BACK in the 1980s you could hardly move in your corner video store for martial arts movies. Cheaply made VHS copies almost worn out through over lending, they catered for a market that sprung up in the aftermath of the Bruce Lee phenomenon from the decade before.
These swiftly knocked out so-called chop-socky epics were like a rite of passage for any young movie buff keen to negotiate their way around the shiny shelves of their local video shop.
The fact that they looked terrible, with their washed out colours and ruthlessly slashed pan-and-scan visuals, mattered not a jot. They were fun, undemanding and above all entertaining. In a glum decade like the 80s, that counted for a lot.
Watching The Ninja Trilogy then, which gathers a selection of those low-rent classics together in their new remastered form, is an odd experience to say the least.
Thanks to the always impressive work of world cinema specialists Eureka Video, these once creaky period gems now sparkle and shine like never before. The effect is disturbing at first. Once you get over the fact that you can actually see and hear the characters on screen properly and that there isn’t a tightly wound VHS tape that’s going to snap if you rewind the action, it all makes sense, though.
What they lose in murky 80s charm they more than make up for in pristine blu-ray quality.
Originally foisted upon audiences by those twin icons of cheap exploitation Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus via their infamous Cannon Films group, these films capture that era when the ninja mythos first truly grabbed hold of millions of western kids' imaginations.
First up is Enter The Ninja. A truly international pot boiler of a film, this features an Italian lead actor (Franco Hero) who is dubbed dreadfully with a full-blown Texas oilman accent and seems to operate in a Philippines setting that’s crawling with cliché-ridden cockney henchmen.
Key to the film’s magic, though, is the casting of Sho Kosugi, a proper martial arts master, who kicks and flails his way through the film like a man possessed even if he clearly couldn’t act his way out of the proverbial paper bag.
It’s little more than a series of loosely connected action sequences but it’s effortlessly entertaining.
The cool Kosugi returns as the hero in Revenge Of The Ninja which relocates the action to America while still retaining the global wackiness of the first film.
A simplistic tale of a drugs war that takes in all manner of racial and social stereotypes, it’s almost like a kids cartoon spoof of a martial arts film at times.
For the final madcap outing here, Ninja III: The Domination, all the stops are pulled out. Without warning a supernatural element is introduced thanks to a haunted arcade machine and a possessed aerobics instructor (Lucinda Dickey) who dresses up as a dead ninja and takes revenge on those who have wronged her.
Utterly bonkers, it’s the best of this wildly entertaining bunch.
