Netflix Deep Cuts: Enter the Ninja

"What about my Lemonade?"

Welcome, dear reader, to the first instalment in a new series of what i'm tentatively calling Netflix Deep Cuts. Something I (along with many others to be fair) have noticed is that Netflix has got some weird crap in it's film library that has no real reason to be there. Seriously, they want to remove Bonnie and Clyde but they keep bloody Suicide Squad? So if they're going to keep all this stuff up there, then i'm going to watch it and see if it should be there. Because my opinion apparently has more weight than theirs.

First on the chopping block? 1981's Enter the Ninja, directed by the late-great legend Menahem Golan. For the uninitiated, Golan was a veritable god of cheap genre pictures during the late-seventies through the eighties, along with his cousin Yoram Globus. The two of them turned out some absolute masterpieces of shlock as both directors and producers, including the legendary Tough Guys Don't Dance (which I promise i'll get to some day). Hell, Golan directed Superman IV: The Quest for Peace for crying out loud! Thats what were dealing with here, and I love it.

So, onto Enter the Ninja. Based on a story written by American Martial Artist Mike Stone (who currently live on an isolated island in the Philippines with his third wife, in case you were wondering) and starring Italian Actor Franco Nero (the original Django, small world eh?) as Cole, a hairy chested forever scowling ninja. After we see him running around in and out of frame for 11 minutes periodically throwing smoke grenades and nearly cutting a mans nose off, he gains his “Ninja license” and sets out to Manila to mooch off his old friend Frank and his new wife Mary Ann, who seems to have a crippling allergy to wearing bras. And it isn't long before Cole comes face to face with the criminal underworld of Manilla, made up entirely of villainous Europeans who take orders from Mr Venarius with his poolside office filled with vaguely sexual water aerobics practitioners.

You see, Frank has a coconut plantation, Venarius wants that plantation, but Frank won't sell because Mary Ann likes living there. So Venarius dispatches goon squads to menace his workers. After one to many face kicks and straight up murders by Cole, Venarius hires his own Ninja, Hasegawa, a fellow graduate from Coles Ninja School. Hasegawa runs around giggling and setting fire to things and kills Frank and kidnaps Mary Ann, who Cole has been doing the nasty with on the sly for a few days at this point. Cole goes full revenge mode and kills Mr Venarius and Hasegawa before saving Mary Ann. And then he just packs up all his kit and leave Manila for some place else.

The first thing you should know about this film is that it is shot in about three months on a low budget, and it shows. The framing is laughable, with characters literally hiding out of frame and running in and out constantly . The actual camera work is surprisingly well done, so credit to the poor saps who had to carry them around. The fight choreography is abysmal. Every hit feels like a half hearted slap or is unintentional comedy, I broke out laughing at everything except the jokes throughout the whole affair. The acting? Sufficient, but severely lacking (accept for Zachi Noy as Siegfried, the hook handed “sonofabitch”). And the plot? So bloody boring. This film could have been a romp through the whole Ninja genre but it just feels like a dull and half-arsed. You can see that the supposed Ninja school is just a pagoda in a park somewhere. You can see office buildings and pedestrians in one shot for crying out loud. This film shouldn't be boring, nothing about its base ingredients should lead it to be boring. But the big man Golan bunted this one, and it comes out as a sort of no substance B-picture.

So onto the big and important question. Should, in my humblest of opinions, be allowed to stay on Netflix? In short? Hell no. It's not a good Ninja movie and it's not bad enough to be enjoyed ironically. It's bland as a plate of unseasoned Tofu. So this one deserves to be dumped and maybe be replaced by some of Golan's finer works. I did however, learn something from this film that I will take with me until my dying day. In the works of the great scholar Frank: “Lemonade? That stuff'll kill you Cole!”