gigantic balloon and FLOATS OFF INTO THE SUNSET ON HIS FUCKING NINJA BALLOON. Then the credits roll over music that sounds like a Bond theme performed on a MIDI synth. A voice croons lyrics about walking into the fire while a silhouette in a headband performs a kata against a sunset backdrop. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more breathtaking way to open a film.

It only escalates, as we find out the ninja is actually Jax. Duncan Jax. OUR HERO. A James Bond style super-spy played by Ian Hunter (a balding middle-aged guy who looks like Chevy Chase). He relaxes after his death-defying safecracker mission by going to a casino where he meets an Asian girl named China (Shakti Chen). He tells her he is “fascinated by a woman with a knowledge of the far east” and amazingly, this gets her into bed. The film then cuts to the next morning where, lying beside her, he quips “I always love to start my day off with a bang”… A class act, I’m sure you’d agree.

You think you’ve got a handle on things but then we’re introduced to Duncan’s spying partner, Boon. Boon is a baboon (played by Typhoon, a popular baboon actor of the day who also appeared in Shakma and The Fly) but he’s no ordinary baboon. He wears a little gi and knows karate. YES. Duncan Jax – THE NINJA JAMES BOND – has a KARATE BABOON as a partner. If you’ve not seen this film I don’t know why you’re even still reading this. You clearly need to fix the situation immediately.

If you are still reading, okay. There’s a bad guy called Goldtooth and he has an island where he’s hording gold and some kind of mythical idol thing that holds great power. He’s in league with Scarlet Leader, a red-suited ninja with a metal mask who has an apparent army of red ninjas, as well as a natty Castle Greyskull type lair with flaming torches, carved skulls and AN ACTUAL CROCODILE PIT. Jax’s boss, Star, has decided that Jax is the only man who can complete “the most dangerous mission ever” (yes, he actually refers to it in these exact words) and sends him to Devil’s Crown Island to defeat the scarlet ninjas and save the idol. Jax – despite the fact that he uses a phonebox to change into his Kosugi ninja outfit – is not Superman, so even he needs a little help. He puts together a team of misfit mercenaries to help storm the island and, each one brings a quality stolen from a more popular film or TV show… It wasn’t unusual for direct-to-video films to rip off existing hits but Unmasking The Idol tries to rip all of them off. You’ll catch el cheapo recreations of familiar moments from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, James Bond, Das Boot, The A-Team and much, much more besides here, and it’s a delight for 80s fanatics to spot.

While Unmasking The Idol might accurately be called dumb (I mean, the ninjas wear black and red outfits for a fight that takes them to a yellow beach and a green forest in sunlight – you’d think they’d be better at hiding) it certainly isn’t “bad”. Director Worth Keeter had a lot of experience behind him and makes this with a more careful hand than it maybe deserves. It’s very well lit and photographed and the stunts are surprisingly effective (even though I suspect they were higher in risk than budget). The action sequences look genuinely cool and the sets – from Jax’s bizarro space station HQ to the evil ninja lair – are amazing, like a Saturday morning cartoon come to life. There is also a LOT of ninjing here, in case you’re thinking this isn’t a ninja movie. It absolutely is. There’s more bokken for you buck than most Godfrey Ho films. Fact. There’s nothing nuanced or sensible about it but its energy and heart make up for all its immaturity and the fact it was deemed bankable just shows what a huge market there was for these kind of “kidult” films. Movies made for adults – with varying degrees of sex, violence and bad language – but ones that still play like they were written by a hyperactive 8 year old on an Etch-a-Sketch.

How was such a thing bankrolled? We may never know but the producer Robert P. Eaton is an interesting – albeit mysterious – figure in Hollywood history. Variously described as a playboy, a producer and a businessman, Eaton hung around the Howard Hughes set (to the extent where he was entrusted by Hughes to edit his memoirs) and was clearly a well-to-do man about town. He married Lana Turner in the 1965 (could you BE more Hollywood?) but cheated on her, got divorced in 1969 and wrote a torrid Jackie Collins style novel called The Body Brokers as a thinly-veiled tell-all about their marriage. But he doesn’t actually have a lot of film credits to his name so who knows what he was actually doing in Hollywood all that time? The mid-80s were the height of the VHS boom so presumably he thought he’d make a quick buck if he could bang out the ultimate exploitation movie – something that would ride each and every video trend at once.

I suspect his plan worked and he had a nice retirement fund, since Unmasking The Idol got massive international distribution on VHS (even if it’s been forgotten now). Eaton and Keeter even made a sequel – Order Of The Black Eagle – in 1987 where Jax (Ian Hunter again, giving hope to us balding middle-aged men everywhere) goes after Neo-Nazi ninjas who have Hitler’s brain and a deadly laser gun… But that’s another post for another day. For now, I’ll leave you with one last case for why you need this film in your life. The climax (possibly inspired by Keeter’s earlier 3D ballooning movie Hot Heirs) features Jax’s jeep – baboon and all – being carried off into the skies by a giant hot air balloon, and one of the best bad guy kiss-offs you’ll see. It’s a phrase used too often but they REALLY, really don’t make them like this any more.

[Tip of the bokken to Ninja Master Luke for bringing this one into my life!]

Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger (1982)

First of all, I apologise that it’s been a little quiet here on Ninjas All The Way Down recently. A lot of boring reasons for my inactivity but rest assured, the Ninja Empire has not been corrupted and I am alive and well. However, this weekend I received an anonymous email via the contact form on my personal website from someone calling themselves simply “a“. It felt like the kind of message that should be attached to a robot and said “Please do some more Ninjas All The Way Down reviews.” So who am I to not give the people what they want? And, for another thing, this is clearly a message from the Great God Ninja himself. So in continuation of my perpetual ninja mission, here’s a new post!

Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger aka The Secret Ninja (1982) is from the pre-cut-and-paste era of IFD, where Joseph Lai, Tomas Tang and Godfrey Ho would acquire mostly South Korean martial arts films, re-dub them, edit them just a little and sell them to the international market with exciting new titles. This one started life as Injamunsalsu (Duel of In-ja Hall) and was directed by Kim Si Hyeon. IFD thought that was a boring title so rechristened it Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger and replaced all trace of the original credits. It now proudly proclaims “DIRECTED BY GODFREY HO”, which is a total lie. If you’re feeling generous you could say he directed the English dubbing session… Anyway, for housekeeping, the version I watched was the UK VHS print, which has about 90 seconds missing. Some shuriken flinging and a nude whipping scene were censored because the BBFC hate fun.

Although not a cut-and-paste movie, you do wonder if maybe spending too much time watching these Korean flicks was responsible for Ho’s later idiosyncratic approach to storytelling. I’ve watched a fair few and they’re just not very well written at all. The plot in this one is particularly tough to follow so bear with me as I try to summarise it. “Lord Evergreen” is a rich nobleman who decides he will marry off his daughter Susan (Seo Jeong-Ah) to whoever can win his martial arts tournament. It looks as if some local champion has won but then everybody’s favourite Korean Bruce Lee impersonator Dragon Lee rocks up, having traveled for days, and serves a kung fu Brucie Bonus – sealed with a fist – winning both the tournament and the girl.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple because Susan gets kidnapped by Tiger So (tae kwon do legend Hwang Jang Lee), an evil dude who sits at the head of the Ninja Society. In a baffling twist, it turns out Lord Evergreen isn’t Susan’s real father but instead she’s the daughter of the former head ninja. “You see!?” bellows Tiger, in an effort to persuade Susan to marry him. “We’re both of the Ninja Society! And ninjas stay together!” Clearly a big fan of nincest. But there’s still more family secrets to come…

Susan has a long lost sister who dresses like the most unconvincing boy ever in order to join the very macho rescue mission with Dragon Lee and (Jaguar Wong himself) Jack Lam, who here plays some kind of wandering fighter dude. The scene where they find out she’s actually a girl is unintentionally hilarious. It gets funnier, the angrier they get because her disguise (essentially just a hat) is so laughably bad. Which is good because the intentional laughs here are diabolically bad. Continuing the theme of cross-dressing there’s a painful slapstick scene where Dragon is ‘seduced’ by a male transvestite with hairy legs, and another where Dragon has to fight ninjas while clinging to a towel to protect his modesty. Don’t misunderstand me here, I do enjoy Dragon Lee and think he’s one of the more entertaining Bruce clones but he CANNOT handle comedy.

He fares better with the fights which, considering the budget, aren’t too bad. Dragon, Jack Lam and Hwang Jang all bring some real martial skills to the proceedings and fans of Ninja Terminator will enjoy seeing “Jaguar” and “Tiger” duff each other up again (in a manner of speaking, at least). There’s actually a fair bit of bokken for your buck here and ninjas around every corner. They have some weird magical powers that include setting things on fire and blowing themselves up (technically more pyromancy than Ninjutsu) and they can burrow underground, climb cliff faces in record time and breathe underwater. They’re also quite natty dressers with a variety of suits and… uh… capes.

I can’t say Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger is a good film. The plot is too convoluted and episodic to ever come together. The production values are underwhelming and the comedy excruciating. But it’s worth an advanced ninjologist’s time just for the heavy ninja content and surprisingly entertaining finale. Hwang Jang Lee fans may feel a sense of deja vu though… Yep, the final fight’s ripped off massively from Ninja In The Dragon’s Den, right down to a surprise breast flash being the bad guy’s undoing. It’s strange because the laser-shooting breasts are easily the weirdest/dumbest thing about that otherwise excellent movie and yet it’s the thing these guys chose to rip off (although they can’t afford lasers so we just get more spontaneous combustion). That kind of cock-eyed decision-making process is ultimately what prevents Secret Ninja from ever being a great film, although it does at least have one of the most needlessly brutal finishing moves ever to leave you walking away on a high. And rubbing your neck because owwwww…

The Sword of Bushido (1990)

I admit that The Sword Of Bushido isn’t strictly a ninja movie. Let’s say it’s ninja-adjacent. There’s a ninja in it but he isn’t, sadly, the main focus of the story, despite being so prominent on the 1996 UK VHS artwork (and all subsequent DVD releases). That said, every release of this film I’ve seen is deceptively packaged. The original UK VHS release featured Richard Norton in ceremonial garb, brandishing a sword against a backdrop of some cliffs and while this scene does exist – it appears while the opening credits roll – it has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the movie… Still, despite all this, I think it’s a film that’s remembered quite fondly by martial arts VHS fans so let’s take a look back.

Norton plays Zac Connors, a former Navy S.E.A.L. whose grandfather went missing in southeast Thailand at the end of WW2. Connors – who in between his intensive Navy training has also been learning Bushido, the Japanese Way Of The Warrior (why? because the 80s) – knows his grandfather was on his way back to the US from Japan when he crash-landed in Thailand. More intriguingly, he was carrying a very valuable ancient Samurai sword at the time, that has also been long since missing. Connors consider it his chūgi to not just locate and properly bury his grandfather’s corpse but also return the sword to Japan where it belongs. Unfortunately for him, the Japanese government are offering a two million dollar reward for the sword so he’s not the only one after it. Cue a trail of bad guys for him to duff up…

To kick off his adventure, Zac enlists the help of one of the U.S. Navy’s senior intelligence officers (Judy Green, who is a deadringer for 80s porn sensation Victoria Paris here). She offers to help him locate his grandfather with state of the art 1980s computer technology. While she taps away at the keys and murmurs retro techspeak, he spends the whole time checking out her ass and calling her a “clerk”. Later, in his apartment, while she continues working, he seduces her with takeaway sushi (from a cheeky delivery boy who asks him “blonde or brunette?” and winks, implying this is a regular tactic). At the vital point where she’s running the software routine that will track the exact location he requires, Zac starts unbuttoning her shirt (!). She does point out “this is sexual harrassment” – which it inarguably is – but I guess no one can resist the exotic allure of sushi, so they giggle their way into a very soft sex scene and then she’s never seen again. Tossed aside like yesterday’s bread. Ouch.

[If it helps sweeten things any, Judy Green and Richard Norton actually got married 3 years after shooting this and are still together now, nearly 30 years later. They present martial arts shows together on Kapow TV, which is just lovely. Aww.]

Anyway, once she’s given him the exact position he was after (in more ways than one), he jets off to the jungles of southeast Thailand, finds his granddad’s body and gets embroiled in some village politics when he’s set upon by his first wave of bad guys – Thai gun runners. There’s a local mercenary called Suay (Rochelle Ashana from Kickboxer) and she is trying to protect her village. Being a man of honour, Zac gets involved and, in return, Suay tries to help him locate the missing sword. What follows is an overlong, somewhat disjointed caper that involves a cocky Vietnam vet who inevitably double-crosses them, a torchlit trek through a cave full of traps and a romantic moment shared beneath a waterfall as Suay and Zac slice leeches off each other’s skin with a knife and then – overcome by the famously aphrodisiac nature of this activity – share a kiss.

So what about the ninja, huh? You came here for ninjing and so did I. Well, he rocks up when Zac and Suay take the precious sword back to Japan and find the Yakuza want to steal it for their own nefarious purposes (it’s all go in Zac’s world). They send a ninja to attack them in their hotel room and it’s a standout scene. He bounds in, does some acrobatics, flings a ton of shuriken around and then gets pushed out of the window, clutching a lamp and clinging on to the extension cord for dear life. “Lights out, buddy,” chuckles Zac and pulls the plug, sending the ninja tumbling to the ground. It’s okay though. He’s a ninja. He always lands on his feet. Tragically, as he stops to shake his fist at the window and curse in Japanese… HE GETS HIT BY A BUS! Suay – who missed all this – asks what happened to him. “He caught the bus,” replies Zac, deadpan as anything.

It’s this kind of bizarre comedy that makes Sword of Bushido a distinctly 80s movie. Zac’s character is reasonably honourable (if you excuse his workplace friskiness) and acts in tune with the Bushido Code. His story is largely played straight and yet we still get hilarious scenes where he chases a car full of Yakuza on a child’s Go-Kart (“sorry kid, I need your wheels”) and winds up in a ditch covered in fish while a Thai youth football team laugh at him (!). On one hand, yes, this film tells a coherent story but, on the other, it’s like about four films smushed into one. It obviously takes its cue from the Indiana Jones adventures but, I dunno. What’s the filmic equivalent of being dropped on your head as an infant? Whatever it is, it happened here.

Still, Sword of Bushido is not without its qualities. Richard Norton has such an easy charisma and makes Zac Connors feel like a much more affable and enjoyable character than he would’ve been in lesser hands. There’s not enough fighting to really show off Norton’s incredible martial talents but he does get to deliver enough chuckle-worthy one-liners to earn his paycheck. The cinematography here (by Ross Berryman, who the same year would shoot the gorgeous-looking Dead Calm) is far above average for the genre, loaded with nifty tracking shots that keep things stylish when the plot lags. The action, when it does happen, is reasonable. There’s some decent pyro, a cool swordfight and some gory shoot-outs and that ninja scene is brief but makes everything worth it.

Ultimately, it’s hard to hate a movie that tries so hard. Like I say, it’s damaged goods, but Norton’s charm holds it together like adorable Aussie duct tape. Why does he keep his Aussie accent when everyone in the film constantly refers to him as “The American” or “Yankee”? I don’t know. It’s questions like this you have to accept won’t be answered by The Sword of Bushido, but if you’re a forgiving ninjologist who’s happy for a gentle nostalgia hit and not much bokken for your buck, you’ll probably get a kick out of all this silliness either way.

Ninja : American Warrior (1987)

For the unintiated – and first-time visitors to this blog – Filmark were one of several Hong Kong production companies who, in the 1980s, bought the rights to existing Asian films then re-edited and re-dubbed them with new storylines. They also spliced in their own footage of mostly Caucasian actors playing ninjas and slapped titles on the films that they felt would appeal to western markets. It worked. Filmark alone sold dozens of films like this all around the world. Sometimes the results of their experiments were abysmal – as messy as you’d expect – but other times they struck gold and made psychotronic martial arts magic. Ninja : American Warrior (1987) came quite late in the cycle but is easily one of their most ambitious entries and a fierce introduction to the madness inside themselves that they’d channel just to make a quick buck…

HOUSEKEEPING PARAGRAPH (feel free to skip if you want to get straight to the action!) : Cheng Kei-Ying (under the name Tommy Cheng) directs the new Filmark footage here and, unusually, it takes up at least a third of the runtime. It’s not just a handful of ninja fights, it’s almost a whole isolated film in itself and he uses some gleefully audacious edits to help it blend “seamlessly” into the source film, Chester Wong’s Queen Bee’s Revenge (1981). This was originally a sequel to Wong’s excellent blood-soaked vengeance saga Queen Bee (also 1981), which Filmark already used as a source film in the unrelated Ninja And The Warriors Of Fire (1987), but where that film more or less followed the same plot as Queen Bee with added ninjas, Ninja : American Warrior does not follow Queen Bee’s Revenge’s plot… at all.

It opens with an unknown woman in aerobics gear walking through a field and being set upon by a red ninja and a gold lamé ninja. The red ninja wears gardening gloves, which he rubs together to create ACTUAL FLAMING FISTS. Yes, this film opens with a ninja, fighting with his hands on fire. Impressively, without setting any of her highly flammable shell suit on fire, Aerobics Woman duffs them both up and announces to the camera that she now only has “the Black Cougar Ninja” left to kill. Then she puts on a rubber mask…

…and we cut to Lu I-Chan (the very glamorous star of Queen Bee’s Revenge) skulking around a building, kicking the ass of various goons who attack her. A man in almost kabuki-style make-up appears from the shadows and murders her, before announcing himself as the Black Cougar Ninja. As a group of shady Triads arrive, he tells them he has completed his mission to kill the woman known as Amazonia. BUT. There’s a twist. In the first of the aforementioned audacious edits, he then bends down and we cut to a rubber mask being pulled off of Lu I-Chan to reveal it’s actually Aerobics Woman from the opening scene! In a Rubber Lu I-Chan mask! The Black Cougar Ninja was tricked. Amazonia isn’t dead after all.

So. For the plot of Ninja : American Warrior, Lu I-Chan is Amazonia, a ninja-trained police officer who’s part of a team trying to stop a female Triad boss known only as The Shrew (“She’s a mean cow,” one cop warns… “I ain’t scared of no cows,” replies another in a key expository dialogue scene). In her arc, she’s taking revenge for the death of mild-mannered and much-loved garden centre manager Charlie Chow (“I love taking revenge!” she shouts iconically, “It makes me feel strong!”) and this involves a lot of bloody shoot-outs and swordfights.

She’s pursued relentlessly by the Black Cougar Ninja, who’s on The Shrew’s payroll, and at one point she fights him while topless, having had to use her top as a decoy (that old trick!). This is all fine but MEANWHILE, there’s another plot happening concurrently. In this one, Joff Houston plays a ninja-trained CIA operative and former Vietnam vet who’s on the trail of the same Triads as Amazonia (they actually “meet” in one scene but eagle eyes will spot it’s all done with camera tricks and editing). In his arc, the primary Triad target is “Justin Taylor” (Jonathan Isgar), a bleach-blonde drug dealer who once served in ‘Nam, side by side with our ninja hero, but went rogue upon his return…

Following it? Not really? Who cares! It’s action all the way! Two films’ worth!

On account of shooting so much of his own footage, Cheng cuts almost all of the story out of Queen Bee’s Revenge and just leaves in the fighting and the sleazy torture sequences. A lot of the new Filmark footage is action too, be it the usual insane ninja fights – heavy on shuriken use, always a pleasure – or the Vietnam flashback scenes. In these we get Houston and Isgar running around with machine guns, intercut with lively stock footage of actual ‘Nam choppers and exploding treelines. Yes, if you’re looking for the edits you can see them but honestly – if I’d watched this as a kid on VHS, I’d’ve probably not noticed and just thought it was the raddest movie ever.

There’s so much gratuitous violence in this, I didn’t even attempt a body count. Nerdy Gweilos take throwing stars to the face; fake “Viet Cong” are stabbed up and shot in droves; and it all builds to probably the most emotive Filmark ever got – a truly fantastic monologue from Isgar as he rants, Rambo-style, about how ‘Nam vets were abandoned by the US government, while getting drunker and drunker…

It starts off reasonably coherent but culminates in him going full Stallone-face and shouting “I’M A WINNER, I’M A SUPER-WINNER!” and if that isn’t something you want on a t-shirt immediately, you’re reading the wrong blog.

This being Filmark, the movie ends with a ninja fight in the woods, with magic floating hoops and exploding shop dummies, and it left me a little breathless with just how enthusiastically this crams in everything an 80s action audience could want. You get a ton of bokken for your buck and the exchange rate is very much in the ninjologist’s favour.

None of this is major-league competent when taken as individual components but combining them all like this makes Ninja : American Warrior essential viewing for anyone interested in the cut-and-paste film phenomena. With the secret formula of Namsploitation, grindhouse crime drama and magical ninjing, Cheng Kei-Ying’s created one of the most memorably strange and adventurous films of its kind. Study hard, ninjologists.

Interview with Dusty Nelson (Sakura Killers / White Phantom)

It’s a ninja scoop! I was really lucky to chat to Dusty Nelson, the creator of 80s VHS ninja classic White Phantom. We talked about the world of low budget filmmaking in the 80s, Taiwanese street gangs, unlikely influences and the real story behind Sakura Killers (a film often credited to Nelson but finally the extent of his involvement is revealed). No one has ever interviewed him before about these movies so this was an exciting interview to do. Big thanks to the awesome Dusty Nelson for taking what ended up being a fair amount of time out of his day for this!

Click here for the full interview over on Den Of Geek!

White Phantom (1987)

While Sakura Killers is an iconic entry into the 80s ninja canon and widely remembered in the minds of VHS freaks worldwide, its sequel White Phantom is perhaps less well-known. They’re both directed by Dusty Nelson, both released in 1987 and both share characters and themes, but while Sakura Killers is a straight-up crowd-pleasing action film, White Phantom tries something different. It plays at a measured pace, is littered with philosophical musings and doesn’t really get going, in action terms, until the very end. But that doesn’t mean it’s of no interest for ninjologists. On the contrary, it’s well worth seeing, for its unique style alone (but, don’t worry, the cataclysmic ninja climax is pretty cool too)…

I’m going to get this out the way early so we don’t dwell on it but yes. This film features an ‘exotic’ ninja dance, shortly after the opening credits. It’s not quite a ninja strip tease as the lady in question only gets down to tiny shorts and a tiger-print vest before a fight breaks and she has to stop, but it’s as close as I’ve seen to one. Page Leong – who choreographed all the dancing in this movie herself – starts off dressed in full ninja garb, pulling all kinds of ninjutsu shapes, then gradually the moves turn from Kuji-kiri to Kama-sutra; the gi comes off, then the hood, then it all goes a bit Flashdance as an insistent synth tune about getting the job done plays over the top. The whole thing is, of course, drenched in neon because this was the 1980s.

Anyway, what else is shaking? How about two ninjas stealing five megaton nuclear weaponry from the back of a lorry? It’s curious how little security is employed to protect this – just one schlubby driver who’s easily neutralised – but maybe it was a double bluff on behalf of whoever was transporting it? Still, the ninjas get away and this sets the plot in motion. These guys are employed by the ever-shady Sakura Family who run Sakura Exports Ltd (presumably a subsidiary of the Sakura Foundation in Sakura Killers) and they want the nukes for… Reasons? We never actually see them do anything like nuking anyone as they’re too busy going round local dance clubs and book shops in Taiwan, bullying the owners for protection money, like an off-brand Yakuza (why they’re in Taiwan is anyone’s guess).

A mysterious masked man named Sanada (voiced by Gregory Snegoff) runs things but is trying to pass them down to his son Hanzo (Jimmy Lee) who isn’t really ready. Sanada offers him advice on being a ninja – yep, the Sakuras are ninjas – but Hanzo is young, hot-headed and eager for power. He’s also having an affair with the aforementioned club dancer, whose name is Mai Lin. It’s dishonorable enough to be carrying on like that but, what the Sakuras don’t realise is Mai Lin is actually an undercover ninja herself (the dance was a dead giveaway, surely?) working for… THE COLONEL! Yes, The Colonel from Sakura Killers is back, although this time he’s played by a more lively looking Bo Svenson, not a slightly-out-of-it Chuck Connors in an ill-fitting baseball cap.

If you’re not already familiar, The Colonel is a mysterious, gung ho American who seems to have a number of agents he trains in ninjutsu to go around the world on, mostly, assassination missions. Here, he’s assigned Mai Lin to go undercover as a stripper so she can seduce Hanzo and make her way to the nukes the Sakuras have stolen. It’s fair to say the Colonel’s methods are unorthodox – an almost certainly illegal and unethical honey trap seems a curious response to the theft of weaponry that could wipe out millions? – but hey. This is 80s Taiwan. Anything goes.

Meanwhile, a whole bunch of brawling goobers are running around duffing each other up. From hired thugs like “Ears” (a guy who goes “Double Hawaiian” (shirts and shorts) and has his Sony Walkman attached at all times) to a tall, dark, handsome stranger from the west called Willi (Jay Roberts Jr). Willi is the star of the story here, a “White Ninja” trained in the ancient arts who looks like he’s walked in off Miami Vice. Quite how he got as far as Taiwan is only half-explained at best but he zeroes in on both Mai Lin, with whom he falls in love, and the Sakuras, whom – with The Colonel’s help – he vows to destroy. Will he save the day or will he fall victim to his Achilles’ heel? As Sanada warns, “The White Ninjas’ true strength is also their true weakness – compassion”…

As I say, this isn’t the fastest paced film. A lot of it unfolds in its own time and it isn’t always the most cleanly structured story. In fact, at times, it feels like a Godfrey Ho cut-and-paste movie, with the way the Sakuras seem to be in their own film and The Colonel in another. There’s a crime plot here with all the blackmail and protection schemes, and a little romantic drama too – Willi woos Mai Lin by giving her a copy of the I Ching (“This is a book about chance”) and plays a mournful harmonica whenever he’s alone – but there’s also ninjas running around chasing nuclear weapons down! The ninjas have some wonderfully mystical dialogue (e.g. “you are a bird, living in a tree of cats” or “To be a shadow, first you must have substance – first rule of being a ninja”) and then in the final third, you get what you came for. Ninjing.

If you’re after high octane martial arts choreography, look elsewhere. The fights here are quite measured but they do still look super rad. When the White Ninja goes on the rampage and takes on a small army of other coloured ninjas, it’s a glorious thing that features authentic ninja weapons and a martial arts style that, while not quite ninjutsu, is clearly inspired by it and feels more realistic than most. The scraps are neatly shot and the final showdown is staged – again – a little like a Godfrey Ho one, all the way down to a spectacular finishing move (and a nice touch as the roaring synths on the soundtrack turn to a mournful harmonica sound). It all wraps up neatly for a plot that takes so many turns, although one does wonder exactly what happens to the nukes…

It’s not the essential viewing that Sakura Killers is but White Phantom’s a neat little oddity that will get your nostalgia glands working overtime. Much like its sister-piece, it’s an interesting time capsule, offering a glimpse of some unglamorous Taiwanese locations and how they were in the late 80s. Jay Roberts Jr is a cool leading man (and does some very entertaining drunken style fighting that takes its cue from The Three Stooges and Jackie Chan). Basically, if you’re a fan of neon lights, radical fashions and graffiti-laden walls, all soundtracked by a Carpenter-goes-East synthesiser score, you’ll love this. The dance scenes are wicked and it’s always nice to see a film that doesn’t follow the rules. At times, when it doesn’t make sense, it just feels like a fetishtic fever dream of 1980s trash chic. And, for ninjologists like me, that goes a long way.

Ninja’s Force (1984)

I don’t want to sound like an old man but sometimes it’s hard to explain the kind of stuff we watched as impressionable young minds in the 1980s. It’s so different to what teenagers watch nowadays, it might as well have come from another planet. However, in Ninja’s Force (1984), I reckon I’ve found a film that distills it; you could show this to kids in 2018 and say “Yep, this is what we were into”… I mean, it’s unlikely they’d enjoy it. They’d be horrified and confused. They may even take out a restraining order on you. But they’d get an idea of the kind of film that, for better or for worse, simply isn’t made any more. It’s ostensibly a film for adults, loaded with sex, violence and bad language yet it’s so child-like in its storytelling, it could have been written by a 12 year old. These movies had us spellbound because they were, at once, on our level and yet full of forbidden things we shouldn’t have been exposed to. They were low-budget beyond even what mainstream film fans would call “B-Movies”. They were “Z-Movies”. Some of the technical aspects may have been outrageously bad, but still they could afford real explosions, stunts, helicopters and exotic locations – which, let’s face it, are the important things. The weirdest thing of all was that we weren’t going out of our way to seek these films that are now so obscure. We weren’t connoisseurs. They were right there on the shelves alongside Rambo, Cobra, Enter The Dragon and all the ‘real’ films. It was the boom years of home entertainment and ANYTHING could sell on VHS. They were essentially cash-ins on a phenomena. And yet, here we are in 2018, three decades later, and I’m still writing about them. They had something. It was an interesting time to discover film.

So, Ninja’s Force then. It was one of many action flicks made in the Philippines by Silver Star, a production company run by the mysterious KY Lim, who pumped out a few dozen features throughout the 80s and 90s. He assembled a regular group of directors, writers and stars, who rotated their duties, with everyone having a go at everything, giving the films a sense of camaraderie if nothing else. Since they had little money (and, according to ninja veteran Richard Harrison, sometimes unfinished scripts) the results veered from atrocious to entertaining but Ninja’s Force is a strong one. A real team effort, it starred Spanish sex symbol Romano Kristoff who co-wrote with Ken Watanabe (not that one) and co-directed with Teddy Page (aka Teddy Chiu). Interestingly, it shares a lot of plot similarity with Ninja Warrior (1985), a Silver Star picture directed by Watanabe that’s nowhere near as good…

Both open with a ninja housebreaking but in this one, the ninja means business. He kills a handful of security guards then slices up an old man, steals a TOP SECRET DOCUMENT (clearly marked as such) and chops up the guy’s disabled daughter for good measure, sending a blast of red arterial spray into the camera – which then artfully fades to the credits sequence (all to some stolen music from Blade Runner – phew!). We then see a senator lecturing the local police force about their inability to solve the crime. Public opinion is down, they can’t find any clues and the senator reckons there’s only one thing for it. “If you agree,” he tells them, “I’ll hire the most deadly, cold and deadly man alive… a ninja!”

Surprisingly, they’re all okay with this so he sends his top two dudes to Japan to find said ninja. They get given a guide who knows the way to the Kōga-ryū and drives them out to the middle of a forest, then walks them deeper into the trees, sits down, lights a fire and tells them to wait. In the middle of the night, just when it’s starting to seem like a waste of time, they hear a rustle in the bushes and – for reasons unfathomable – one of the cops stands up and pulls out a gun, only to get struck down by ninja arrows. I mean, really. WHAT WAS HE EXPECTING? The guide gets an arrow to the heart for his troubles too (apparently standard practice for anyone who knows the way to the Kōga-ryū), leaving the second cop, Williams (Mike Monty), to get a sack pulled over his head and a knockout blow.

He wakes up inside the Kōga-ryū, surrounded by ninjas. The ninja master asks why he’s come and, after hearing the story so far, eventually consents to lending him “the ultimate ninja”. Why? Because “a true ninja’s responsibility is to make harmony in this world”, of course. Duh. The ultimate ninja is a guy called Kenzo (Romano Kristoff, not Japanese) who flies back to the Philippines with Williams. ready to save the world. Williams has a sexy sister called Laura (Gwendolyn Hung), who has an equally sexy friend (Jeselle Morgan). They like to hang out in their giant house, giggling about ninjas and how excited they are to meet a real one. When Kenzo shows up, they try tricking him into revealing his ninja powers by setting up a dinner party where they’ve secured buckets of water over the door and booby-trapped chairs. He doesn’t, obviously, because he’s the ultimate ninja, but the whole scene is an admirably bizarre one. Definitely the only giggly ninja dinner party farce I’ve seen.

MEANWHILE, EVIL SCIENCE IS HAPPENING:

There’s a guy called Professor Yamamoto (Ken Watanabe) who is working for a cocktail-slurping baddie called Mr Duncan (Tony Carreon) on some dark shit that involves kidnapping women, tying them up, taking their clothes off and pumping them full of drugs until they go mad. At first I wondered if this was just because it was the 80s and that’s what passed for science back then, but no. There is a twisted logic to it. Duncan likes quoting Timothy Leary and experimenting with LSD. His plan is to give people just the right amount of LSD that he can break their mind and turn them into zombies who obey his commands, building an army that will take over the world. The TOP SECRET DOCUMENT from earlier apparently contains a formula that’s expedited their work. Things are going well:

And that’s your plot. It takes about 40 minutes before it coheres but does pull off telling a story from start to end (not always a given in these films) and it’s an enjoyable one too. Despite some occasionally dark subject matter (including some attempted rape on the LSD zombies and a gratuitous alleyway attack on Laura that gets broken up by Kenzo, Death Wish style – why? Because it’s the 80s!), most of this is done with a sense of fun. For example, there’s a scene where Williams’s car explodes that’s a classic. He and Kenzo leap out of the moving vehicle, just seconds before it blows up (a seriously impressive stunt all done in one take) then, with the car still flaming in the background, they stand up, brush themselves down and shrug it off. “There goes my car!” laughs Williams.

In what must be a nod to The Last Ninja (1983), Kenzo adopts an array of flamboyant disguises, including an elderly fisherman and a Princess Diana style “lady”, all of which is a reminder that despite stilted acting from some of the cast here, Kristoff is actually quite a talent. He has a decent look for an action hero, uncanny comic timing and natural charisma that makes him a good lead.

In terms of the ninjing (which is what we’re here for), there is substantial payoff if you have patience. Laura gets kidnapped and taken to Mr Duncan’s ruinous Spanish monastery on an island (another example of shrewd location scouting), so it’s up to Kenzo to save both her and humanity. He straps on his ninja suit – with a perplexingly conspicuous silver headband – and ninjes it up big style, hacking and slashing his way through the guards, lopping off arms and doing some rough martial arts work. The fight scenes here are not gracefully choreographed but they have charm. They feel a bit like the fight scenes you might shoot with your mates when you’re 12, on your dad’s camcorder. Lots of striking stances then flinging each other around and shouting. The whole thing wraps up with a catchy one-liner (“Who are you?” / “I am your executioner!”), a bloody decapitation and a ninja chase through a dungeon that looks like it’s been lit by Mario Bava.

Or does it? There’s a surprise coda, just when it looks like the day has been saved. Kenzo announces he must face his destiny – “the ninja creed of death!” – which gives us a bonus fight on the beach, during which the two ninjas involved take off their masks and stick on natty headbands instead. Why headbands? Because it was the 80s, of course! Headbands were the coolest thing in the world.

So yeah, Ninja’s Force might not be a ‘good’ film in technical terms (although, frankly, I’d like to see you do better). Some scenes are undeniably, hilariously bad (“Apologies are the sunshine after the hurricane… beautiful but useless!”) and yet it’s entertaining from start to finish. It has energy, enthusiasm and a checklist of stuff you want if you’re a ninjologist of a certain age. This is, after all, a genre rooted in what’s commonly known as “trash” cinema so if you’re not getting any joy out of a Spanish ninja with expressive eyebrows, LSD zombies, shameless nudity and a body count well into the double figures, then I’m not sure you’ve come to the right blog.