Robot Ninja

My review was written in July 1990 after watching the movie on Cinema Home Video cassette.

This amateur direct-to-video picture is aimed at gorehounds and fans ot the disgusting.

One-man Akron, Ohio filmmaker J. R. Bookwalter dedicates this feature to comic strip artists, and its best aspect consists of black & white comic drawings of the adventures of "Robot Ninja" by David Lange.

Rather inferior-quality live action concerns artist Michael Todd, who decides to fight violent crime in his small town of Ridgway by taking up the silver mask of his fictional hero and going on the warpath himself. In between boring scenes of his problems with his publisher, Burt Ward, are awkwardly staged acts of mayhem. Watching people throw up and expose fake-looking innards is no fun.

Ward is along as an afterthought, making verbal references to the campiness of the proceedings, analogous to his "Batman" tv series. He's named Stan Kane and similar homages are in other character names like Cameron, Spinell, DePalma and Miss Barbeau.

Bookwalter scores low marks in all technical departments, committing a cardinal sin for a tyro filmer of overusing the hand-held camera.