Enter the Ninja explores the absorbing detail the Ninja's lethal, little-known Art of Invisibility which includes the use of hypnotism, explosives, and super-human acrobatic fighting skills. The Ninja Trilogy is released in a new dual-format special edition collection by Eureka! on 18 January.The Ninja is the highest honor given to the dedicated followers of Ninjutsu, the deadliest of all martial arts. And yes, there is even another gratuitous jacuzzi scene in this entirely undisciplined, over-the-top, tone-deaf ’80s hot tub time machine, now disinterred by Eureka! to prove that ninja – ever popping up where you least expect them – can never truly die. One sequence shows Kosugi’s Japanese migrant facing off against a hatchet-wielding Native American, another sees him taking on the Village People in a children’s playground – and there are not one but three scenes of violence set in and around that great signifier of Eighties affluence and eroticism, the hot tub – the last of these, somehow, in the middle of the thrilling roof-top climax.Ĭraziest of all though is Ninja III: The Domination, which somehow combines a now unstoppable (and not remotely stealthy) ninja killing machine with an exorcism motif lifted straight from the horror genre, and gratuitous aerobics sequences (showing off the talents of Lucinda Dickey, flush from recent success in Cannon’s Breakin’).ĭickey’s possessed Christie uses supernaturally acquired ball-breaking skills to take vengeance upon the policemen who had (sort-of) killed a Terminator-like ninja, but baulks at harming her hirsute cop boyfriend Billy Secord (Jordan Bennett), especially during their V8 juice-dripping foreplay. Altogether gorier, and featuring a masked killer who takes out his opponents one by one, Revenge of the Ninja appropriates part of its form from the then-voguish slasher (“What is this, Halloween?”, a character is heard to ask), and part from the gangster flick. Indeed, genre ran even freer in the sequels. Who knows where the flashbacks to Cole’s Angolan Bush War experience fit into all this – but the anything-goes approach to genre is key to the whole trilogy’s charm.
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Christopher George makes for a hilariously camp villain, dedicating his free time to choreographing female synchronised swimmers in his office swimming pool. Yet as recently certified ninja Cole (played improbably by the original Django, Franco Nero) intervenes to defend an impotent rancher and his wife against a ruthless land-grabber, Enter the Ninja proves to be as much oater as assassin’s actioner. The very title of Enter the Ninja riffs on/rips off the East-West martial arts clash of Enter the Dragon, and the opening credits boast a fetishisation of Japanese weapons and techniques that would pervade the trilogy. Though the groundwork was laid by 1980’s The Octagon, it was these three films that began a veritable explosion of ninja presence in mainstream action flicks. The so-called Ninja Trilogy comprises Menahem Golan’s Enter the Ninja from 1981, and Sam Firstenberg’s sequels in-name-only, Revenge of the Ninja (1983) and Ninja III: The Domination (1984), all unified by the appearance of actor and real-life practitioner of ninjutsu Sho Kosugi (playing a different character in each title), and all rightly celebrated as showcases for the most egregious, ’80s-inflected cash-in excesses of Golan and Globus’ Cannon Films. Still, exploring is always best done at the outer edges – and so this column will be dedicated to direct-to-video dross, disinterred B pictures and the odd (and we mean odd) films orphaned at the festival fringes. Psychotronic cinema is a hard and loose category of termite art which, whether because too shamelessly genre-bound or just too wacky-backy niche, occupies the critical margins.
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