'Five Element Ninjas (1982)' is a Kung fu flick about a martial arts school whose best fighters win a tournament and, in the process, cause a Japanese opponent to commit Seppuku. The man's fellow fighters send a letter to one of his allies back in Japan, an ally who just so happens to be a master ninja and leader of the eponymous five element ninja clans. Naturally, the ninjas make their way to China to avenge their fallen friend, and their mysterious martial arts skills prove to be very challenging to overcome. That's the basic set-up, even if the synopsis spoils a lot more of the narrative, and what follows is a nuts-and-bolts - but no less effective for it - revenge thriller with sequences of sometimes startlingly brutal combat and an unexpectedly nihilistic vibe. The five element ninja factions all use different methods to defeat their foes. For example, the gold ninjas use copper (?) hats to blind their opponents, the wood ninjas disguise themselves as trees, the water ninjas hide (you guessed it) underwater, the fire ninjas cloud the battlefield with smoke before striking with flaming swords, and the earth ninjas attack from beneath the ground. Each clan has several more tricks up its sleeve, but their common theme is to surprise and disorient their opponents before they viciously carve them to pieces. There are also regular ninjas who can silently infiltrate even the most heavily guarded of places, and they strike with ruthless efficiency using claws and iron fists and daggers and all manner of deadly instruments. They aren't interested in fighting fair and it's this that gives them their greatest advantage over the more traditional Chinese martial artists comprising the film's heroic side. Even though it is essentially a China vs Japan affair and there is an undercurrent of Ninjutsu being less honorable than Kung fu, the flick doesn't really feel interested in the kind of jingoism so often present in its peers (some martial arts movies are literally anti-Japanese propaganda pieces). It isn't really interested in the political implications of its premise, more so in pitting two different styles of combat against each other and making a broad but indicting statement about vengeance - and even violence - in general (one of the characters, after murdering someone who has recently wronged them, says to himself: "I didn't do anything wrong... did I?"). It's arguably uninterested in making any kind of statement at all, but its unwillingness to compromise on its focal violence speaks volumes in itself. This is sometimes downright nasty and it has no semblance of mercy to it. It also has a fairly unusual pacing that puts a lot of emphasis on the things building up to the hero's desire for revenge, rather than on the training process required to achieve it (which still appears but is much shorter so that the following segment can surprise us with the techniques the lead has learned in order to counter the various strategies of the five element ninjas). After a pretty full-on opening movement, the picture slows down significantly to introduce and focus on a kind of femme fatale character, and this somewhat humdrum segment is clearly the weakest. It's narratively important, but ever-so-slightly dull. It doesn't help that the soundtrack features an incredibly repetitive motif that builds and reaches its crescendo literally on a loop as if it's emphasising several major reveals that all occur within minutes of one another. In reality it's used to highlight things like opening a window or delivering a note, and its overused so much that it's genuinely annoying. Despite these issues, though, the film is a lot of fun when it gets out of its own way and does what it's best at: highly choreographed ultraviolence. With a colourful, almost cartoony aesthetic and a willful shunning of reality (it makes excellent use of reversed footage), the movie depicts its impressive combat as frantic, urgent and splattered with blood. Although it still tends to seem more like a painful dance than a duel (not a complaint), the film is considerably more vicious than a lot of its peers and is unafraid to showcase its brutality in shades of gleefully saturated red. People are stabbed, slashed, disemboweled and literally pulled apart, and it's all glorious. It's all in good fun (for us) and makes for some really memorable set-pieces soaked in bodily fluids and punctuated by out-of-place smiles of victory. Overall, this is a highly enjoyable and suitably silly martial arts movie that features some notable moments of gore and a strangely bleak atmosphere that's actually slightly haunting in retrospect. It's good stuff.
