Capsule Reviews - 2 Ninja Movies

Ninja Busters (USA, 1984: Paul Kyriazi)
Aka: Shadow Fight

Starring: Sid Campbell, Eric Lee, Gerald Okamura, Dalia Guiterrez, Nancy Lee, Harry Mok, Juan Morales, Carlos Navarro, Frank Navarro, Bob Ramos, Fumiko Takahashi
Director: Paul Kyriazi
Action Director: n/a

Interesting attempt at a martial arts comedy at a time that I think most examples of the genre were SERIOUS BUZINESS--or at least were treated as such, despite the final product (Enter the Ninja, I'm looking at you). This was directed by Paul Kyriazi, who worked on the sorta cult film Death Machines, starring Ron Marchini (who had a dojo in my hometown of Stockton, CA). He also directed Eric "the King of Kata" Lee in, who is one of this film's main stars, in Weapons of Death. He then went on to direct Marchini once again in Omega Cop, which was filmed in Stockton--STOCK-STATE, baby!

The film opens with a criminal named Santos (Juan Morales) going to Japan (I think?) to see the Dragon Lady--she's named after the stereotype--played by Fumiko Takahasi (later of The Kôsuke Kindaichi Series 13: The Village of the Eight Tombs). He's complaining about the cost of her protection, which we learn are ninjas. She assures them that they are masters of stealth and will never been seen by their targets. Yeah...right.

We then meet our protagonists, Chic (Sid Campbell, of Death Machines) and Bernie (Eric Lee). They are laborers at one of Santos's warehouses and their shtick is to get into trouble and then try to impress or intimidate people by declaring that Bernie was "Bruce Lee's first student" and that Chic "taught Bruce Lee to do his Tiger yell." All this gets them is a nice ass-whooping on several occasions. They eventually decide to...well...y'know...actually learn martial arts. They go to a karate studio run by Gerald Okumura, in probably his biggest role in terms of fighting and screen time. They spend much of their time ogling the pretty Asian girls at the dojo and Bernie eventually gets a girlfriend in the form of Tina (Nancy Lee, Weapons of Death and Hammerhead). At some point, they decide to tone down their shtick and start taking their training seriously; at one point, Okumura inexplicably brings in a bunch of masters of other styles to tutor our heroes, which is why Bernie walks out of a karate dojo performing kung fu.

It isn't until well into the second half of the movie that we actually have a plot. You see, one of Santos's rackets is arms dealing and his latest clients are a group of black militants--dressed in leopard-print jumpsuits and berets--who want to start the Revolution. Amusingly enough, during the deal, Santos points out to them that starting the Revolution is silly and they'd be better off just trying to work and make money. In any case, the militants try to stiff Santos and his men during the deal, but Santos has the entire junkyard (where the deal is going down) occupied by ninjas. A huge fight breaks out and Bernie and Chic end up being witnesses to the violence. Santos sends his ninjas after the two and fights break out at the Dojo, at the Salsa Club that belongs to one of the other sensei (Carlos Navarro, of Weapons of Death), at an aerobics class, and finally at the warehouse from earlier.

The first half is a lazy comedy about two ne'er-do-wells trying to pick up women. It isn't funny and it gets old very quickly. And their attempts to turn Bruce Lee's legacy into a running gag just fall flat. The film is very much starting to wear out its welcome--and to some, may already have--by the time the action kicks up in the second half. First, we get a fight between Eric Lee and another student, a former-biker named Sonny (Frank Navarro), who uses a combination of karate and break dancing moves. It isn't bad (well, I guess it kinda is), but some of the wider circular movements of kung fu don't look good onscreen when inserted into American fight choreography. The big brawl between the ninja and the black militants display how utterly inept these ninja are. To quote John Goodman from Speed Racer: "More like a NON-ja. Terrible what passes for ninja these days." The last several fights are a little better, mainly on the novelty of seeing Gerald Okumura kick so much butt. But really, you're better off sticking with The Octagon, Revenge of the Ninja, or even the first two (or three) American Ninja movies instead of this.

The Ninja Mission (Sweden, 1984: Mats Helge)

Starring: Krzysztof Kolberger, Hanna Bieniuszewicz, Bo F. Munthe, Curt Broberg, Hans Rosteen, John Quantz, Sirka Sander, Mark Davies, Wolff Lindner, Mats Helge Olsson
Director: Mats Helge
Action Director: The European Ninja Center

Swedish-made Cold War action film made during the Ninja Craze of the 1980s. It is sorta a ninja-martial arts movie, but most of the action revolves around automatic weapons, so don't go in expecting anything resembling the ninja films of Cannon (or Alexander Lo Rei, or Chang Cheh, or Robert Tai, or the TMNT). What it is, however, is a film that depicts the Soviet army as being such incompetent boobs that it is little wonder those punk-a** b*tches lost the Cold War.

So, a nightclub singer named Nadia (Polish actress Hanna Bieniuszewicz) is being chased all over Stockholm by a bunch of shady men, whom we learn are the KGB. She is rescued by a mysterious, handsome young man named Mason (Krzyszstof Kolberger, also Polish). Mason turns out to be part of the C.I.A. and is part of a mission to help Nadia's nuclear physicist father, Dr. Markov (Curt Broberg), defect out of Leningrad (St. Petersburg). Markov is about to make some sort of discovery regarding nuclear fission and if it falls into the hands of those dirty, Godless Ruskies, the tide in the Cold War will be turned. Anyway, the KGB agents attack the nightclub where Nadia works and kidnap her, notwithstanding all the efforts of Mason and his ninja mercenary team.

Meanwhile, another group of C.I.A. agents are helping to get Markov out of the USSR, but are betrayed by Markov's assistant, Natassia (Sirka Sander), who is better at killing "our boys from Langley" than she is at killing "Moose and Squirrel." Natassia smuggles Markov into a helicopter which takes him to an isolated mansion which he thinks is in Sweden, but is actually located in Russia near the Finnish border. There he will be reunited Nadia and finish his work "in peace" under the supervision of double agent Ableman (Hans Rosteen). So, Mason gets his ninja team together and sneak into Russia and kill dozens and dozens of Soviet soldiers as they try to find Markov and get him out Mother Russia.

If this film has a so-bad-it's-good reputation, it earns it, I guess. The plot is pretty simple and the story breaks into a prolonged shoot-out at regular intervals. And the final half-hour is almost non-stop action, so there's that. It suffers from bad lighting--although that may be the fault of the VHS transfer--that often reaches the levels of, "Before Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, there was The Ninja Mission." The martial arts action is limited and almost always framed, shot, and edited in ways that you cannot see what the actors are doing, thus obscuring the choreography brought to you by the good folks at the "European Ninja Center."

The action gets impressively graphic in the last reel or so, with a bloody ninja decapitation, LOTS AND LOTS of squibs, and a fun sequence where the ninjas start firing explosive darts at their enemies, which cause heads and limbs to start exploding. And yes, this film suffers from an egregious case of "guns with bottomless magazines." Good gosh, they get a lot of mileage out of those machine guns. Maybe they should've sold the secret of those to the Soviets.