Not so the goons who are hunting him down, red-dressed ninjas (red!) who it turns out are trying to kill him in a final test of his skills at a Japanese ninja school. I could see this guy in the dead of night if my eyes were closed and the moon was covered by cloud. It's a colour that was not really favoured by real-life ninjas, who were all about stealth and sinking into the shadows. There's just one thing, he's dressed from head to toe in the brightest white. One thing you can be sure of from the start in this cheesy but once popular action exploitation flick from 1981 is that despite the presence of a good many ninja warriors in the opening scene, here Franco Nero is definitely the ninja.
Of course, if you have a bit of a thing for Franco Nero, feel free to read it any way you please. Like Enter the Dragon, the film from which it unashamedly cribbed its title, I always felt there should be a comma in there to avoid any sleazy misreading of what it's actually about. I have to admit to being a tad more cynical than some others (no, really?), but midway through my viewing of this trilogy – which I never caught back when they were first released – I still got the surprise of my life.Įnter the Ninja.
The original Cannon trilogy – Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja and Ninja III: The Domination – have been brought together here as a dual format Blu-ray and DVD set by Eureka, who are starting to give Arrow some serious competition when it comes to cult movie Blu-ray and DVD releases. No, our introduction to the Japanese ninja came in the shape of three films made by exploitation specialists Cannon Films in the early 1980s and their box office popularity kicked off a wave of American made ninja movies, including Cannon's own American Ninja series. We learned about samurai from Kurosawa movies, but Kurosawa never made a ninja film. The reason is simple – almost all of the 70s martial arts movies that reached western shores originated from Hong Kong, and ninjas are Japanese in origin.
Nowadays we all know what a ninja is, but they were a surprisingly long time coming to American genre cinema. As many will now know, martial arts come in a variety of guises, but in the 70s they tended to get lumped together under the single and misleading umbrella of kung fu. Back then, western audiences tended to generalise about such things. Gort dons his robes and whips out his shurikens.īack in 1981, the first wave of Hong Kong martial arts movies had come and gone and made a serious impact on American action cinema. The three movies from Cannon Films that kicked off a ninja exploitation craze in the 1980s – ENTER THE NINJA, REVENGE OF THE NINJA and NINJA III: THE DOMINATION – have been brought together in THE NINJA TRILOGY, a Blu-ray and DVD set recently release by Eureka. Front page disc reviews film reviews articles interviews