Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

If you spend enough time (and money, mostly money, all hail capitalism) buying and watching things from different Blu-ray labels, you start to get a feel for the different sensibilities behind each one's curation of the films they release. And in that sense, New York Ninja feels so at home with the schlocky charms of Vinegar Syndrome's releases that if it didn't exist, they would will it into existence. Which is kind of what happened. A bunch of unreleased footage from an incomplete production of a ninja movie from the '80s was lovingly assembled into a finished film, with dialogue provided by a voice cast of genre stars (Don "the Dragon" Wilson, Linnea Quigley, Michael Berryman and others) and slapped with a snazzy new synth soundtrack courtesy of the band Voyag3r. What's even more surprising is the respect that went into this, and the overall coherence of the result. There's a certain goofiness inherent in the subject matter, but the movie doesn't play this up excessively, and the results feel true to the spirit of a real '80s ninja movie. And given that all the original audio elements were lost, the script wasn't available and the original director didn't want anything to do with the project, the story is actually easy enough to follow. It's a miracle this movie exists. As for whether it's any good...

Well, it feels like an authentic '80s ninja movie, and not an especially distinguished one, but if you like that kind of thing, it certainly has its charms. The original director and star is John Liu, a martial arts star best known for his superman kicking abilities, which Grady Hendrix claims, on the documentary included on the Blu-ray, were the result of extensive training and "perverted crotch torture" (a phrase both frightening and intriguing). One can see these abilities put to great use in the highly entertaining Invincible Armour, which contains one of the great villain deaths in cinema. These abilities can also be seen in New York Ninja, but in less potent a package.

Working with a minuscule crew inexperienced in shooting martial arts, the shot setups here are a lot more basic and the effect is more demonstrative than exciting. See John Liu kick the hell out of a bunch of goons who can barely keep up. (The goons here don't coordinate their outfits very well. At times it seems like the Ninja is fighting members of the Village People.) The effect is similar to Jackie Chan handily outperforming the much slower American stuntmen in Battle Creek Brawl. (I enjoy that movie enough, as director Robert Clouse understands Jackie's star qualities, even if he's not skilled enough to do them justice. And we get to hang out with Jackie's girlfriend Kristine DeBell.) But when the Ninja chases bad guys on rollerskates or does his big hair-raising stunt at the end, it's pretty hard to hold those shortcomings against it.

The other charms of the movie come from the "New York" part of the title. Pre-cleanup NYC is one of the ultimate movie settings if you're into genre fare, providing a reliable level of scuzzy texture to the proceedings. There's added sleaze thanks to the plot, which features the titular New York Ninja avenging the death of his wife by fighting a sex-trafficking ring run by the monstrous Plutonium Killer, who has a habit of murdering the girls his organization kidnaps with his radioactive hands. (I assume this is the sex-trafficking version of "getting high on your own supply", which seems like a poor business model.) The Ninja of course has a secret identity, and during his off hours attaches himself to a news crew determined to catch his exploits and build up his legend. He ends up with a dedicated fanbase, who bail him out with the cops at least once. There are even t-shirts, although it looks suspiciously like they just modified a bunch of "I New York" shirts.

The movie settles into a pattern of the Plutonium Killer's goons terrorizing innocent women (including the great Sharon Mitchell, who gets harassed in the subway; alas, she has no dialogue) and the New York Ninja intervening to deliver justice. It's hard to say the movie really escalates, but the fun stuff comes steadily enough that I was entertained. And in case you're wondering, there's an end credits rap, for those of us who want to either relieve the glories of the preceding hour and a half, or didn't pay enough attention and need it summarized for us. I would suggest pairing this with Charles Ahearn's The Deadly Art of Survival, another movie that situates martial arts in pre-cleanup New York and features its share of ninja bullshit, although that one is surprisingly sincere about its belief that martial arts can better the community. (The star Nathan Ingram once received a medal from Ed Koch for foiling a bank robbery, so he seemed to practice what he preached.)

I chased this with a viewing of an earlier Liu directorial effort, Ninja in the Claws of the CIA AKA Made in China AKA Kung Fu Emmanuelle, a movie whose feverish incoherence makes New York Ninja seem downright classical in its storytelling. From what I could make out (and I confess some of the details escaped me), John Liu is hired by the CIA to train their operatives in martial arts (and of course, Liu had his own style, Zen Kwun Do) and then crosses them and escapes to Paris with his own secret heretofore unmentioned organization as the CIA tries to kill him. Also he has a twin brother (also played by Liu) who appears for one scene, disappears for 90% of the proceedings, and then *SPOILERS* is immediately machine-gunned to death when he makes his return. *END SPOILERS* There's definitely a Seagalian quality to the self-aggrandizing material, but the delivery feels like a direct transmission from the mind of a conspiracy nut who stayed up all night watching kung fu movies. How "good" this is I cannot say, but when Liu is fighting off a whiny little bitch played by Casanova Wong and ignoring a scantily clad female operative rubbing up against him at the same time, traditional standards of quality go out the window. (I assume that operative was the "Kung Fu Emmanuelle" of the alternate title. The version I watched trimmed out around twenty minutes from the runtime, which unless I hear other, will assume consisted entirely of more scenes of this character.) And of course, there are lots of great fights, the fruits of that frightening and intriguing "perverted crotch torture" that Grady Hendrix alluded to.

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Apropos of ninjas, I enjoy Sho Kosugi's movies. Particularly Revenge Of The Ninja and Pray For Death.

I haven't seen those two, but I enjoyed Enter the Ninja and especially Ninja III: The Domination, starring the great Lucinda Dickey.

I also like those films, but those two feature Kosugi in a secondary role and the middle two make him the star.
And, of course, I also love Ms. Dickey.

I just watched this. Fun stuff. Very much an Evil Dead fan film, and never as mean and unpredictable as the original, but finds a way to add its own distinct flavour when it's riffing on key moments. I suspect this would be fun to watch with a group. And at an hour or so long, you can't lose.

Good movie. Delivers what it promises (Sally Field in a Hawaiian shirt).

This is a movie about a woman in her thirties seducing a fifteen-year-old boy, and while I hate to use this word as it tends to by deployed by dumbest, most reductive movie watchers on the planet, it never acknowledges how problematic the subject matter is. There's a throwaway line referring to the illegality of the woman's actions, but ultimately the relationship is painted as wholesome and life-affirming. Which is expected as this is an '80s sex comedy and as such frames its premise as adolescent fantasy. Wouldn't it be awesome if you could make it with your super hot European maid Sylvia Kristel? And from that perspective, it offers a few minor surprises in that it (very gently) interrogates the scenario, with Kristel chiding the hero for obviously checking out her legs, and then having the hero awkwardly react when Kristel starts to make good on the fantasy. (When she invites him to her room and lets him watch her undress, he rushes out to tell his buddy what happened instead of going to bed with her.) And while sex crimes are de rigueur for '80s sex comedies (exhibit A: Revenge of the Nerds; exhibit B: also Revenge of the Nerds), one might appreciate that at least the hero isn't the one committing them here.

Now, on those terms, I will concede the movie is fairly successful, and much of the credit goes to Kristel. For a role that's basically a fantasy, I think she imbues it with a certain amount of humanity and warmth and manages to overcome the skeeviness of the central relationship. Kristel was best known for sexpot roles thank to the Emmanuelle series, and having seen the first one of those, I think she brings a similarly sympathetic presence, even if the character she plays here is more experienced than the one in the other movie. I'm looking at her Wikipedia page, and given all the near misses in her career (The Tenant, Once Upon a Time in America, Superman, The Hunger, a bunch of Bond movies), it's maybe a bit disappointing that she got typecast in this kind of material, although she manages to elevate it at least a little. Also, as a straight male and therefore the target audience for this movie, I found her quite attractive and will concede that the abundance of nudity (some of it courtesy of a body double, I learn from the Wikipedia page) is not entirely unwelcome. As this is a sex comedy, both of those work in the movie's favour.

Now, if it had just limited itself to that relationship, this might have been a sane if questionable movie, but that wouldn't be exciting enough. No, this has to stick in a blackmail plot orchestrated by the chauffeur Howard Hesseman (bringing a similarly sleazy charm as his role in Doctor Detroit; for all I know, he played the same character and switched jobs). There's a faked death, a missing body, a nosy detective played by Ed Begley Jr. and a car chase, all while the hero gets questionable advice from his dorky friend who keeps calling his sister April 1978 Playmate of the Month Pamela Jean Bryant a "creep" even though she's reacting perfectly normally to how freaking annoying he is. I will not pretend I know what made the filmmakers think any of this was a good idea, but I will also not pretend that I wasn't entertained. Probably the most intriguing read of the plot is that it suggests a kind of class warfare, the chauffeur and the maid scheming against a member of the upper class. This is basically Parasite, if that movie wanted you to unambiguously root for the rich and against the poors.

At this point I must clarify that the title refers to lessons in life and love, not actual book learnin' lessons. For that you'll have to turn to Gary Graver's Private Teacher, where Kay Parker helped Tom Byron overcome his shyness through the power of Shakespeare and fellatio. (Mostly fellatio. I'm a fan.) But the insane high point of the movie comes right at the end, when *MILD SPOILERS* the hero claims to have learned his lesson about pursuing girls appropriate for his age and asks out his foxy teacher played by home staging pioneer Meridith Baer, which is presented as a feel good ending. Only in the '80s.

Heh.
I've always had a soft-spot for this one.
How do you like your eggs?

Funny, just yesterday I watched Siskel & Ebert's contemporaneous evisceration of this one, one of them's Dog Of The Week, and I just had to chuckle. I always liked this movie, and not just for the titillation (I was fairly young when this hit HBO) but there was something else about it that felt mysterious and cool to me.

The heart wants what it wants (sexy European maid Sylvia Kristel).



I mean, the movie is pretty dumb so I'm not surprised that they dumped on it, but I dunno, I don't mind it's brand of dumbness, particularly when we get to hang out with Sylvia Kristel.

Like most people, I'd first "seen" Manos: The Hands of Fate through Mystery Science Theatre 3000, where among other things, the boys chided the movie for its endless driving scenes. Watching the movie proper, they're not exactly wrong, as there are plenty of driving scenes, which go on for far longer than they might "need" to. But I think that's part of the movie's charm. The early sections have the effect of watching somebody's home movies that they took on vacation, only there's something a little off about them, and that offness comes into focus as the movie progresses and the plot kicks in. I'm probably being a bit generous here, but I did enjoy watching these scenes, not just because the scenery looked nice enough, but because they allowed the movie to establish certain rhythms, only to upend them soon after. I watched this on a pretty nice transfer, which was certainly conducive to such pleasures. Say what you will about MST3K (I don't have the same history with them as some others, but I think they at least understand the movies they're making fun of and are actually clever and funny, unlike much of their YouTube progeny), but it's unlikely that this would be available in such a nice looking copy were it not for them showcasing the movie.

The closest comparison to this I can think of are the slashers of Ray Dennis Steckler, particularly Blood Shack, another movie that isn't terribly long but feels a lot longer and where we're stuck in the desert heat in one location and not a lot happens. The difference, if you can squint hard enough, is that Steckler seems to know how a conventional movie is supposed to move and has a basic understanding of craft, and what he "struggles" with is finding enough material to fill the runtime. (A good chunk of the movie is set at the rodeo, and we get to hang out with a pony named Peanuts.) The movie settles into a nice, sunburnt, zonked out, heat stroke vibe, sporadically interrupted by bursts of bloodletting to meet genre demands. Manos in contrast is a lot more unwieldy, shots framed with a tenuous grasp of symmetry and screen composition, arrythmically bringing each one to a close and knocking us into the next one. The movie jerks forward on its wobbly legs, as if it were about to tip over at any moment. If you graphed both movies, Blood Shack would be a relatively flattened curve, while Manos would be much choppier, like the output of a polygraph test.

That wobbliness is matched by its most memorable performance, John Reynolds as the satyr Torgo, who wobbles about on his bowed legs (the result of a rig he built himself) and delivers his lines like he'd been drinking heavily instead of memorizing his dialogue and seems to remember it a word at a time. (Apparently he was using LSD quite heavily during the production, which might explain things.) It's not a "good" performance, but it certainly makes an impact. And there's Tom Neyman as the Master, whose wives immediately start bickering and wrestling once he revives them. (I am not a polygamist, but I suspect the secret to a successful polygamist marriage is for not just you to get along with your spouses, but for your spouses to get along with each other. The latter does not seem to be the case here.) The wives all wear flowy white robes, which is a sure sign of quality cinema in my book. And there's the couple who seemingly makes out for several hours at the side of the road, and the cute dogs, to which the movie cuts whenever the energy level threatens to sag (so with some frequency). If the movie suffers in one key respect compared to Blood Shack, is that it lacks a sympathetic presence like Carolyn Brandt to ground the proceedings. The heroes here don't make much of an impact compared to the weirdness around them.

Manos was directed by insurance salesman Harold P. Warren, a first-time filmmaker who made the movie over a bit with Stirlling Silliphant, Oscar-winning screenwriter and student of Bruce Lee. Warren's film isn't polished by any measure, but the result is far stranger, like an transmission of an alien's approximation of a human movie, whose signal threatens to give out at any given moment. It's not "scary" by any real measure, but it creates its own off-kilter atmosphere that I enjoyed spending time in.

Nice review of Manos

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IMDb
Letterboxd

Muchas gracias.

I really need to watch Manos at some point.

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It's on Tubi.

That's why you should've joined the Hall of Infamy

When you call your movie My Name Called Bruce, one could reasonably expect a fair amount of Bruce in your movie. Not the real Bruce Lee, mind you, as he's dead. But a Bruce Lee imitator, given that the movie falls into the Bruceploitation genre. Alas, this movie fails to deliver on that simple level. The Bruce Lee clone here is Bruce Le, but his screentime is shockingly limited and he disappears for large chunks of the movie. Even worse, when he's onscreen, he doesn't even get to do all that much fun stuff. There are none of the tea-kettle-like kiai noises we know and love, none of the facial contortions that make him look like he's about to have a seizure. The sounds coming out of his mouth are normal and the expressions he uses are limited. He briefly sports a fake beard, similar to the disguise worn by the Bruce Lee imitator in Game of Death, but there's little of the Bruce Le magic otherwise. And before you ask, I don't think he's even called Bruce in this, despite what the title says.

Instead, the real star of the movie is a female cop. Who played this cop seems to be throwing me for a loop, as I see a few articles about the movie referring to her as Christina Cheung, but IMDb credits someone named Eu-Joo Im (and offers no such alias). For all I know they're the same person but I don't care to dig further. The point is, she has a pretty agreeable presence and makes you wish she were in a better movie, as the one here is a super-generic crime story about stolen antiques that I was forgetting as I was watching it. As a result, I may have tuned out a lot of the details, but it's the movie's fault and I am innocent of all charges. Aside from the fight scenes, the highlight of her appearance involves a scene where she wears a towel, and through the magic of editing, changes into a completely different outfit without letting the creepy guy she was with catch a peek. The movie is also spiced up by a reasonably funky soundtrack, including a piece that sounds suspiciously like "Gimme Some Lovin'", a song I will always associate with Iron Eagle, as the hero plays the tape as he proceeds to bomb fake Libya back to the stone age. (The movie is not known for enlightened views on foreign policy.) None of this has anything to do with My Name Called Bruce, I just wanted to talk about Iron Eagle.

It did not work in the movie's favour that I watched this on an abominable transfer, even by the standard of the less than pristine copies I've been watching most of these Bruceploitation movies on. (I'm not gonna knock the YouTube channels that posted these as I think they're doing good work, but I suspect a good DVD edition was never released for most of these movies in the first place. I remembering hearing rumours that one of the boutique Blu-ray labels was planning on releasing a Bruceploitation box set at one point, so I will likely grab that if it transpires.) There are a few scenes in darkened environments that, were I feeling more generous might suggest have an unintentional avant garde quality, but will more soberly note are just very hard to decipher. I will say that the version I watched was around twenty minutes shorter than the runtime listed on Letterboxd, but I'd wager that a longer runtime would not benefit the movie.

As for the fight scenes, most of them are watchable enough but lack enough inspiration to make an impact, especially as the villains are defined only in the loosest, most generic terms. The movie uses a fair bit of slow motion in capturing the heroine in these fight scenes, meaning that we get a lot of her hair fluttering in the wind in slow motion, and I admit I was not immune to her charms in these moments. (The heart wants what it wants.) The movie picks up in the final fifteen-to-twenty minutes when we get a fight scene where Le fends off a few baddies while blindfolded and tied up, then the heroine chases after the main baddie on motorcycle then on foot, and then we get a final showdown between her and the baddie, with Le briefly stepping in. The metamorphosis of the chase isn't quite as inspired as a similar one in The Heroin Busters (which has an all-time great climax), but is still quite a bit of fun. The final fight alas fumbles the opportunity for a two-on-one confrontation, but I suppose it would look bad if the Bruce Lee impersonator needed help in a fight. Even though the heroine ends up stepping back in at the last moment.

But yeah, twenty fun minutes, mostly at the end. Dull as shit otherwise.

Not to be confused with...

I don't remember anybody with a cowboy hat in the movie.