VENUS IN FURS (Paroxismus, 1969)

Jazz musician Jimmy Logan seems to be recovering from a bad trip -- he digs his trumpet out of the sand and can't remember why he buried it -- when a body washes up on a beach to launch him on an even worse trip. Jimmy recognizes the body and can even guess why she's dead. He witnessed the gang-rape of Wanda Reed (Maria Rohm) by three decadent characters in Istanbul -- but apparently did nothing. It's not clear whether people know generally that Wanda is dead. At least no one but Jimmy bats an eye when she turns up, live as life, in Rio during the Carnival. One of her tormentors is also there, but he ends up dead. In fact, Wanda has somehow loved or at least stimulated him to death (hence the movie's alternate title). She'll repeat that trick elsewhere on the globe, somehow following Jimmy as he goes from gig to gig like her spotter, to take out a bisexual woman (Margaret Lee) and Ahmet (Klaus Kinski), who either has a turban fetish or is supposed to be a Turkish man. Wanda's mysterious movements pretty much kill Jimmy's interracial buzz with nightclub singer Rita (Barbara McNair), but obsessions are like that. And when all's said and done Jimmy's back on the beach playing a personal requiem for Wanda, only to see a body wash up on the beach. So is it one of those movies where the hapless hero has to repeat the story over and over for eternity? No, because this time the body is different, and the difference is twist enough for this picture.

Ladies and gentlemen, James Darren on trumpet and Jess Franco at the keyboard.

I'm tempted to shrug my shoulders and say, "Well, that's Jess Franco for you," but Paroxismus is actually one of the Spanish director's more accessible movies. What I mean is that, despite its impenetrable story, which bears no relation to the Sacher-Masoch novel it's sometimes named for, it's mostly free of Franco's signature idiosyncrasies and personal mythology. While we do get one of his favorite motifs, a singer writhing on her back, there's no "Dr. Orloff" or "Morpho" running around, at least in the English-language version. Venus in Furs takes us to a very strange place, but it isn't Jess Franco's personal world. Franco just makes it compellingly colorful and musical, if also a bit campy and sensual at the same time.

Above, Maria Rohm puts the moves on Margaret Lee. Below, Klaus Kinski contemplates his ill-fated one-man show about the Prophet Muhammad.

The movie actually sustains an air of genuine supernatural mystery until the ending leaves the story making almost no sense whatsoever. As I said, it's unclear how many people know that Wanda is dead, and it's even less clear whether anyone's investigating her apparently unnatural demise. The story as told may be possible only in the absence of a criminal justice system. But given what we can assume finally to be Jimmy's special perspective, can we really be sure that Wanda is dead. On the other hand, what we learn about Jimmy makes his relationship with Rita hard to explain -- except if we assume that his interpretation of his final vision is unreliable. For that matter, the entire film may be nothing but Jimmy's jazzy delirium on the beach, his fantasy of supernatural vengeance substituting for the steps he was apparently incapable of taking to secure justice for Wanda. At its trippy heart, Paroxismus may simply be a guilt trip.

If you're willing to do the interpretive work on your own, you could well appreciate Franco's film as an impressionistic puzzle, a set of variations on an ultimately hidden theme. But you could just as easily dismiss Paroxismus as reels of incoherent pretension, redeemed or not by visual flair and period flavor. It seems appropriate, somehow, that this movie is ultimately whatever each viewer makes of it.

CARLOS (2010)

The Sundance Channel deserves an Emmy just for scheduling Olivier Assayas's 5.5 hour epic about the career of Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, not to mention taking part in the production. The film played out over three nights earlier this week in advance of a limited theatrical run, but I won't wait until it hits the big screen to call it one of the best films of the year.

Under his nom de terror, Carlos Martinez, or the unwanted sobriquet "Carlos the Jackal," the Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez cut a flamboyant swath across Europe and the Middle East from the 1970s until his capture in Sudan in 1994. First as an agent of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and then as a freelancer, Carlos (Edgar Ramirez) was dedicated to armed struggle against imperialism as his route to glory. As Assayas's film shows, Carlos was one of many young people with similar dreams in the aftermath of the Sixties. The first third of the film emphasizes the sociability of Carlos's milieu as the would-be revolutionaries party and screw and argue over strategy and tactics. Carlos's sexuality is foregrounded -- Ramirez gives us the full monty within the first few minutes -- as is his sexism. Revolution is a turn-on for Carlos's crowd; he uses a hand grenade for foreplay with an enthralled girlfriend. There are always girlfriends for Carlos; while they're usually revolutionaries like he is, he often treats them in an inegalitarian fashion. In the second half, he tells Magdelena Kopp that, as his lover, she must accept revolutionary militant discipline. That extends to accepting his cheating on her after she's given birth to his child because he has "needs." Near the end, this leftist warrior is indulging in a most exploitative form of sexuality, the restroom blowjob, and as if as comeuppance he's nearly crippled by bouts of severe testicular pain. Carlos is no ascetic, and arguably no fanatic. He talks the talk of revolution, but it may all be a matter of self-gratification (or "glory") for him.

Terrorism was different in Carlos's time. Throughout the film, there's an implicit contrast with the puritanical zealots we identify with terrorism today. Though Carlos late in the game talks about embracing Islam to butter up prospective Iranian sponsors, revolution was never about self-denial for him. While he tells people that he expects to be killed at any time, he doesn't believe in suicide. That point is driven home in the central sequence of the long film, Carlos's raid on the 1975 OPEC summit in Vienna. His scheme is a dizzying success, except for the accidental killing of a Libyan diplomat that complicates his plan to escape with hostages via Libya to Iraq. His decision to release the hostages, including the Saudi oil minister, in return for $20,000,000, enrages his PFLP and Iraqi handlers, who had ordered him to kill the minister. Carlos sees only good in taking the money, which he sees as his only way of getting out of the situation alive, but his handlers feel that he should have obeyed orders and killed the Saudi at all costs. They think he's more interested in being a celebrity terrorist, and while he makes good arguments to the contrary, you can't help thinking that they're partly correct. And while Carlos basks in his clandestine celebrity, it'll be downhill from here for him. It's downhill not just because he's given in to egoism, but because his original revolutionary fervor has been subordinated to the power politics of nations. His plans are subject to the national interests of Iraqis, Syrians, Hungarians, East Germans and so on. When he accepts asylum from these states, he also puts himself at risk of being thrown out at any convenient moment. Time is also passing him by. Late in the Seventies Soviet KGB chief Yuri Andropov meets with Carlos and other top terrorists and puts an open contract on the life of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. After two years of desultory planning, Carlos's gang is beaten to the punch by an Islamist conspiracy. The film still has nearly two hours to go, but from that point Carlos himself is basically obsolete. He has one good run left when he terrorizes France to force the release of two captured comrades, but after that he lives on a reputation that also makes him a liability to anyone who harbors him, especially after the communist bloc collapses and everyone wants to cut a deal with the U.S. Carlos's changing fortunes are a history lesson on the global political upheaval of his time.

As a film, Carlos is what I call a Scorsesean epic, a rise-and-fall story in the manner of Goodfellas and Casino with a rocking soundtrack of oldies. Given how the film opens with the car-bombing of a Palestinian terrorist, you could also see Carlos as an unofficial sequel to Steven Spielberg's Munich. If you envision Carlos in high-concept terms as a cross between Munich and Goodfellas you may come close to its essence. Like Scorsese does, Assayas and co-writer Dan Franck delineate the rise of a corrupt yet successful system that inevitably declines, but while Scorsese focuses on the internal, personal corruption that kills the system, Carlos, perhaps in keeping with its subject's preferred mode of historical analysis, links his decline with the collapse of the Cold War environment within which he thrived, while leaving room for the damage done by his own ego and other failings. Appropriately, Edgar Ramirez carries the film with a DeNironian performance of body modification, transforming from buff Seventies stud to bloated fugitive, briefly back again and finally to middle-aged thickness, stiffness and exhaustion. Ramirez can talk the ideological talk and belie it by swaggering through the selfish, sexist glory-seeking walk. Fluently multilingual, he's the perfect star for a film half in English, half not, holding the polyglot action together and keeping it intense in all languages. Carlos ought to be a star-making film for him. He has a serial harem of attractive support, Bond girls of terror, most notably Nora von Waldstaetten as Magdalena Kopp and Julia Hummer as the alarmingly bloodthirsty Nada, in whom Carlos has no romantic interest.

Assayas taps into a deep tradition of French genre filmmaking, from the silent supervillain serials of Louis Feuillade (to which he'd already paid homage in Irma Vep) to the caper-thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville. He also manages to fit in an apparent homage to The Godfather (involving a bathroom break to fetch a gun) along the way. Working on an unprecedented scale, he keeps things intriguing with bursts of bloody violence as well as more elaborate set pieces like the Vienna raid. Some moments even feel blackly comic, as when Carlos's cronies twice bungle attempts to hit El Al jets with rocket launchers. The ease with which the terrorists stroll into airports and set up their weapons in the middle of crowds is doubly absurd from today's perspective. The film may appear episodic, but the script keeps you aware of the relationships, both political and romantic, that complicate Carlos's life and the stakes involved at every point in the movie. Over five hours and change I was never bored. A theatrical version less than half the length of the original has been prepared for release and may be available already on demand. Perhaps understandably, I say accept no substitutes and watch the full version whenever or wherever you can find it.

Here's a trailer from IFCFilmsTube:

THE STRANGER AND THE GUNFIGHTER (1974)

Let's take a look at the trailer first this time. This copy was uploaded to YouTube by venomchamber.

That's the trailer I saw on a compilation disc and that's why I rented a DVD of the film now known as Blood Money. I should have been seeing a vigorously brutal story worthy of the hype, something that should have been an improvement on the only other spaghetti western-kung fu crossover I've seen, the merrily vicious and unconscionably entertaining Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe. As far as production values are concerned, Blood Money, a collaboration between Carlo Ponti and Shaw Bros. with Antonio "Anthony M. Dawson" Margheriti directing, wins hands down. This is a beautifully shot film on a bigger budget than you might expect, with lush cinematography by Alejandro Ulloa and evocative landscapes filmed in both Spain (standing in for the U.S. as usual) and China. The music by Carlos Savina is more elegiac than badass, more Ortolani than Morricone, but very easy on the ear. The mighty men who star, Lee Van Cleef and Lo Lieh, are troupers who perform with enthusiasm....

BUTT!

That's a pun, not a typo, and it leads us to the problem with this promising package. It turns out to be a comedy, but I have no automatic problem with that. Shanghai Joe is pretty funny, too, whether it means to be or not. But the type of comedy The Stranger and the Gunfighter indulges in has little to do with its gunfighting or kung-fu elements. The original Italian title is La dove non batte il sole. My Microsoft Translator rather witlessly translates this as "Where does not beat the sun," but a more idiomatic attempt, "Where the sun don't shine," gets us nearer the bottom of the matter.

We're introduced to Dakota (Van Cleef) working his way through the defenses of a safe. At each obstacle he discovers a photograph of a woman, and with each discovery Margheriti cuts to a flashback presumably showing how the picture was taken. Each woman had a tryst with a short, bald Chinese merchant who seems to have a rear-end fetish. He examines each woman's tush with an appraiser's eye. All of this is unknown to Dakota as he prepares to blow the safe. The merchant appears to prevent the blast, but is killed by the explosion. Dakota is captured, tried and sentenced to death for the merchant's death.

In China, we learn that the merchant was the uncle of Ho Chiang (Lo Lieh) and that funds entrusted to him by a local mandarin are unaccounted for. All the official has to show for his investment is a cigar store Indian. To redeem the family honor, not to mention save their lives, Ho must go to America and recover the money. Lo Lieh gets to show off some moves here but the action seems perfunctory and the director seems most interested in getting slow-mo shots of the actor leaping through the air. Still, it's just about the most fighting we'll see from Lo Lieh in the picture.

Ho makes it to our original starting point in time to interview Dakota on the night before the hanging. He decides that the outlaw would make an excellent guide to the rest of the west and contrives to rescue him from the gallows. Reviewing the four photos, our duo realize that they must track down these women and find out what the old man found so fascinating about their butts. The bright but guileless Ho is unselfconscious about asking women to examine their asses or, worse, asking the men in their lives for the privilege. Despite these faux pas he emerges as the brains of the outfit, equipped with a foolproof method of picking roulette winners and a case full of acupuncture needles to enhance his imposture of a doctor. He deduces at last that each woman has had a share of information tattooed on her behind; combined, these rump notes will reveal the true location of the treasure.

"I wish to look at ass of your wife." A redundantly shocking moment from The Stranger and the Gunfighter.

The plot renders Blood Money a mildly bawdy comedy of manners -- or in Dakota's case, the lack thereof. The copy I watched seems to be 10 minutes short of the original length, which may explain why nothing more salacious than a butt is exposed here. The same comedy situations are repeated four times over, while Van Cleef is wasted playing a buffoon. You hold out hope for something better once some villains are introduced: an ex-con religious fanatic murderer (Julian Ugarte) who travels in a horse-drawn church and dresses like Rasputin of the West, and a big Indian brute clearly meant for a showdown with Ho. Add the inevitable Mexican bandits and you have a potentially formidable roster of enemies. But no one's heart really seems to be into the violence, even when a tortured Dakota gets hold of a Gatling gun, and the big fight between Lo Lieh and the Indian is lackluster. This is fatal. There's no point to making a spaghetti-kung fu crossover unless you go for broke with the action and violence. There's no point to watching such a film unless you expect a lot of action and violence. But somebody (Carlo Ponti, maybe) must have thought that the actresses' assets were equal in importance to shooting, kicking and killing. With all due respect to the rears of Femi Benussi, Erika Blanc, Patty Shepard and Karen Yeh, it just ain't so.

"The Deacon" (Julian Ugarte) brings the wrath of God wherever he goes, but no man makes a martyr of Lee Van Cleef -- though they can sure try.

Maybe this film was made too late. By 1974 comedy had contaminated spaghetti westerns to an almost incurable extent, and to a point where we should be grateful that we at least got Van Cleef and not Terrence Hill. By the time kung-fu was big enough globally to make a project like this plausible, the damage had already been done, and it was probably inevitable that a film like this would end up as some sort of comedy. It is only a Seventies dream, I suppose, to envision a film with a gunfighter and a martial artist who are both badasses true to their respective genres, something closer to the Mifune-Bronson teamup in Red Sun. That ideal crossover may exist only in that trailer I saw. If that sort of crossover is what you're looking for, the trailer is probably all you need to see.

In Brief: TAKEN (2009)

There's a women-in-captivity movie feebly struggling to exist in the middle of Pierre Morel's surprise hit, but neither he nor mastermind Luc Besson have the guts to take their movie in that direction. The PG-13 rating constrains them, and constraint is the main characteristic of this surprisingly lame effort. What did people see in the advertising that lured them to the theaters? I wonder whether it wasn't the other side of the "torture porn" equation, the invitation to identify with the torturer in a fantasy of unrestrained righteousness, Jack Bauer style, as opposed to the dare to empathize with victims the horror films throw down. There was clearly an appetite to see a wrathful paternal figure run amok, but amok proves to be an over-generous estimate of Liam Neeson's intensity in this slumming exercise. He's clearly the wrong man for the role, but the character of Bryan Mills is arguably hopeless: a self-pitying shlub with class-envy issues and daddy anxieties focused on a teenage daughter. It's as if Al Bundy proved to be a sleeper-agent hitman and someone had kidnapped Kelly.

A friend I watched this with said it reminded him of Commando in some ways, but it lacks that film's enthusiasm. The foolish movie thinks it's an A picture rather than the exploitation rampage it needed to be. It lacked the courage to implicate itself in the exploitation it portrayed on screen. A true exploitation film would have dared to eroticize the predicament of Neeson's daughter and relied on your own guilty conscience of enjoyment to enhance the horror of her plight. It would also have allowed Neeson to show more enthusiasm, panache or just plain rage in his action scenes. Instead, the transition from shlub to cool ruthless customer is so instantaneous that it loses any credibility. Neeson has no time for genuine anxiety, fear or even indignation. The part needed someone more self-combustible. I naturally think of Mel Gibson because of Ransom, but it seems that plenty of people could have done it better than Neeson. His performance only makes sense if you think of the entire film as a vindication of the wise father and an affirmation of his paternal authority. The father-knows-best theme is cemented when the daughter is marked for doom almost literally from the moment she steps off the plane in Paris. Neeson is only ever performing his fatherly duty, but there's no emotional reward for him except for showing off his connection to a pop star that had already been established before the film's plot actually got started -- at a painfully late point in a relatively short feature. But here's some instant exploitation brainstorming that could have improved the film. Wouldn't it have made Dad even cooler in his daughter's eyes and definitively one-upped ex-wife Famke Janssen if our hero actually ended up with the pop star at the end of picture? Taken is littered with many such unexploited opportunities, and I kick myself for thinking that it's popularity and Neeson's presence meant that it had anything going for it. It didn't.

I give it credit for not getting too neat and tying the daughter's kidnapping to Neeson's secret past, but that meant that the white-slaver villains needed to be more colorful, more evil, more something than they are. But the film works on the assumption that the mere thought of white slavery, along with occasional glimpses of drug-addled victims flopping about, is enough to keep us interested in the bad guys' destruction. It isn't. This project is fatally halfhearted about nearly every aspect of its story, and Neeson isn't even that committed to his work. All I can say in my defense is that at least I waited until I could rent the thing from the library. It cost me no money, at least. If somebody liked it, fine. I'd even be curious to learn why, but I don't expect to be won over. Feel free to try just the same.

THE NINJA STRIKES BACK (Xiong Zhong, 1982)

Whichever of the purported directors of The Ninja Strikes Back came up with this image deserves to be considered the Rene Magritte of martial-arts cinema.

Two thousand years ago, give or take, the Flavian Amphitheater (known to us as the Colosseum) witnessed combat to the death from the mightiest killing machines of the age: the gladiators. In 1972, Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris revived the tradition, symbolically at least, by staging a mock mortal combat for the film Return (or Way) of the Dragon. Ten years later, Bruce Le and an international team of exploitation filmmakers continued that tradition in the film now under review, which is just a respectful way of saying they ripped off Return of the Dragon.

The Ninja Strikes Back, which was known elsewhere and at other times as Bruce Le Strikes Back or Eye of the Dragon, is a collaboration between Le and exploitation maven Dick Randall, who had earlier worked with the star in such stuff as The Clones of Bruce Lee. On his own, Randall produced films ranging from The Wild World of Jayne Mansfield to For Your Height Only. Le co-directed this film with Joseph Kong (aka Joseph Velasco), the director of Clones as well as the film with the most sublimely illiterate U.S. title ever: My Name Called Bruce. While co-star Andre Koob isn't listed as a director in the film itself, the RareFlix DVD box cover adds him to the list. So we have as many as three directors, along with a producer with a certain style, for a production that sprawls from Rome to Paris to Macao. This is a volatile mixture even before we get to the plot.

"Bruce" lives in Rome, where he and his friend Ron Wong are muscle for "The Boss." We are introduced to our hero in the back room of a pool hall where he's playing a high-stakes poker game. Catching a competitor cheating, Bruce chastises all involved with flying feet and the requisite Brucian screams. While fellow Brucian Dragon Lee resembles Curly Howard somewhat in his vocalizations, Le sometimes comes closer to Jerry Lewis, were Lewis a Bruce Lee imitator.

The Boss sends Bruce and Ron to carry out a drug deal. The deal goes bad and Bruce gets a bullet in the leg. Nobly he tells Ron to get away, and is himself taken by the police. At this point, nearly nine minutes into the picture, the opening credits appear.

Bruce serves his time and is released. In the meantime, Ron seems to have risen in the Boss's organization. He's now bold enough to propose kidnapping the daughter of a newly arrived ambassador (from where? who knows?) who won't do business with The Boss. He's also eager to have Bruce back in the gang, telling our hero, "It's a great big one I owe you." But Bruce wants to make a clean break from his criminal life. Invited by The Boss to beat up a captive for old time's sake, he demurs. Ron does the honors instead, while The Boss wishes Bruce well.

So of course Ron and some goons disguised as artists try to kill Bruce a few minutes later (in running time) while he's on the town with his (presumably) Italian girlfriend Laura. Our hero's kung fu is strong, but the gang has him on the ropes until a redheaded woman with a gun scatters the criminals. She never gets a name, but she turns out to be a policewoman working with Inspector Marino. The actress is audaciously named Chick Norris, but is really Corliss Randall, wife of the producer (who himself plays the Ambassador). The Rome police are investigating Ron and The Boss. They have more cause to investigate when Ron's kidnap plan kicks in. Ron is a creative thinker. This is who he sends after Sophie, the Ambassador's daughter.

Go ahead and question the utility of a kidnapper in drag, but this film's attitude is why not? There'll be more proof of this later. Right now, the thing is still just getting started.

Red and Marino start roughing up the criminal element for information on Ron, whom they suspect in the kidnapping. But their interrogation techniques won't get them very far. Here's how they work: they corner a guy in a pool hall, and Marino punches him once in the gut. They ask him about Ron, but he won't answer. They give up. Bruce is little help, either. At the hospital after the last attack, he tells the cops that he'll settle his business with Ron on his own. But after the gang attacks him at the hospital, Bruce is ready to go to Paris with Marino to help track down the kidnappers.

There's just enough of a hint of the Italian polizioteschi genre to give this kung fu movie a little Euro-exoticism. And as our heroes go to Paris the film begins to burrow its way into a special little world of sleaze. The tone is set by their visit to a discotheque, where Marino gets information using a gun and a urinal.

This informant directs our heroes to their next stop, a porno studio. This is as good a time as any for an Exploitation Movie Quiz.

Q. The script calls for the protagonists to invade a porno studio. Do you
a)go for shock value by following them into the studio and surprising the crew, or
b)build up suspense by showing the making of a pornographic film.

The correct answer is b). Or at least I assume that Messrs. Randall, Le, Kong et al hoped to create some sort of tension in their audience by allowing the lesbian scene within the film to develop from kissing to groping to bodies grinding nakedly together before Bruce and the Inspector spoil things. Now they have to reckon with porno set security. Had this been twenty years later, they might have had to deal with Kimbo Slice, and they probably would have had an easier time than they do with this fat guy.

But all of this effort only gets them another name and another destination. Coitus interruptus is the common motif here as our heroes catch Jean Pierre in the act. This only incites a chase scene and a hostage standoff on the Paris Metro. Then Jean Pierre ditches the kid and runs for it. He deserves what he gets: a beating. But when he tells the good guys what they want to know, they tell him to go home. He reveals that the ninja has taken Sophie to Macao.

The who? The whaaa? This is the first time anyone's mentioned a ninja in the movie, if you don't count those almost subliminal images from the opening credits. Who is this ninja person, anyway? The question takes us to Macao, still ruled by Portugal at the time, where young women are turned into doped-up nymphomaniacs in order to get prominent men into compromising positions.

And Yang Sze wants a piece of the action. Yes, it's our old friend Bolo Yeung taking his pick of the crop. Except he has to answer to none other than Harold "Oddjob" Sakata. And in case you had any confusion as to who he is, a bit of, er, borrowed James Bond music plays every time he shows up. Poor Bolo is Oddjob's bitch. The once-mighty "Chinese Hercules" lives in fear of Sakata-san's dreaded iron glove. It makes him whimper, "Put it away....I won't touch her, I swear it!"

But these mighty men are merely minions of the ninja, whom we see (for now) only from the chest down. To make sure of this, the camera freeze frames in the middle of a pan up they mystery man's ninja-clad body before the film hurries back to Italy to get Bruce back in the action. You see, it was one thing to tag along to Paris with the inspector, but Bruce would rather hang out on the beach and oil Laura's naked back than fly out to Macao.

Too bad, Bruce: a clumsy sniper blows a hole in Laura's head that was meant for yours. Ron isn't done with our hero yet, so Bruce isn't done with the search for Sophie. Of course, $50,000 from the Ambassador helps firm up his resolution. "Bring my daughter home," the diplomat pleads. "I will," Bruce says, "I promise...honest."

Now it's personal for Bruce, and it's only going to get more personal. Macao is Bruce's home town. His father drank and worried about him there, and Bruce's first thought is to pay Pop a visit. But the house is empty, except for a friend who appears to explain that two Japanese men (Oddjob and Bolo to you) showed up two months ago to kill Bruce's dad and kidnap his sister. "They were ninja," the friend says, "I'm sure of it." But not the ninja, of course.

For all his travails, sometimes it's still good to be Bolo Yeung.

All right, then. Randall's gang has been sort of teasing us with this ninja business for over half the picture. Here's where they start making up for it. Ninjas attack Bruce and his friend at a cemetery in all their pajama-clad backflipping splendor. These are full-tilt ninja, too; they have the power to vanish. I didn't say they throw smoke bombs and run away. I mean that they vanish into thin air. They also can burst out of the earth when they need to. And they decapitate people.

Bruce is hard pressed to put an end to this silliness.

But he prevails here and against both Bolo and Sakata, the latter on a boat with Sophie tied to the mast. For the occasion, our villain is sporting his old Oddjob hat, for all the good it's ever done him.

Hooray! Sophie and Bruce's sister and the other drugged-up nymphomaniacs are saved, and Bruce brings his prize back to Rome. But not all scores have been settled yet. With Marino and Red tied up in traffic, Bruce has barely deposited Sophie at the Ambassador's residence before she's kidnapped again, and the Ambassador himself is killed. You all forgot about Ron and The Boss, didn't you? But Ron forgets nothing. He calls Bruce and challenges him to fight the ninja to the death at the Colosseum to save Sophie. Funny thing is, when Bruce shows up and fights his way through a bunch of pretenders, the only dude left to face him is Ron himself. No pajamas, no magic tricks. So is Ron the ninja, after all, or did distributors simply require our filmmakers to use the word "ninja" a certain number of times in the script? We may never know. But there remains one more thing to be ripped off: the anatomical analysis of carnage innovated by Mr. Sonny Chiba.

As I've attempted to demonstrate, The Ninja Strikes Back has something for just about everybody, except for good taste. It has a soundtrack stolen from other movies, it has a Bruce Lee imitator as well as the real Bolo Yeung, it has quasi-pornography, appallingly Euro-fied disco music (the 70s seemed to end later on the Continent), tons of tourist footage of Rome, a decapitation, toplessness at every opportunity, and just when you start to think the title is a rip-off you get ninjas up the wazoo. The combination of disco and ninjas leaves the film poised on the border between 70s and 80s trash, as if a new era of exploitation cinema was struggling to be born. Randall, Le and Kong simply pile on as much junk as they can find to make a bigger bonfire, and it burns pretty good for a while. Their film has a cumulative effect as events grow more outrageous. The fun of it is wondering what they'll think of next, and when you reach that point the story doesn't really have to make sense anymore, which is a good thing for the story.

The Ninja Strikes Back is part of the RareFlix Triple Feature Vol. 3 box set, along with Lady Street Fighter (see below) and the Leo Fong starrer Revenge of the Bushido Blade. While Lady Street Fighter is strictly for the serious connoisseurs of bad moviemaking, Ninja is probably more accessible thanks to its more competent action and its flaunting of impressive locations. It also looks as good as it probably can in a widescreen edition straight from the rights holders. While I expect "good" things of the Fong film, I can say pretty confidently that the two movies I've seen make the set worth seeing for exotic cinema buffs.