Magic, mystery, and mayhem – oh my!
From sentient swords and CIA conspiracies to warring martial arts academies, the world
of the movie ninja is as vast as it is weird.
For most American audiences, the term "ninja" summons up a collection of pop culture references
— the long-running Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and Chris Farley's pratfalls
in Beverly Hills Ninja may be a couple that come to mind.
For cult movie fans, it may be the avalanche of interchangeable 80's action movies featuring
a mix of Caucasian and Asian actors tossing shuriken at bad guys.
"Thank you."
"That's very impressive."
But the earliest movies about ninja long predated the '80s boom.
Japanese filmmakers first began making movies about ninja as early as the silent film era.
Many of these early titles centered around folk tales, like those of Jiraiya and Sarutobi
Sasuke — and yes, these stories directly inspired the Naruto characters of the same name.
Unfortunately, like the vast majority of silent movies, very few of these early efforts still exist.
In fact, the 1921 film Jiraiya the Brave is considered to be the oldest surviving ninja
film, though only 20 minutes of the movie remain intact.
Today, ninja are seemingly everywhere.
When ninja went worldwide in the 1980s, other countries started making their own adventures
— including Sweden, Argentina, South Korea and India.
There are ninja anime, giant monster movies, comedies, and even "adults-only" films.
Ninja were inescapable in Japanese movie theaters during the 1950s and 1960s.
The website Vintage Ninja breaks down this period into distinct types, with one being
the fantasy-fueled efforts.
These ninja were more like wizards, battling evil sorcerers and giant monsters with a mix
of swordplay and spells.
The 1959 animated ninja film Shonen Sarutobi Sasuke fits in this vein, as we witness the
titular proto-ninja and his fight against a lake demon.
Unlike many of its fellow fantasy ninja films, it saw a theatrical release in the United
States — but strangely, the American version called Magic Boy removed any references to ninja.
The other ninja films of the '60s boom included black-and-white historical action-dramas,
fueled by a mix of political intrigue, energetic camerawork and bloody fight sequences.
Some traits — such as the ninja's superhuman stealth and their array of unique weapons
— would carry over into the brawny American cousins of the 1980s.
But films like the stark, psychologically driven Samurai Spy couldn't be more different
from the action antics in the American Ninja series.
For many Westerners, their first exposure to ninja came from the 1967 James Bond film,
You Only Live Twice.
It focuses on a dissolute Bond learning ninjutsu in Japan to carry out the assassination of
his nemesis, Blofeld.
"The firing power inside my crater is enough to annihilate a small army.
You can watch it all on TV."
Two real-life martial artists were hired by the film's producers to lend authenticity
to the ninja sequences.
Judo champion Donn F. Draeger not only trained Sean Connery in many fighting styles, but
also served as his stunt double.
This wasn't uncommon, as Draeger had previously served as John Wayne's stunt double in the
1958 film The Barbarian and the Geisha.
The other consultant was Masaaki Hatsumi — recognized today as a grandmaster of the nine schools
of martial arts — who also appeared in the movie as an aide to the spy Tiger Tanaka.
Hatsumi later used his training to found a dojo in Japan, where thousands travel each
year to learn ninjutsu techniques.
By the mid-1970s, ninja had infiltrated American popular culture.
They appeared on television series, like Kung Fu and Hawaii Five-0, while Marvel and DC
introduced ninja characters in Judomaster, Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu and the Deadly
Hands of Kung Fu anthology.
However, ninja wouldn't turn up in a Hollywood movie until 1975's The Killer Elite.
Directed by action auteur Sam Peckinpah, the movie concerns a pair of undercover agents
for hire, played by James Caan and Robert Duvall.
Their testosterone-fueled friendship comes to an abrupt end when Duvall double-crosses
Caan and leaves him for dead.
Caan's rehabilitation involves intense martial arts training, which serves him well when
he hits the revenge trail to stop an assassin from killing a Taiwanese politician.
This doesn't sit well with Duvall, who summons a small army of ninja to finish the job.
But Peckinpah's ninja are no more effective than standard issue henchmen, falling hard
to a guy with a cane, a dumpy Burt Young, a middle-aged diplomat and his daughter, and
a machine gun-toting Bo Hopkins.
According to the martial arts compendium These Fists Break Bricks, the early 1980s ninja
were thriving on TV, in best-selling books, and even in perfume.
The time was right for a Hollywood ninja movie, and Mike Stone thought it would be his ticket
to stardom.
Stone, a karate champion and instructor, pitched a ninja movie called Dance of Death to The
Cannon Group — the movie factory that would be responsible for many of Chuck Norris's
action titles.
With Stone signed on as both star and scriptwriter, the producers were hoping to beat 20th Century
Fox's adaptation of Eric Van Lustbader's The Ninja to theaters.
They didn't need to worry — that production fell into developmental hell — but they
soon faced their own problems with the movie that would become 1981's Enter the Ninja.
Producer Menahem Golan reportedly arrived on set and fired the director, crew, and Stone
as leading man.
As Stone said in The Cannon Film Guide Volume II,
Golan stepped in as director and hired Italian actor Franco Nero to replace Stone.
"Gentlemen.
Let's be reasonable.
Why don't we talk?"
Golan would eventually walk back his decision somewhat, rehiring Stone as fight coordinator
and as Nero's stunt double.
He allowed Stone to hire his own stuntmen, including a Japanese kendo and judo champ
named Sho Kosugi.
Kosugi would also play one of the film's bad guys — a performance that made him the face
of ninja throughout the 1980s.
Throughout the 80s, Sho Kosugi was an on-screen murder machine, laying waste to every bad
guy who dared to cross his path.
One of his most popular movies during this period was 1985's Pray for Death.
That was the best you could hope for from Sho: that he'd kill you quickly.
That image contrasted heavily with Kosugi's real life as a hard-working family man with
a healthy skepticism about his status as an action hero.
Though his on-screen characters made him exceptionally popular, his legacy was ultimately cemented
as the first Japanese actor to top-bill an American action movie.
While he had been elevated from the bad guy in Enter the Ninja to the hero in Revenge
of the Ninja, he was dismissive of the loopy Ninja III: The Domination and left the Cannon
Group over a contract dispute.
After Pray for Death earned an X rating, he requested cuts to ensure that younger fans
could see it.
When the national box office returns for ninja movies cooled off, Kosugi hosted the Ninja
Theater VHS series and eventually returned to Japan, where he found new fame on television.
In 2009, the Wachowskis paid tribute to his early screen days by casting him as the villain
in Ninja Assassin.
Though The Cannon Group lost Sho Kosugi, they still saw money to be made in the shuriken
and katana business.
As noted in These Fist Break Bricks, the company pre-sold American Ninja as a vehicle for Chuck Norris.
They had to go looking for a new action star, though, as Norris wasn't interested in the project.
Enter Michael Dudikoff, a model-turned-actor who often played affable boyfriends and best
pals in movies and on television.
"Veal…
Par…
What's this word?"
"It's Parmesan."
Director Sam Firstenberg was instantly smitten with Dudikoff, recalling to KungFuMagazine.com,
What Dudikoff lacked was the necessary martial arts skills.
He knew some, but he wasn't entirely believable as someone who could fight multiple ninja
at once or jump out of a helicopter.
Thankfully, the producers still had Mike Stone on hand to choreograph the fights and help
Dudikoff achieve ninja-level prowess.
It certainly didn't hurt that he was paired up on-screen with Steve James, a brawny real-life
martial artist.
Dudikoff would play Joe Armstrong in two of the three sequels, sharing lead billing with
actor David Bradley on American Ninja 4.
Let's say it's 1982, and you're an independent distributor with a sizable catalog of martial
arts movies.
Audiences aren't lining up for these titles like they used to — not like the new crop
of ninja flicks cleaning up in theaters and on home video.
So, being the enterprising type, you snip off the title cards from a handful of your
movies and stitch on new ones that prominently feature ninja.
The fact that your movies have little or nothing to do with ninja, well, that's beside the point.
According to a 1986 New York Daily News interview with Rod Hurley, Vice President of Master Arts Video,
One of the more amusing examples includes 1982's Shaolin Prince.
When it finally arrived on American VHS, it bore the title Death Mask of the Ninja, despite
no ninja being in the film.
The 1978 period action drama Heroes of the East features Chinese and Japanese martial
arts, but its real concern is a broken marriage.
Nevertheless, it was renamed numerous times, given titles such as Shaolin Challenges Ninja,
Challenge of the Ninja, and Shaolin vs. Ninja.
When a film subgenre runs out of gas, one of the most common ways for producers to retain
fan interest is to fold elements of other genres into their titles.
This cross-pollination has resulted in some inspired hybrids and some genuine oddities,
and ninja movies are no exception.
"Curses!
Get 'em, boys!"
During this period, fans would stumble across mutations like 1989's Robot Ninja, a no-budget
comedy about a comic book artist fighting crime.
Ninja Academy, from the same year, applied the Police Academy formula to a pair of rival
ninja schools populated by misanthropic weirdos.
Of course, the hands-down winner for most bizarre ninja-hybrid movie might just be 1984's
Ninja III: The Domination.
Intended as another sequel to Enter the Ninja, the film takes an unexpected turn into the supernatural.
Lucinda Dickey is an aerobics instructor possessed by the spirit of an evil ninja.
James Hong is an exorcist who fails to remove the spirit, which prompts — who else?
— Sho Kosugi to step in.
Floating swords, lycra bodysuits, and mind control all combine into a truly absurd experience.
While it's unlikely that the American-made ninja movies of the 1980s will ever be described
as classics, even the worst Cannon Group titles can appear worthy of the Criterion Collection
when compared to the films of Hong Kong's Godfrey Ho.
He flooded international markets with hundreds of cheaply made, nonsensical ninja movies
during the 1980s and 1990s.
"Alright, you better come out now."
"Oh, I think we better do as he says."
After catching wind of Enter the Ninja and wanting his own Franco Nero for his ninja
projects, Ho would hire American actor Richard Harrison — a star of spaghetti Westerns.
However, Ho didn't seem to care that Harrison didn't know martial arts.
He also didn't care that the props and sets were dollar-store quality, or that the movies'
dialogue was seemingly endless verbal loops on ninja empires.
Ho simply hid his stunt players behind hoods and masks, and threw in plenty of gunplay
and smoke bombs to hide the seams.
But what set Ho's movies apart from other low-budget martial arts titles of the era
was his practice of recycling footage from one film to create dozens of others.
Scenes of Harrison shot for one movie would turn up in several other Ho titles, and Harrison
later claimed that Ho's movies caused him to quit acting completely.
When Ho exhausted his footage of Harrison, he bought movies from other Asian markets
and dissected them for more Frankenstein creations.
Quality — or lack thereof — didn't stop Ho until he supposedly retired in the early
2000s to become a film teacher, of all things.
In the 1980s, ninja exploitation films wreaked low-budget havoc across international screens
in the Philippines, Hong Kong, Turkey, and even India.
But one probably wouldn't expect a ninja movie to come from Sweden.
However, the Scandinavian country produced a small handful of homegrown ninja titles
in the late 80s, with the best known to international audiences being 1984's The Ninja Mission.
"Listen Mason, and listen good.
You're to take the ninja into Russia, and get Markov out."
A hopelessly convoluted and astonishingly gory thriller that pits a CIA-backed team
of Swedish ninja against Soviet forces that hold a defecting Russian scientist hostage.
Bo F. Munthe — the self-described Grandfather of European Ninjutsu — co-stars as a member
of the ninja team, whose martial arts skills could be charitably described as rudimentary.
However, their ability to kill bad guys in as messy a manner as possible is top-notch.
Director Mats Helge Olsson had previously made headlines in the early 80s for producing
the historical epic Sweden for the Swedes, which landed him in prison for accounting misdeeds.
He rebounded with the international theatrical and VHS sales for The Ninja Mission, which
he followed with a slew of other action titles — each one as technically inept, yet enthusiastically
made as the next.
The VHS boom wasn't just a fresh revenue source for theatrical movies, old and new.
It also provided aspiring filmmakers a chance to get their homemade productions out into
the world.
These backyard auteurs typically focused on the genres that attracted the widest viewership
— so if you owned a headband and a rubber throwing star, this was your chance to be
in the ninja movie business.
Some of the best-known, or notorious, homegrown ninja titles included Justice, Ninja Style
— a $12,000 actioner by St. Louis detective-turned-filmmaker Ron White — and L.A. Streetfighters, where
a forty-something former Bruce Lee clone plays a high schooler battling drug dealers.
But L.A. Streetfighters director Richard Park Woo-sang also oversaw another amateur ninja
picture, Miami Connection, that inexplicably found an enthusiastic audience — three decades
after its original release.
According to Park, after seeing an interview with taekwondo studio owner Master Y.K.
Kim on a South Korean talk show, Park pitched him on making a martial arts movie.
Kim recruited his students as cast members, borrowed money from friends, and even mortgaged
his school to fund the movie.
However, distributors took one look at its plot — a mishmash of non-sequiturs about
a rock band running afoul of drug-dealing ninja — and advised Kim to just throw it away.
Flash forward to 2009, when Alamo Drafthouse programmer Zach Carlson bought the film on
eBay and screened a reel for audiences at their Austin, Texas location.
Rapturous response led to festival dates, leaving Kim baffled, delighted, and ready
to make more movies.
He told Weekly,
Taiwanese actor John Liu earned a following for his superhuman high kicks in low-budget
Hong Kong and Taiwanese kung fu movies during the 1970s.
But as the old joke goes, what he really wanted to do was direct.
In the 1980s, he established his own microbudget production company and wrote, produced, directed,
and starred in four nearly incoherent martial arts movies.
The last of these, New York Ninja, began filming in 1984 but was abandoned after its distributor
filed for bankruptcy.
This drove Liu to give up filmmaking and return to Paris to oversee his own martial arts studio.
"You can't beat me.
I'm immortal."
Flash-forward three decades, and the film preservation and home video distributor Vinegar
Syndrome locates the surviving elements, but no script or storyboards.
When Liu declined to complete the movie, editor Kurtis M. Spieler painstakingly assembled
the footage into a semi-coherent storyline, earning himself credit as the film's Re-Director.
After corralling several cult actors to dub the on-screen characters, New York Ninja played
the film festival circuit in 2021, eventually receiving a national release.
As for the finished product?
Well, seeing really is believing.
Audiences may not fully accept the sight of a ninja vigilante patrolling New York City
— occasionally on roller skates — in search of the cartoonish gang members who killed
his wife.
A radioactive villain called the Plutonium Man and an army of grade school ninja fans
also factor into the mix, which wobbles and bops to a new '80s-synth-style score by Voyag3r.
Though ninja appeared to be unstoppable on-screen, their appeal eventually waned.
While remaining a popular draw on the home video market, theatrical returns began to
dwindle as the 80s drew to a close.
A wave of negative press started, about how ninja led to real-life crime, including a
highly-publicized 1984 home invasion of actress/director Penny Marshall.
Profit-minded producers began shifting away from ninja, wi th films like 1985's No Retreat,
No Surrender elevating the marquee status of kickboxing, a more aggressive combat sport
than ninjutsu, with less spirituality.
With the help of the energetic Belgian martial artist and actor Jean-Claude Van Damme, kickboxing
and mixed martial arts came to dominate the American action scene, introducing a host
of new movie stars.
These ranged from Steven Seagal and Bruce Lee's son, Brandon, to direct-to-video players
like Billy Blanks, Don "The Dragon" Wilson, and Cynthia Rothrock.