Ninja III: The Domination (1984)

 

Director: Sam Firstenberg

Screenplay: James R. Silke

Cast: Shô Kosugi as Yamada; Lucinda Dickey as Christie; Jordan Bennett as Secord; David Chung as Black Ninja; Dale Ishimoto as Okuda; James Hong as Miyashima

Ephemeral Waves

 

Only a ninja can destroy a ninja.

Out of the Cannon Group canon, Ninja III could be seen as one of their most infamous productions, where after Israeli expats and independent film producers Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan helped produce the eighties craze for ninjas, with Enter the Ninja (1981) and Revenge of the Ninja (1983), the cousins backed another production by director Sam Firstenberg with Shô Kosugi, the Japanese star who became central to considerable few of these ninja films in the eighties (such as Pray for Death (1985) and Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985)) in the United States. This one however would imagine what would happen if you were possessed by the ghost of an evil ninja.

The film does not slouch with a ridiculous opening which is yet, with hindsight to how Cannon Group were not a company able to throw a lot of money around, that is impressive with age. It becomes a far more ambitious and mad spectacle, especially knowing one of Cannon's ultimate swords of Damocles over its head was trying to spend too much on films which were not successful. In how the prologue establishes the evil ninja, assassinating someone on a golf course, it becomes a prolonged act a mayhem before he becomes the ghost that possesses Lucinda Dickey of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), slaughtering everyone including the police who chase after him. Alongside how long and extravagant the scene is on its small budget, there is the fact this was before CGI was prominent, so that is a real stunt person hanging off a real helicopter in a ninja costume at one point.

Eventually the numbers game is too much, but this ninja still survived having holes blown into him with firearms, even shotguns, and massacre a whole lot of the cops after him. This was just the prologue, eventually crawling along in the desert where he encounters Christie, Lucinda Dickey's character a telephone pole engineer in the day, passing to her his katana which contains his soul and possesses her. This is, undoubtedly, a bizarre film as it goes along, a reminder that Cannon Group were a curious beast, who funded so legitimately talented figures, including working with John Cassavetes as a director or Jean-Luc Godard, even if that later production King Lear (1987) was effectively a middle finger to Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan. They also released films presuming they would be hits but coming from a complete naivety at points - Going Bananas (1987), a children's film, has the bizarre anecdote from Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films (2014) about Menahem Golan meeting with the handlers of Clyde the orangutan (Clint Eastwood's co-star from Every Which Way But Loose (1978) and Any Which Way You Can (1980)) to discuss a potential movie deal, only to eventually have to have a dwarf actor in an obvious suit. They could hit trends perfectly, like the original Breakin' film or cashing in on superhero films, but Ninja III does come from the studio being out of touch in a magical way for their productions.

Nothing is more of the eighties, of its moment, in one shot than within Ninja III where Lucinda Dickey is playing Tapper (1983), on an arcade machine she can somehow afford to own, in aerobics lycra. The film after its opening does, honestly, struggle at times with its own shambolic nature, but there is an infectiousness to the proceedings if you can appreciate this film, as Christie begins under the ninja's influence to kill the police officers who finished him off, one attempting to romance her by way of being such an annoyance she finally gives in. Alongside the question of whether pouring V8 vegetable juice on yourself can be considered sexy, which does happen in this film, the other obvious concern is that this definitely is not even like other American martial arts films from this period, in that this really does not focus on the martial arts, yet the idea here of a supernatural ninja is not as trivialising as you would think. This does evoke the cut-and-paste ninja films which made Hong Kong filmmaker Godfrey Ho's infamous reputation, with this in comparison managing a slicker nature in its eighties cheese than some of the productions Ho and his producer at the time Joseph Lai had, but still retaining the DNA. Its supernatural nature makes the comparison perfect, even riffing on The Exorcist with a much appreciated cameo by James Hong as a spiritualist who realises he is out of his depth with an evil ghost ninja. The film is not really even a Shô Kosugi work either as, whilst a name for the tale to sell it, he is a minor figure here, a good ninja out for revenge, for his lost eye and his slain master, travelling to the United States after the evil ninja and happy to perform his own form of exorcism when he realises the circumstances. Instead, this film becomes a curious hodgepodge of aspects and plot points of its own.

A film like this would be even lower budget in the modern straight to streaming era, making one like this which got cinema releases at one point more fascinating. It has its lengthy dialogue scenes, but the strangeness of the production from Cannon Group does feel a one off, not a great film but a compelling one. The Godfrey Ho comparison is apt, and honestly, whilst the real Japanese ninja were people who disguised themselves to blend into surroundings, in Japanese pop culture they have taken ninja to their own exaggerated forms. Particularly in mind to The Kouga Ninja Scrolls (1958–1959), a novel by the Japanese author Futaro Yamada and its lasting impact on depictions in decades after, alongside the influence of cult pop culture media like video games, ninja in Japanese pop culture have been exaggerated as supernatural figures who have bee hives growing out of their backs, let alone their own infinite supply of shuriken like this film has. The difference is that, like the moody synth score by Udi Harpaz and Misha Segal, this has its own quirks from reinterpreting ninja in a Western hemisphere alongside its unintentional aspects, such as its extended aerobics sequence for comedy. Whilst this cannot hold a candle to the Hong Kong and Japanese martial arts films from this era, there is the fictional ninja iconography, like Japan's, which is quirky with hindsight.

The only real issue with this film, truthfully, is that it is exoticising Japanese culture, which is definitely problematic, and whilst his cameo is fun, undeniably a Chinese American actor in James Hong playing a Japanese character, or one who is ambiguous in his spiritual clinic's aesthetic whilst being able to understand a Japanese ghost, shows Ninja III has aged. But the film itself, with its legacy of infamy, is too gleefully weird to just dismiss, especially as it lives up to its mad reputation and does not feel too low budget to cop out of what it promised. The ninja fad as well of the eighties has an added quirk which is meaningful for myself in that, thanks to a certain person named James Ferman, the head of the British Board of Film Classification who started in 1975 and was thankfully ousted in 1999, we would have never gotten a film like this unless with severe censorship until the DVD era. I was too young for this to care, and Godfrey Ho's ninja films were the ones I got to first, but Ferman was responsible for numerous practices which are right to view of puritanical or just bizarre in British film censorship, one of them being he had scenes of things like nunchucks and shurikens removed from films under the fear of British children imitating them, which even compromised the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. This makes a film like Ninja III even more idiosyncratic, as the ninja fad is this strange eighties concept in terms of their Western depictions that we would have not gotten the full extent of. A film like Ninja III would have not been seen in its proper form, outside of bootlegging, until the DVD era here, and its additional time capsule nature of pure eighties oddness, mainlining some of Cannon Group's most charming but also infamous aspects in one production, was a huge experience for me even if this was less a great viewing experience entire for just the film, but the experience itself. Certainly it was an entertaining experience too as a film, not as weird as I had presumed in some ways, more with a greater sense of cheesy eccentricity that won me over, but this is definitely a case of a film which you need to appreciate a "cult" film to get the best out of this or you will think this is dumb. Those who can appreciate just that extended prologue on the golf course will be happy that, if that wins them over, the film will be a great experience for them onwards.