“Ninjas? That’s preposterous! This is 20th century Manila.”
What would we do without low budget dreck lensed in the Philippines? After all, the country has been a favored filming location for all manner of trash that’s in part been the inspiration for this very site. You’ve got the likes of “erotic kung fu classic” (er) Firecracker, Death Force, Vampire Hookers, Naked Vengeance, TNT Jackson, Zombie 3 and of course, one of the more popular efforts, the early 80s Cannon film, Enter the Ninja.
Politzioteschi / giallo vet Franco Nero (Django) is Cole, a mustachioed recent ninja initiate in modern day Japan, admitted to the fold after surviving a rather onerous task: escaping and/or killing at least a dozen or so of his colleagues through pristine jungles to earn his diploma.
Actually, it’s a scroll his sensei bestows on him with a bunch of gobbledygook on it. With some protestations by a black ninja (veteran Sho Kosugi), Cole is granted ninjahood and loosed upon the world and told to use his powers for good.
First assignment? Hopping on a 747 and helping out an old, and exceeding drunk army buddy, Frank, in the Philippines. Frank and his wife are getting shaken down by a real estate tycoon and his primary henchman, a man with a hook for a hand – which would be useful for yanking a crummy Vaudeville act off the stage, but is pretty vocationally limiting.
The tycoon is none other than square-jawed ex Marine (and frequent booming voice in cruddy Italian horror films), Christopher George, who plays Charles Venarius, a magnate who sees gold in those hills – or rather, oil deposits on Frank’s plantation.
That the Cannon boys, Golan and Globus want you to at first root for a plantation owner operating what is effectively a business built on subsistence chattel labour, is one of the many weird aspects of Enter the Ninja.
But that doesn’t make it any less fun. You get the hallmarks of martial arts films – cymbal crashes/gongs, portentous pronouncements, nunchucks drills, spinning back kicks, and a few choices zingers like “hang in there,” when Mr Hook Hand is hoisted by his own petard/hook for a hand onto a support beam of a divey saloon.
White ninja Cole lays waste to village barflies, and doles out more beatings than Keith Moon did his toms, and what we get is a final confrontation between the embittered black ninja and the hero white one. Think of it as chess, but for dummies.
***1/2 (out of 5)
Check out the Enter the Ninja Podcast discussion.
Really Awful Movies 