Ninja: Shadow of a Tear and Ninja III: The Domination are both fine ninja movie sequels (as explained in Part I), but what about their prequels? In 2009 Florentine and Adkins collaborated on the simply titled Ninja after having collaborated on a few projects, most notably Undisputed II: Last Man Standing. Their first Ninja is a movie they’ve both admitted they weren’t very satisfied with, but I still like it quite a lot.
I’ll always love this movie for being the first thing that ever introduced me to Adkins. Specifically, I saw a clip of the subway fight scene online. I watched it several times, over and over. It’s a great fight scene I still enjoy, and there’s another scene from later in the film in which Adkins wastes a gang of cult members that shows off his skills fantastically, with impressive kick combos aplenty.
There certainly are some issues with the scripting, acting, story… well, most things in Ninja could be better. But those two fight scenes alone make it worth watching, and then there’s a whole bunch of other cool action in it. It’s certainly not the full on assault of awesome fight scenes that Shadow of a Tear has, but it’s definitely worth your time.
It was also nice to see guys in full ninja costumes fighting with ninja weapons in this movie in the late ’00s, years since the ninja movie boom. The Domination had whet my appetite though and I wanted more old-school ninja action.
Ninja III: The Domination is the second sequel to 1981’s Enter the Ninja, which was directed by Cannon Films boss Menahem Golan himself, may he rest in peace. Although it came out after Chuck Norris vs ninjas in The Octagon, it is generally acknowledged as being the film that kickstarted the ’80s ninja craze. Oh and even though it’s a sequel, these mavericks play by their own rules, and in this series that means no film has any plot or character relation to each other. But they do all have ninjas.
After a cool credit sequence over a ninjitsu master showing off his skills to a set routine, Enter the Ninja opens with a gaijin ninja played by the original Django, Franco Nero, running through a forest and wasting other ninjas. Nero is dressed in a white ninja outfit which works more like high-vis gear rather than camouflage – his opponents are mostly in lovely maroon ones, although the main foe wears classic black.
Various ninja weapons and tricks are showcased right off the bat, for about the first ten minutes straight. We see katana, nan chuk, sai, shruiken, throwing spikes and hand-to-hand action all before the first bit of dialogue. Granted, the quality of the special effects are not too dissimilar to what countless kids accomplished with nothing but a camcorder and some ketchup in the ’80s, but it has heart.
Turns out Nero has travelled to Japan to learn the art of ninjitsu from an archetypal old sensei dude with a long beard and that. One of the younger Japanese ninja students is gutted though – this punk is a gaijin, letting him become a ninja is an insult to his samurai ancestors and stuff! Anyway, Nero cruises to the Philippines to help a buddy out as some nasty oil tycoon types – including Christopher George being constantly awesome and a small, fat, hook-handed henchman with a hilariously cartoonish German accent and disgusting facial hair – who are trying to bully him off his land.
The movie shifts gears quite a bit and ninjas take a back seat for a while, although Nero’s fighting inability doesn’t. He’s shit. Don’t get me wrong, Nero is gorgeous on-screen; he has a fantastic Magnum P.I. style moustache and a steely stare that could melt even the hardest of hearts. But in his unmasked fistfights he is replaced very clearly by a stuntman for the important bits. At one point they give him nan-chuks which he pretends he can use and it’d be hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. He’s also dubbed into English as he’s playing an American. Why’d they put him in this role? That’s Cannon Films for ya, they just don’t give a fuck.
There’s a lot in this movie that is super ridiculous, but unfortunately a lot of that is a fairly charmless kind of generic, low-budget ’80s trash ridiculousness. The appealing ninja business certainly comes back to bookend the film and Nero’s charm, along with George and the dude that played grandpa in Silent Night, Deadly Night kept me interested as the middle of the film got a bit dreary. Easily offended viewers should also be warned, Enter the Ninja was made in a different time. There’s some casual misogyny and brief looks at actual on-screen cock fighting that isn’t nice.
Back to Sam Firstenberg directing a Cannon Film: American Ninja. The first in what became a five-film series, it stars Michael Dudikoff as a ninjitsu-trained American soldier on a US army base in… the Philippines, again. An evil Frenchman is buying weapons from evil, corrupt American officers and commanding an army of evil ninjas to protect his evilness.
Dudikoff doesn’t speak for a long while into the film. They were clearly going for the Clint Eastwood style hard man of few words, but he looks way too stupid to pull that off and instead just appears really simple. When he finally does start speaking, his voice and words make him seem even more simple… something like Ryan Gosling in Drive meets that hilarious security guard from Nathan For You.
Dudikoff’s main buddy in this film is a black dude named Curtis Jackson – coincidentally, the real name of angry hip-hop man 50 Cent. He’s played by Steve James, a chap who turned up in a few other Cannon Films and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, and sadly I didn’t recognise anything he said as lyrics from ‘Heat’, ‘Many Men’ or ‘How to Rob’.
American Ninja is a pretty funny, very bad movie. There’s a few examples of cars exploding because they very lightly touch another object while travelling at barely more than a snail’s pace and loads of terrible practical special effects. Dudikoff gets on a motorbike at one point for no reason aside from looking cool, but as he drives over a only slightly moderately impressive jump, it’s extremely clear it’s a stuntman. Obviously nobody complained at Nero’s obvious replacement in Enter the Ninja, so why bother even putting a wig on this dark haired, dark skinned guy to make him look like Dudikoff?
Karate master Tadashi Yamashita plays Black Star Ninja, one of the main baddies. Unlike pretty much everyone else in the film, he is actually skilled and has a couple of cool fistfights. Later he starts shooting flame and bullets out of his ninja suit and even a Star Wars style laser, which blows up a pot plant. Nobody says anything like: “Hey did you see that futuristic raygun thing he just shot?” Nup. They just carry on fighting, ignoring the film’s momentary genre shift.
There’s a bunch of other notable ninja movies I wanted to watch and chat about but with Menahem Golan recently dying I ended up watching and rewatching many of the Cannon joints. Some other notable ones include Pray for Death, The Super Ninja, Shinobi No Mono, Revenge of the Ninja, Ninja in the Dragon’s Den and Rage of Ninja.
Miami Connection is not really a ninja film, but it is one of my favourite films featuring ninjas. This film is flat-out amazing and I was lucky enough to see it on the big screen. Ninja III: The Domination was a hilarious riot of a movie that I loved, but Miami Connection is an absolutely sublime, crap-tastic masterpiece that has to be seen to be believed. The music video pulled from it and embedded above is a small taste of why.
It’s been unearthed and released on Blu-ray, but it’s still kind of difficult to get your hands on in New Zealand. Ninja: Shadow of a Tear is now very easy to get your hands on, however, and I urge you to do so.
I sincerely hope Florentine and Adkins get back together for a third Ninja. But even if they don’t, they’re working on a fourth Undisputed and the very exciting sounding Close Range.
