ENTER THE NINJA (1981)

 

Every time the conversation turns to ninja movies I have to remind people of the moment in You Only Live Twice when Tiger Tanaka introduces James Bond to his modern ninjas. On a firing range we see these ninjas firing machine guns, throwing hand grenades, and so on. Pretty cool. The film is from 1967, and cinematic ninja have grown only less modern since then. What the hell? Well, what happened, obviously, was the rise of martial-arts cinema as a global genre. These appealed to a romantic if not atavistic sentiment of their time, inspiring fantasies of ancient wisdom and personal discipline overcoming oppressive technological modernity. Archetypally speaking, there's not much difference between a ninja -- a good ninja, I mean -- and an Ewok. So by the end of the Seventies we had Eric von Lustbader's novels, Frank Miller's comics, The Octagon, and finally Enter the Ninja, a film that bestrides two eras. It looks forward to the Eighties as the work of two of that decade's defining genre producers, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, and an early showcase for the movie ninja of the decade, Sho Kosugi. But it looks to the past in its casting of Franco Nero as its hero. The implausibility of casting has never stopped Nero. If he can be a western gunslinger and a singing knight of Camelot, he can damn well be a ninja.

I'm told that there are versions of Menahem Golan's film in which Nero, as he reportedly prefers, speaks his own English dialogue, but Netflix isn't streaming that version. If anything, the superimposition of an alien voice only exacerbates what I see as Nero's visible discomfort with the project. Nevertheless, he plays Cole, whom we learn was once a mercenary fighting wars in Africa -- virtually a modern ninja already -- who for reasons never made clear quit the business in order to learn, in Japan, how to be a traditional ninja. The film opens with his final exam. Cole's white-clad bulk crashes through the woods, slaughtering all in his path, until he confronts and decapitates an old master. The master, head attached, promptly reappears for the graduation ceremony. All the mayhem and gore we'd seen were fake, the master's erstwhile head merely papier-mache. Cole has to recite the nine principles of ninjistu in order to graduate and nails them. But bigoted Hasegawa (Kusugi) protests that no foreigner can be a true ninja. Fortunately, his opinion counts for crap with the sensei and Cole is sent out into the world to follow the ninja way of helping the helpless and oppressed. But how will his bleeding-heart-liberal ninjitsu stand up to the rage of raw capitalism?

Cole heads to the Philippines, where his old mercenary pal Frank Landers -- Alex Courtney plays him like a hastily drawn and drunken-voiced cartoon of James Caan -- runs a plantation with his English wife Mary Ann (Susan George). Nero may as well be back in the Old West. Here, as there, an evil financier (Christopher George, no relation to Susan) covets the good people's land. The sinister Mr. Venarius, who keeps synchronized swimmers in his deluxe pool as a "living mobile," has sent a goon squad to the outskirts of Manila to drive the Landers' workers off the farm and the Landers off their land. The goon squad is led by Siegfried Schultz (Zachi Noy), a Teutonic leperchaun with a hook hand who is duly humiliated when Cole defends his friends. Our hero rips Schultzie's hook clean off, which helps convince Venarius that he needs a better class of goon. After Cole and another new buddy, the transplanted old codger "Dollars" (Will Hare) ruin Venarius's attempt to negotiate a sale at gunpoint, our villain learns that the Landers' protector is a ninja. "I want a ninja!" he demands -- I paraphrase -- "I want a ninja now!"

 

The forces of evil converge ...

Venarius's faithful flunky Mr. Carter (Constantine Gregory) dutifully flies to Tokyo and does what anyone would do to find a ninja: he goes to a talent agency. Miraculously, Carter ends up at Cole's old school, where he explains to the sensei, without naming names, that a bad man is terrorizing Mr. Venarius's business concerns. This looks like a job for Hasegawa, whose idea of defending the oppressed includes slitting Frank Landers' throat, kidnapping Mary Ann, burning down the farmhouses and cackling evilly. I'm not sure sensei would approve, and I know Cole doesn't. He happened to be out on a lark with Dollars, raiding Venarius's corporate headquarters and leaving his guards in compromising positions, as all this went down, receiving only Hasegawa's selfie film of a recent kill as a warning of what's to come.

 

Above, Mr. Carter's, "I think I've been hurt, sir," is my favorite line of the film.

 

Below: Senator McCain, this is human cockfighting.

To save Mary Ann, Cole must face another gang of useless guards and eliminate Venarius himself before confronting Hasegawa in a cockfighting arena. You might think that since Nero's ninja costume makes it very easy for a stuntman to replace him in all but the close-ups that this formal finale would be a truly climactic battle, but you'd be wrong. Kosugi and his stunt-opponent may be talented, but the fight choreography and direction lumber along as if Nero himself were fighting in his big white jammies. It doesn't help that our good ninja suddenly starts fighting dirty, blowing chalk into poor Hasegawa's face to get an early advantage. But I guess a ninja's gotta do what a ninja's gotta do, especially when the woman he now loves -- Frank having disqualified himself before death by drinking himself into impotence, and Mary Ann having seduced Cole in his guest room -- is in danger. After one of the clumsiest finishes to a swordfight I've seen, good triumphs, while Hasegawa gets the consolation prize of a genuine decapitation. But it was Sho Kosugi who'd live to fight another day, and another, and plenty more after that for Golan-Globus and others. while Nero never made another martial arts movie. That leaves Enter the Ninja looking like a rough draft of ninja films to come, but as the wellspring from which they flowed it still has a lot to answer for.

THE SECRET OF THE URN (1966)

Before there was a one-armed swordsman or one-armed boxer in Hong Kong, before there was a one-armed murderer on The Fugitive TV series, before Spencer Tracy was a one-armed karate expert in Bad Day at Black Rock, there was Tange Sazen. Created by the author Fubo Hayashi in 1927, the one-armed, one-eyed ronin has been a fixture of Japanese pop culture ever since. Within a year of his invention, he was in the movies, and films have been made of his mythical exploits ever since, the latest in 2004 according to Wikipedia. So popular was the motif of Tange Sazen that one studio contrived to turn the character into a woman for a presumably bizarre but also presumably progressive series of films. Hideo Gosha's rendering of the Sazen story is, one must assume, more conventional, and has the advantage of being made when Gosha was at the peak of his powers as a director of suspenseful action films. Apparently an adaption of an established Sazen story, The Secret of the Urn also feels like a dry run for Gosha's masterpiece Goyokin, which would appear three years later.

Gosha's film opens with Tange Sazen's origin. Our antihero starts out as an ordinary Tokugawa-era samurai, Samanosuke (Kinnosuke Nakamura) who is assigned to assassinate a conspirator. He's tapped because he once loved the target's wife, so that his superiors can disclaim responsibility and blame Samanosuke for acting out of jealousy. He confronts his target in the countryside, informs him of the charge, and gives him a chance to die honorably in combat. The conspirator, deciding that his cause is hopeless, opts for seppuku instead, asking Samanosuke to be his second and deliver the deathblow. His promise proves treacherous; when Samanosuke assumes the position, the conspirator turns on him and slashes his face, blinding him in one eye and in effect making him the Jonah Hex of Japan. Samanosuke still finishes his man, but now has to fight off government men who tag him as an insane murderer. He escapes, but leaves his sword arm behind in the confusion.

The plot proper now begins. We're introduced to the famous Yagyu clan, which has been commissioned by the shogunate to host an important festival. The purpose of this is simply to drain the Yagyu of their resources; if they can't come up with the funds, their fiefdom will be forfeit. Times are tough, as they usually are in a Gosha film, so what is to be done? A 120-year old retainer has the answer: the Yagyu possess a treasure known as the Earless Monkey Urn. Of great historical significance in its own right, the urn also has the key to a million-ryo treasure. The only idea I can offer of how much that is is to note that one hundred ryo is the amount usually offered some sucker who happens to possess the urn but doesn't know its true value. Such a person is presumably very much impressed with the hundred ryo, so escalate accordingly. But how do other people get their hands on the urn?

There are spies and thieves everywhere, it turns out, so that not only the Yagyus' rivals but a pair of common thieves -- a stuttering burglar and a pistol-packing geisha -- know about the urn and its significance, even if none of them necessarily know how to interpret its inscriptions. The amazingly resilient urn -- what is it, made of iron? -- literally becomes a football scrimmaged over by rival factions as the two thieves and an ambitious little urchin watch and wait for their chance. The struggle eventually brings everyone to the doorstep, figuratively speaking, of the ronin Tange Sazen, who has trained himself as an invincible swordsman with his remaining arm. He soon takes charge of the urn, knowing only that people are fighting over it and that he can clearly make mischief with it. The thieves know what it's worth, but Sazen doesn't necessarily care -- and at the same time the more-or-less innocent Yagyu have a perfectly legitimate claim to the urn, and their future depends on it. Will the mockingly bitter Sazen regain his sense of honor? Will the reappearance of his lost love bring him to his senses, or has something developed between him and the geisha -- and will that bring him to his senses -- or her to hers?

My feeling that Secret of the Urn was a practice run for Goyokin is based on several factors, including the presence of Nakamura, the convergence of politics and a money grab, the involvement of a brother-and-sister team of rogues, and the fact that Urn isn't quite as good as the later film. Goyokin may simply have been Gosha's way of improving on many of the established story elements in the Tange Sazen saga. The later film has both a stronger moral core, embodied by Tatsuya Nakadai, and a more relentless dramatic momentum. Urn is episodic and protracted by comparison, even though it's a good half-hour shorter than Goyokin. It's inferior on just about every level, but not being a masterpiece is no crime, especially when Urn is as lively and well-acted overall as it is. It shares with Goyokin a realist but not revisionist awareness of the cynical and mercenary forces at work in samurai times, along with a faith that true heroism was both possible and capable of victory. That makes Gosha's samurai films classic adventures of the sort fans of classic Hollywood could recognize and empathize with.

Personally, one bonus element in Urn is the presence of ninjas. Especially gratifying is Gosha's use of them the way they should be used: as cannon fodder -- or, to be more accurate, either sword fodder or fodder for the geisha's pistol. For are not ninjas the most overrated creatures in all creation? I might take them seriously if they were "modern ninjas" like the ones Tetsuro Tamba (a welcome presence in Urn, as usual) was training in You Only Live Twice, but too often in movies ninja are no more than allegedly lethal mimes with Boba Fett powers. They are assumed to be badass because -- to somebody -- they look cool. The armies of ninjas that infested the 1980s were good only for laughs. Historical ninjas are admittedly more plausible as menaces, but only if used properly as skulking assassins. In Urn, when they attempt to attack frontally or en masse, they are properly slaughtered with sword and gun. Tange Sazen has my respect on the strength of this one outing as a ninja-killer. Doing it all one-handed is nearly as impressive as the Chinese martial artists in that Japanese film whose title I can never remember who could take out ninjas with his bare hands. So ha-ha to Eric Van Lustbader, Frank Miller and other ninja-lovers; I do not recommend Secret of the Urn to them.

Nor would I recommend it objectively to anyone unfamiliar with Hideo Gosha's work until you've seen Goyokin first. But since Urn is currently available as a Netflix streaming video, while they have to send you Goyokin in the mail, you may as well watch Secret, since it is a well-made, entertaining action movie from the classic period of samurai cinema. Think of it as an appetizer, with Goyokin as the main course; you'll probably like it, and I can assure you there's better to come.

AnimEigo released the film on DVD this year, provided the stream to Netflix, and uploaded this English-subtitled trailer to YouTube.

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.