Movie Review: bad martial arts movies: American Ninja
Title:
American NinjaDirector: Sam Firstenberg
Actors:Michael Dudikoff, Steve James, Judie Aronson
Iran Contra seemed to have it all: Rogue military operations, money and guns to a government that had held Americans hostage, illegal supply of weapons to insurgents because they were “fighting communism,” and, most importantly, a big-haired blond with documents in her bra. Yet it falls into a dead zone, far below Watergate, far, far below the Monica Lewinski Affair. Nobody has a made a good movie out of Iran Contra, even though it has almost every possible element.
What it was missing, what it clearly needed, was more Ninjas. Like this movie. American Ninja is oddly prescient, dealing with covert arms transfers through a shadow South American businessman, probably a drug-lord, to some organization fighting for “freedom” against Communism. But American Ninja, though lacking Fawn Hall, has Ninjas and that has made all the difference. Sequel after sequel after sequel. Could Michael Dudikoff possibly have had a career otherwise? He’d make a good looking robot, maybe, but isn’t menacing enough to be a terminator.
This is the kind of movie that harbors old clichés that have been temporarily exiled from better fare. You have the Japanese Master who for some reason likes the American Kid. You have the Woman Who is Too Vain to Understand Danger, “Do you know how much those shoes cost?” and you get The Man with No Memory. These clichés are patched together into a basic plot. Viewed from a long ways away the plot makes a certain amount of low-budget sense. But up close, the plot points are too thick, too ridiculous, too close to the edge of farce.
Then there’s the matter of the bad martial arts. Some of it is so badly staged you want to yell at the screen. Much of it is shot too poorly to see what might be going on. Mostly it’s punctuated with plenty of gunfire to at least keep you awake. At one point, after pulling out one of almost every Ninja weapon out of this wristband, the Bad Ninja suddenly fires a laser. He has a laser? Why didn’t he use that first? But at that point it’s too late to complain. The only real hope is that maybe, just maybe, that prison guard, number 258, I think, is really a young Samuel L. Jackson. Maybe it’s not, and you don’t get much of a look, but if it is that would be cool.
Why did I watch this movie, not once but twice? Well, my FRIEND Tom put this on his top ten list. I watched it once and sent it back, thinking: this is crap, I have nothing to say about this movie. Then the EDITOR of Breaking it Down sent a note listing movies we needed to see, and this movie was on it. AGAIN, I ordered it from Netflix. Again, I waited for some secret magic, some special scene. But no, it was still crap.
Tom explained to me that he first saw this movie when he was 13. He believed then, (and still does) that any movie with Ninja in the title was likely to be cool. When I was 13 I really liked a couple cheesy Italian Western comedies, My Name is Trinity, and Trinity is Still My Name. I’ve seen pieces of these somewhere since, and am pretty sure they suck. But today I saw a collector set of Trinity pictures, three of them. Only 12 dollars. So I bought them and, well, maybe they’ll be better than American Ninja. If not, there’s always E-Bay.
-Daniel H. Jeffers
Horror Movies (review): Alien vs. Predator
This site is evolving. Since, of all my blogs, this has the lowest traffic levels, there is plenty of room to experiment. I had previously posted reviews of a number of movies on the website: Breakingitdown.com, however that website has folded. So, since the reviews are often written with the same slant as I am developing here, I am reposting some of them to this website. First up: Alien vs. Predator
Title:
AVP: Alien Vs. PredatorDirector: Paul W.S. Anderson
Cast (Predator Food): Sanaa Lathan, Lance Hendrikson, Raoul Bova, Ewen Brenner and a bunch of other people.
Wow.
Not the movie, so much. Somehow, in the middle of the workweek, I got talked into seeing the midnight show. It was a small crowd that seemed to be in search of the next
Star Trek convention. Small, but lively. Before the movie, people actually yelled out which side they were on. (Mostly
Alien, I think).
Sadly, you will never replicate that experience. That crowd existed just that once, in the moment. Most of those people won’t be back to see AVP. Those that do will be mixed in with more normal people who will not enjoy the movie near as much. No reason they should.
This movie raises a lot of interesting questions. Like, what do these people do in the daytime? Sleep, probably. Most live with their mother, so they don’t need jobs. Still, you have to wonder if some might be donning normal clothes and riding the bus with you in the morning. But let’s move past the scary parts and back to the movie itself. Here are the questions the movie raised for me:
What genre makes the most sense of this material?
Should we bow down before dark and ancient masters even if they kill us at will?
Shouldn’t we be watching Arnold battle Sigourney?
Do we secretly crave our ancient predators?
Hasn’t everyone seen David Letterman’s Will it Float?
How many scenes were stolen from other movies?
Do chicks dig Man-eating Klingons with dread-locks?What genre makes the most sense of this material?One obvious question is what level or genre should we use to make sense of this movie. Horror movies work in a universe that’s just a little scarier than ours. Adventure movies work in a world where the hero is just a bit stronger and faster than anyone else. Comic books work in a world of exaggerated character traits and ridiculous plots. Wherever we start, we hope to end up on the same note.
The problem here is that the original material comes from different genres and quality levels. Alien was a full on Five star movie. Scary as hell, it was horror in a sci-fi setting. The sequel is an adventure movie with space marines and super-Ripley, but the first one was pure horror. The first
Predator movie was adventure, also with a sci-fi backdrop. Not a five star movie, but a very solid three-star fun-fest.
The third major source for this movie, though un-credited, is obviously H.P. Lovecraft’s classic novel, “
Mountains of Madness”. In his novel, the protagonist is driven mad by the knowledge he discovers at an Antarctic archeological find. It is revealed that ancient and powerful races struggled here, and the humanity is so small, so irrelevant that we could be destroyed as an afterthought.
This revelation is not so much one of danger as it is a destruction of our conceit. No longer at the top of the food-chain, mankind is not even worthy of notice from those who are on top. This kind of horror has become something of a sub-genre in itself, Lovecraftian horror.
Before making it into the movie level, the material was filtered down into a comic-book, then given a video-game feel. The resulting movie is, like
League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, populated with characters shorn of context and level. Every element has lost the moorings that gave it resonance in the first place. The Aliens are well-trodden forms of fear, with no gradual revelation to increase our horror. The Predators are not so implacable anymore, and there is no hero like Arnold to match up to them. The Lovecraftian backdrop is drained of impact by the lack of true scale. Too much is familiar.
The film-makers never found the right level for this movie. Oddly, they chose to pitch it as a disaster movie. First, they used the conventional introduction of cannon-fodder sequences, followed by a superficial generation of tension between people. When the disaster finally came, we saw bunches get taken out pretty much in the order we would have guessed. Once the disaster theme was exhausted, they switched over to a video-game aesthetic. This probably serves the movie best, though video-game movies should have more complex puzzles than you find here.
Should we bow down before dark and ancient masters even if they kill us at will?
Maybe this should have been raised in the movie
Troy, as it was certainly on the minds of the ancient Greeks quite a bit. Here, it serves just as a quick plot turning point, and the decision, once made, takes a turn to the ridiculous.
The tag line of this movie is: “No matter who wins, we lose!” False advertising, and it makes you think the point of view character should have been somebody with a shot at winning. Still, the structure quickly shows us that one side will only kill is in small bunches, while the other will kill us in much larger groups. Also, one side will kill us honorably, by ripping our skull and spinal chords out of our bodies. The other will also discomfit us, by invading our bodies with their young and causing us to burst embarrassingly during dinner.
As humans, we’re pretty sure we’d rather have our skulls ripped out over having anything burst out of our bellies. So the choice becomes clear. And there is even a credible bowing scene as the lead character makes that very choice. Then, however, the filmmakers cheat. Instead of accepting the implications of this act, they let the heroine become acknowledged as a fellow warrior by the Predators.
Shouldn’t we be watching Arnold battle Sigourney?Disregarding bad sequels, Arnold beat the Predator, and Sigourney kicked the crap of out one Alien in the first movie, and took out the prime Mother of all Aliens in the second. So Alien v. Predator is clearly a battle for second place.
Do we secretly crave our ancient predators?
Evolution led us to a place where we could suddenly hide from, kill, trap, or denature our predators. Some still live on in zoos, others exist in nature, but only as long as they don’t eat too many children. Yet our literature is constantly looking for something to put in that top slot, something worthy of our respect even as it kills us. This top predator has to be bigger, more powerful, impervious to our suffering.
Jurassic Park showed a touch of this predator worship, introducing the T-Rex as a magnificent enemy. To complete the cycle, the T-rex steps in to destroy lesser predators such as the velociraptors. They are not worthy to hunt us.
This movie is kind of a struggle between potential predators. Who is worthy of preying on humanity? The Alien presents a maternal kind of destruction, forcing us all into birth-giving vessels for her progeny. The Predator is asexually male, a father figure who won’t stoop to sympathy or understanding, but in the end can be brought to respect.
In this case, we seek the with-held approval of the killing parent and run from the intrusive demands of the voracious mother. I don’t know what all that means, but I’m pretty sure this movie is a thin vehicle for all this thinking anyway.
Hasn’t everyone seen David Letterman’s Will it Float?The actual question here is: “how much bad science, history, and logic will we absorb without complaint?” The question heading is more like the answer.
Since this movie falls somewhere between video game and disaster movie, the standards are fairly low. However, a few things stand out:
- An archeologist is digging, looking for something important, but finds a Pepsi bottle top instead. He stops digging. Gee, shouldn’t you keep digging?
- The heroine talks about how the location they are going to is one of the coldest, most dangerous places on earth. But when they get there, everyone runs around with their faces exposed. Naturally we want to know who is being killed off. But shouldn’t the cannon fodder at least act chilly?
- The shaft, which is suddenly drilled overnight, is at a “perfect 30 degree angle.” Why is that important? Would 27.5 degrees have been a “perfect 27.5 degree angle?”
- At one point, when the walls start shifting, one of the archeologists decides it must happen every ten minutes, because the ancients used a metric system. Did they use metric minutes? Are minutes metric? Even if they used a metric system, why wouldn’t they pick, say, eleven minutes? After all, the thing is supposed to be a trap.
- All the rest could be forgiven, small flaws that might show up much later. But the big finale comes when a large, probably empty, water-tank drops into the ocean, then sinks like a stone. Haven’t the filmmakers at least watched an episode of Will it Float? The problem is not one just for physics loving nerds. Anyone with common sense saw the water tower go into the water and thought “that’s going to float.” Maybe they could have shown it filled with lead or something, but then it couldn’t have stayed up on the wooden platform all those years, let alone be levered over by our heroine.
How many scenes were stolen from other movies?Everybody copies. Sometimes we call it inspiration, sometimes a tribute. Sometimes we want to reexamine a theme. Often we think we could have done something better. But a lot of imitation is just a lack of imagination. Instead of creating a character, we steal one, change it a little, and let audience recognition fill in the background for us. Obviously, since that’s the theme of this movie, a few more stolen scenes shouldn’t bother us. Let’s list a few:
- Initial climbing sequence, answering a cell-phone while on the side of a mountain, goes back to one of the original Star Trek movies, and was copied in MI-2.
- Digging sequence, along with the way things are cut together, echo both The Exorcist and Close Encounters.
- The ending is too much like Close Encounters for comfort.
- The setting of the Antarctic whaling station is quite like John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Do chicks dig Man-eating Klingons with dread-locks?Apparently. Warrior tattoos are a good ideas as well.
-daniel h. jeffers
