American Samurai (1992)

When I was in middle school in the mid-1990s, I got bitten pretty hard by the Highlander bug.  You know the movies and attendant television series about immortal guys fighting with swords?  I was totally into those, and I have a collection of stamped steel flea market samurai swords in my closet to prove it.  Because of Highlander, there was a period of time when I was extremely interested in anything that to do with swordfighting, from playing those Bushido Blade video games to standing out in the woods with my buddy Josh and cudgeling each other with sticks.  This interest led me to look for other movies in a similar vein, but my resources at the time were basically limited to checking the weekly TV schedule each Sunday to see if anything with a sword-fighting-ish title would be playing on HBO.

It was this process that led me to today’s movie, the 1992 martial arts offering American Samurai.  It’s directed by the ever-prolific Sam Firstenberg, who also gifted the world of cinema with the American Ninja and Cyborg Cop franchises and directed the celebrated opus Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.  The titular American samurai is played by martial artist David Bradley, whose other credits include three of the American Ninja movies (though weirdly not the ones directed by Firstenber) and an episode of Murder, She Wrote.  A bit of disclosure here: I'm reviewing the 2005 Warner Bros. DVD release of the film, which is cropped like crazy to the point that it's functionally edited for violence despite carrying an R rating.

The setup of the movie is as simple as it is nonsensical: A private plane carrying a rich family crashes in the mountains of Japan.  Everyone on board is killed except for baby Drew, who is found and rescued by Tatsuya Sanga, modern Japanese swordsman and easy-going guy.  Rather than, say, contacting the proper authorities and reconnecting the boy with his surviving family overseas, Sanga adopts Drew as his own and trains him to be a samurai warrior.  Drew progresses quickly with the help of a training montage and eventually surpasses Sanga’s own son Kenjiro in skill.  Kenjiro is bitterly envious of Drew, and when their father passes on the family katana to Drew instead of him, Kenjiro vows revenge.

Several years later we find Drew living in the United States as a reporter, while the sinister Kenjiro has gone on to become the Chairman of Iron Chef America a dangerous yakuza assassin.* Kenjiro sends goons to Drew’s apartment to steal back the family sword.  Drew beats up several members of the gang but is eventually shot, losing the sword and punishing viewers with an extended, weirdly shot dream sequence.  After finding his samurai will to survive in dreamland, Drew sticks his fingers into his own abdomen and pulls out the bullet, after which he is somehow just fine.  Because the presence of the slug itself is what’s harmful about being shot, apparently.

Shortly thereafter, we find Drew back on his feet and on his way to Turkey to investigate a murder related to the drug trade.  (This is the one and only time it is ever salient to the plot that he’s a reporter.)  Drew is convinced that only Kenjiro could have committed the murder, as the victim was apparently killed with special technique known only to the Sanga line of swordsmen.  Alongside Drew is photographer Janet Ward, with whom he bickers unconvincingly for ten minutes of screen time before they shag in the least titillating love scene ever filmed this side of National Geographic.  In all honesty, if you like boobless, buttless sex scenes using obvious body doubles, dubbed voices, and creepy art-house lighting, American Samurai is your kink.  It may also be worth noting that this pallid humping comes immediately after Drew has a waking nightmare and Janet finds him swinging a sword in an empty hotel room while wearing nothing but tiny red man-panties.

The two eventually follow Kenjiro’s trail to a nightclub connected to a known drug trafficker.  While subtly looking for clues about Kenjiro by directly asking every shady-looking guy in the bar if they known his brother by name, Drew finds himself drawn into a bar brawl between the local talent and a big beardy guy dressed as a cowboy.  Drew is shot with a taser during the struggle and he and Janet are captured by the bad guys.  Drew awakens chained up in an old-timey dungeon, with Kenjiro waiting to inform him that Janet will be killed if Drew doesn’t take part in a Tukish swordfighting tournament filled with pirates and guys dressed like Conan the Barbarian.

At this point I feel like I should point out that I’m not skimming over the plot in this review, it’s just that this movie has all the coherence and structure of a fever dream.  I don’t know for sure if the final product represents the film as it was originally intended or if a bunch of plot elements somehow ended up on the cutting room floor, but American Samurai is not overly concerned with forming an intricate narrative.  Or any narrative.  Instead, it wants desperately to get to the fight scenes as fast as possible – Which is fair enough, because they’re the only good parts.

Drew reluctantly agrees to fight in the tournament, which is apparently being held so that the super rich can bet on mortal combat.  There’s a million dollar prize up for grabs to the winner, but the price of defeat is death or dismemberment.  A video game roster of costumed combatants has shown up, including the aforementioned barbarian and pirate, some kung fu guys, a Viking,  and (shock of shocks), the bowie-knife wielding cowboy from the bar.  The cowboy introduces himself as Ed Harrison, a down-on-his-luck guy who views the tournament as his last shot at the good life.  He and Drew share a long moment as they both realize that Ed is going to fill the “good guy’s pal who gets killed by the bad guy” role in this picture.

I actually don’t want to say too much about the fight scenes, as they’re really what the movie exists for.  The viewer gets to see pretty much all of the tournament fights and many of them are pretty interesting, although honestly the ones without the main characters are arguably the best.  There’s a fight between a couple of kung fu-ish guys that’s quite a bit of  fun, as well as a battle between the oft-mentioned Conan clone and a guy dressed like an American gladiator that scratches the itch pretty well too. 

Drew’s fights are odd because, since he’s the good guy, he doesn’t want to kill anybody.  This means he’s doing a whole of ninja-kicking bad guys while they’re trying to run him through with halberds and whatnot.  In one fight he turns his sword around and fights with the spine of the blade (kind of like that old samurai anime Rurouni Kenshin), which is pretty cool, but I wish we got to see more swordplay out of him.  He also constantly gets ghostly, Obi-wan Kenobi advice from the disembodied voice of his dad.  Well, not really advice, just his dad’s voice constantly telling how bad-ass samurai are, but I think we’re meant to take it as advice.

The tournament sequence, which takes up around 60% of the movie, is for some reason divided up into days that the viewer is made aware of through subtitles at the bottom of the screen.  I guess this is meant to give us some sense of verisimilitude – Nobody would physically be able to handle half a dozen death duels in one day while still putting on a show for the crowd – but since the editing is so bad that you can see guys who got disemboweled earlier in tournament walking around in the locker room later it all becomes kind of a moot point.

At the end, of course, Kenjiro and Drew must duel to the death.  Again, it’s hard to escape the video game vibe here.  Both guys are dressed in opposite color outfits like Ryu and Ken from Streefighter and, dun-dun-dun, Kenjiro is evilly using the sacred family sword against his own brother.  Before they begin, Kenjiro announces that once he’s killed Drew, he’s going to go back to Japan and kill their dad too.  Since the dad had only appeared as a magic ghost voice since ten minutes into the movie, I’d assumed he was dead already.  Silly me.

Unfortunately, the climatic battle is probably the worst fight scene in the movie.  A number of sequences consist of one combatant flailing away at a disembodied sword blade poking in from off-screen, and in general it’s just shot so badly that it’s hard to tell what’s going on.  There’s even some cropped stock footage from a previous fight.  In the end Drew pacifist spares his brother’s life by hacking gigantic gashes out of both of his ankles and leaving him to wallow in a pool of his own blood.  Drew reclaims the family sword, then magnanimously gives Kenjiro his own katana so that the wicked brother can commit seppuku and reclaim his samurai honor.  Of course, once Drew has his back turned Kenjiro gets other ideas.  Once Drew is approximately 15 yards away, Kenjiro lawn-darts a full-sized katana at him with an angry villain yell, only have Drew knocked it back at him (from 15 yards away, I must repeat) such that it impales him perfectly through the center of the chest.

The end.

What can I say about American Samurai?  It’s bad.  I remember being extremely impressed with this movie when I saw it on cable as a 12 year-old, but it just doesn’t hold up well at all.  If I’m honest, I also had it mixed up pretty badly in my mind with Circle of Steel, a 1994 movie with more or less the same plot.  I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but for the curious, there’s an edited version of it on Youtube that only has the fight scenes.  I still wouldn’t recommend it, but what you do when I’m not looking is your business.

____________

*  But seriously, that actor went on to become the Chairman of Iron Chef America.

Enter the Ninja (1981)

Let's try a little experiment. Close your eyes for a few seconds and try to visualize a ninja. What image comes to mind?

I'd be willing to bet it's probably something like this:

Or if you're from my generation, maybe it's something like this:


I would put down money that whatever your image of a ninja might be, it probably isn't a 40 year-old Italian guy in a white leisure suit. And yet, dear friends, that is the premise of the 1981 martial arts film Enter the Ninja. The movie is the story of Cole, our aforementioned white ninja. Played by Franco Nero, who would later go on to play the bad guy in Die Hard 2, Cole is a former soldier who retired from the front lines in order to travel to Japan and study ninjitsu. It's a peculiar set-up to be sure, but not so weird as to distinguish it from other 80s action flicks. So what sets Enter the Ninja apart? Read on.

The first 15 minutes of the film is a heaping pile of awesome ninja carnage as Cole faces off against a veritable army of red-garbed ninjas led by the deadly black ninja Hasagawa, played by martial arts star and real-life ninjitsu expert Sho Kosugi. The whir of nunchuks, clash of swords, and two unmotivated slow-motion leaps over a waterfall accentuate an extravaganza of all-out ninja warfare. Eventually Cole emerges victorious and it turns out that the entire battle, including a decapitation, was simply a part of Cole's final exam to attain the rank of Ninja Master^TM. Through a combination of wooden body armor and wax heads, none of the ninjas slaughtered along the way actually got hurt - except for one guy who took a sword to the face, but that's an occupational hazard when you're a ninja - and soon everyone is enjoying a celebratory afternoon tea to congratulate Cole for a job well done.

Everyone, that is, except for the black ninja Hasagawa, who's feeling burned that a foreigner has attained the highest rank in ninjitsu. Dun dun dun...

After completing his ninja training, Cole decides to visit his old war buddy Frank at his coconut plantation in the Philippines. (That's one hell of a sentence right there.) Climbing over a fence to surprise his pal using his fancy new ninja skills, Cole finds himself confronted by his buddy's shotgun-toting wife Mary Ann. He quickly overpowers her, scoring a blatant boob grab in the process, but the limp-wristedness of the sequence serves as a dire warning of the film's greatest flaw: Franco Nero is no martial artist.

A ninja can grope you five times
before you even know he's there.

It turns out that Cole is conspicuously much better at being a ninja when he's wearing his virginal white dogi and mask, as well as when he's kind of far away from the camera and his hair's a slightly different color. The fact is that Mike Stone, the film's fight choreographer, played the white ninja in almost all of the fight scenes. When Cole actually has to fight with his face in full view, it's a cornucopia of exaggerated karate chops and wildly leaning kicks. Since we won't actually see Cole in his ninja dogi again until the last ten minutes of the film, this is a bit of a problem.

In any event, Cole soon discovers that his pal Frank has turned into a souse since the end of the war and has little motivation to do anything other than loaf about in his hammock and watch cockfights. That's all well and good, except that Frank's plantation is being menaced by a dwarfish hook-handed man and his small army of thugs. After a handful of clumsy fistfights, many of which are bizarrely infused with comedy sound effects, Cole and a local information broker played by the Grandpa from Silent Night, Deadly Night discover that the hook-man is only the henchman of a shadowy evil businessman. The hook-man's employer is trying to drive Frank away from his coconut farm in order to exploit the untapped oil wealth beneath it.

This sinister job-creator, Mr. Venarious (played by frequent Love Boat and Fantasy Island guest star Christopher George), has deduced that Cole can only be a ninja because of the way he's used an onslaught of waist-high kicks and over-sold backhands to spank the best goons that a fistful of five dollar bills down at the wharf can buy. Venarius, who spends most of his screen-time dressed in what looks like a wizard robe and waving a conductor's baton at a handful of bored-looking women in a swimming pool, soon dispatches his right hand man Mr. Parker to Japan to recruit a ninja of his own to serve as Cole's foil. Free cookies to anyone who can guess where this is going.

Venarius' yes-man travels to the Orient to hire a ninja through a talent agency and not only does he actually succeed, but gee-golly the evil ninja he hires just happens to be Hasagawa, the black ninja from the prelude. Hasagawa hurriedly rushes to the Philippines to advance the plot and launches a stealthy attack on Frank's compound. In what is easily one of the best sequences in the film, Hasagawa bloodily dispatches Frank's guards with a variety of ninja weapons. The sequence includes a fantastic (and oddly funny) shot in which Frank and his wife are eating dinner while you can see Hasagawa picking off guards one-by-one in the background. Hasagawa easily confronts and kills Frank, then kidnaps Mary Ann (who, by the way, Cole has been porking) to lure Cole into a final confrontation. Just to be a dick, Hasagawa then sets fire to the village where Frank's plantation workers live. Briefly forgetting the point of being a ninja, Hasagawa races through the streets in a not-so-stealthy fashion while laughing maniacally and waving a burning torch in each hand. Maybe he's apeshit crazy, maybe he's just a man who enjoys his work.  I'm not here to judge.

Cole at last dons his ninja attire and sets off on a mission of revenge. Despite being laden down with every ninja weapon ever conceived (including two swords, a pair of sai, a tanto, caltrops, a blowgun, a tonfa, a billion shuriken, and a bow and arrow) and wearing a blazing white costume, Cole sneaks into Venarius' downtown office building under cover of afternoon and slaughters a whole bunch of guards...and also some guy answering the phone. In a bit of a Super Mario Bros. moment, Mr. Parker appears and tells Cole that the princess is another castle and that he'll have to accompany him to another site to rescue Mary Ann.

Cole, still in his ninja outfit, accepts a car ride to small stadium where a plexiglass arena has been erected in anticipation of the final duel between the white and black ninjas. Unfortunately for Venarius, Hasagawa is nowhere to be found and Cole quickly lays waste to his remaining toughs. Without his goons to hide behind, Venarius is finally forced to confront Cole himself and is quickly killed in the best death scene ever.

Suddenly Hasagawa appears and, surprisingly, sets Mary Ann free - All he wants is a duel to the death with Cole. I guess he's not such a bad guy after all...except for killing all those people and burning down a town for no good reason. The two rivals finally square off in a well-choreographed spear vs. sword battle for supremacy. Regrettably, the tension of their all-too-brief fight is hamstrung by the fact that we saw Cole kick Hasagawa's ass at least three times in the opening battle sequence. The outcome is never really in doubt and within a few moments Hasagawa is ten pounds lighter and a foot shorter.

The movie ends with Cole, er...heroically abandoning the newly widowed woman he's been banging for the entire movie and heading off for other adventures that, thankfully, never made it onto film.

Sorry baby, but you just can't tie a ninja down.
Also, sorry your husband got killed by ninjas...

Enter the Ninja is an odd, badly paced film that has nonetheless made its way into the pantheon of classic ninja movies based largely on the 20 minutes of the film with Sho Kosugi in them. Large parts of the film are honestly kind of boring, which is doubly inexcusable because of how frenetic and fun the opening moments are. There are too many plodding, sloppy fight scenes of Franco Nero gamely flailing about, and the it seems like as soon as the movie finally gets started, it's over.

That said, the main problem with the whole movie is that it focuses on the wrong ninja. When you watch a martial arts flick, you reasonably expect the hero to actually know what the hell he's doing. Enter the Ninja has it backwards, with the guy who's obviously a bad ass playing second fiddle to another, slightly paunchier guy with lots of action movie credits but not much action movie cred. This movie should have been about Sho Kosugi kicking ass and taking names; a showcase of martial arts and ninja weapons with a much faster pace. We eventually got that film in the form of an unrelated 1983 sequel called Revenge of the Ninja, but that's a tale for another day.