The Octagon (1980)

The Octagon (1980)

 

Starring: Chuck Norris, Karen Carlson, Lee Van Cleef, Art Hindle, Carol Bagdasarian, Tadashi Yamashita, Kim Lankford, Larry D. Mann, Kurt Grayson, Richard Norton
Director: Eric Karson
Action Director: Chuck Norris, Aaron Norris

 

The Octagon is an interesting film is that it was one of the contributors to the “Ninja Craze” that took international action movies by storm in the first half of the 1980s, and whose collateral effects can be seen to this very day. Everybody knows what a “ninja” is and has some mental image of a person in black (or white) clothing with a hood/mask leaving only an eye slit visible, armed with a katana. Although The Octagon was not the first Occidental film to feature those infamous spies/assassins—I’m sure that honor goes to You Only Live Twice—this movie, along with the following year’s Enter the Ninja, really helped ninja enter the Western pop culture lexicon. And given the movie’s release date of 1980, it was only appropriate that Chuck Norris play moviedom’s first American Ninja.

Norris plays Scott James, a former karate champion who retired from the ring after seriously injuring (killing?) his opponent during a match. The movie makes no reference to what his current profession is, although it is kinda sorta suggested that James either has experience in the military, or at least did a limited stint as a mercenary at some point. Or maybe he’s just the co-owner of the martial arts school he frequents—look for a young Ernie Hudson as one of the students there. Anyway, when we meet James, he and his friend (little brother?) A.J. (Art Hindle, of Porky’s and Black Christmas) are at the ballet, where James’s potential girlfriend Nancy (Kim Lankford) is performing.

After a night on the town—during which Nancy comes across as being particularly jittery—the couple retire to her house, where they are ambushed by ninja assassins. Nancy is killed, and we later discover that every inhabitant of the house had been murdered previous to their arrival. James later learns from A.J. that her brother had been arrested a few days prior for murdering a European diplomat. Scott suspects that ninjitsu antics are afoot (well, duh!) and goes over to his old friend McCarn (Lee Van Cleef, who later was cast in the ninja-themed series “The Master”).

McCarn runs an outfit that specializes in hiring out bodyguards and doing mercenary work, albeit only jobs that involve anti-terrorism. Both him and James have a history together, although their dialog is elliptical enough that I can’t quite figure out what it is—thus my earlier speculation about James having done some mercenary work in the past. McCarn doesn’t know enough to set James on the right path, but their story isn’t over yet.

Enter Justine (TV actress Karen Carlson), the wealthy heiress to a European newspaper empire. Her dad was murdered by terrorists a few years ago, and now she uses her money and influence to track down and kill terrorists all over the world. Her next target is Seikura, who happens to be Scott James’s former ninja brother. Seikura (Tadashi Yamashita, of Za Karate and Soul of Chiba) runs a ninja training camp in Central America, which routinely receives both mercenaries and terrorists as pupils. Justine tries to convince Scott in a myriad of ways to get involved, although he refuses to work directly with her.

James eventually does get involved, but of his own accord. He signs up to mercenary outfit run by a guy named Doggo (Kurt Grayson, another TV veteran), who is one of Seikura’s principal sources of income. McCarn is out to get Doggo, mainly because the latter does business with anyone with money, independent of their political or moral stances (which would include terrorists). And when James shows up at Doggo’s compound yammering about ninjas, it’s going to get both him and Justine into trouble. And when the latter convinces A.J. to get involved in the Seikura mission, too, James is going to have some good reasons to see this through to the end.

The Octagon has a lot more story than one might expect from an 80s ninja movie. While not necessarily incidental to the plot, the ninjas themselves kinda run in parallel to the Scott James mercenary storyline until they finally intersect in the third act. Until then, it’s mainly about James trying to investigate Doggo in hopes of learning more about Seikura’s training camp, with lots of dialog being thrown around about “getting involved” and “embracing a cause.” There’s a subplot about A.J. falling into Justine’s “clutches,” which presents him with a cause to live (or die) for—fighting terrorism—and get out of James’s shadow. On one hand, it is rather silly for someone like A.J. to think he could fight the anti-terrorism cause: there is only so much a black belt in karate (or tang soo do) can do against a small ninja army (or any terrorist with connections to international crime).

On the same token, however, this year saw the invasion of Ukraine by Russia under the command of Vladimir Putin. Despite the fact that the United States has not directly involved itself in the fighting itself, many former soldiers and Special Forces operatives have seen the plight of the Ukrainian citizens and felt the call to go there and offer their services on a volunteer basis, sometimes as instructors, others on the front lines or in guerrilla tactics. And although Putin isn’t using ninja in this particular invasion, I can see the parallel between Scott James and A.J. getting involved in the anti-terrorist game and ex-military types flying to Poland, crossing the border into the Ukraine, and making a stand against international bullies.

The problem is that for a movie with this many characters and this much story, there isn’t enough information for us to really get a feel for what’s going on. Moreover, a lot of characters’ motivations just don’t make any sense. In one scene, Scott James meets a fellow named Tibor (Larry Mann, yet another TV veteran), an Israeli fur coat maker who moonlights as a financier of Doggo’s and Seikura’s operations. When he meet him, he tells Scott that he joined the mercenary game after his little brother was murdered in the Munich Olympics. But if that’s the case, why would he get involved with two outfits that encourage (and train) terrorists? Wouldn’t he be better off working with McCarn instead?

I also had a difficult time figuring out the motivations of the character Aura (The Aurora Encounter’s Carol Bagdasarian). We meet her at Seikura’s training camp and she seems to be a pretty apt pupil of the ways of ninjitsu. But as soon as she leaves, she wants out of the mercenary game before even getting her first mission. She tells us at one point that she wanted a cause to fight for and joined Doggo’s mercenary team for that reason, but at what point did she determine that it was no longer what she wanted for her life? Was it when Seikura’s ninja enforcer (Richard Norton, in one of two roles) murdered a man for trying to desert the camp in front of her? Maybe, but like a lot of characters in this movie, the motivations are rather murky.

The fights were handled by Chuck and Aaron Norris, although I suspect that Richard Norton had a lot to do with staging the finale. After all, tang soo do—Chuck’s original style—isn’t known for its weapons forms. On the other hand, Norton’s training in goju-ryu had a strong kobudo, or weapons, element to it and Norton learned how to use a number of weapons, including the katana, the bo staff and the sai swords. So, in addition to playing the lead ninja enforcer, Kyo, I’m pretty sure that Norton helped choreograph the weapons fights (although he only gets billing as a stuntman).

The way Norton tells it, he met Norris back in ’78 when a friend of his brought Chuck over to Australia participate in the local martial arts demonstrations while promoting his Good Guys Wear Black. Norton was doing weapons demonstrations on the same circuit at that time. The two hit it off and Norris told Norton to look him up if he ever found himself in California. Besides teaching martial arts, Norton also worked as a bodyguard for a number of singers whenever their tours brought them to Australia. One of them, country music legend Linda Rondstadt, invited Norton to be her personal bodyguard, which resulted in him flying out to California. There, he looked up Chuck, who was doing pre-production for The Octagon. As he had the right weapons background for this kind of a movie, Norris brought him on board.

The action is limited for the first two acts. There is a brief scuffle between Chuck and some ninja assassins in one of the early scenes. The action dies down as his Scott character investigates the world of mercenaries, although there is a short fight between him and said soldiers-for-hire (including Richard Norton in a second role). There is a second scuffle between Chuck and the ninja in a hotel room, after which we get the big finale in which Chuck storms Tadashi Yamashita’s ninja compound.

As a kid, I kinda let the earlier scenes just sort of “wash over” me as I waited for that big finale. I’m pretty sure that a lot of martial arts fans can (and do) forgive The Octagon’s sluggish pacing and muddled storytelling on account of the climax, which is 20 minutes of Chuck Norris killing ninja. There is lots of spin kicking, sword swinging and judo takedowns as Norris fights one ninja after another, before having big showdowns with both Kyo (Norton) and Seikura (Yamashita). The former is one of those “Best Chuck Norris Moments” fights, especially because it was the first time since his fight with Bruce Lee years before that he really had an opponent worthy of his abilities[1]. The two go at it with katana and sai swords, with Norton getting in a lot of good hits against a typically-unbeatable Norris. This fight, although not the last, is certainly better than his final throwdown with shorin-ryu master Tadashi Yamashita, who has done better work in other movies. But there is enough good in those last 20 minutes that I can understand why so many people place this in their top 3 (or 5) Chuck Norris films of all time.

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[1] - I suppose the previous year’s A Force of One did in the form of Bill “Superfoot” Wallace, but I think their fights could have been better.