Revisiting The Warriors

When it comes to an author despising a screen adaptation of their work, Stephen King’s remarks about The Shining being “a maddening, perverse, and disappointing film,” are almost complimentary, at least if you compare them to Sol Yurick’s take on The Warriors.

The novelist never came to terms with the film’s status as a cult classic. And he’s said that while the skeleton of the movie was intact, the revolutionary content was missing, director Walter Hill had no idea how street kids talk, and that it was “trashy” (though beautifully filmed).

And with respect to the Pied Piper of the Bronx, gang leader Cyrus…well…Yurick didn’t DIG him at all either, saying “the actor was awful.”

One of the most remarkable aspects of The Warriors is the gulf between the high-minded intentions of the author- Sol Yurick’s book drew from Anabasis by Zenophon, a pupil of Socrates with the eponymous gangsters as Greek mercenaries – and the finished product. The Warriors is an often corny, but unrelenting and adrenaline-fueled chase from one end of the New York subway system to the other.

Cyrus, the Bronx gang wrangler, boasts strength in numbers, and that there are somewhere in the neighbourhood of 40,000 affiliated or unaffiliated gangsters, but that “there ain’t but 20,000 police in the whole town.”

When Cyrus is gunned down, rivals finger The Warriors, who’ve gotta then bop their way back to Coney Island and escape the thousands who now see red.

Instead of splitting for cabs, the boys ride the rails. For native New Yorkers, the idea of a chase happening on the subway can only exist in the realm of fiction as they are constantly grousing about MTA delays. Nonetheless the dark and seedy tunnels provide an excellent action backdrop – after all, the “cut and cover” technique used to build the system, means it is very loud indeed, and the screeching of the subways is a great aural accompaniment to sleazy graffiti-filled subterranean visuals.

Walter Hill keeps the action tight and tense like he did with Southern Comfort (the excellent hicksploitation that Vinegar Syndrome is putting out this year) .

The music is absolutely cracking too (Barry De Vorzon, Martha and the Vandellas and Joe Walsh, hello)

One of the best action films of all time, The Warriors is worth a revisit every few years.

**** (out of 5)

Enter the Ninja

“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.