In Enter the Ninja, her character is introduced with a shotgun in hand, defending her husband and their home. She ends the film with a shotgun in hand, defending her husband and helping to defend their home.
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She had a wild sexual desire that he couldn’t or didn’t know how to fulfill. In that film, she played a promiscuous female frustrated with her husband’s focus on his work instead of her. Her character is interesting to me given that I just watched her in a similar role in Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Susan George plays the lead female character, the wife of Nero’s war buddy. Honestly, he does a lot better than I expected him too, but I’d just rather see someone else in the role.
Franco Nero holds his own as a pseudo martial artist, but I much prefer him dragging around a coffin than high-kicking henchmen in a Filipino bar. Thankfully, Sho Kosugi is fucking awesome every time he’s on-screen, but unfortunately he’s only in the opening and most of the finale. Even with the expectations removed, it’s a bad action film and one that has few saving graces. It’s boring through most of this section and while the intro promises tons of badass ninja action, it never truly delivers. “Wow, everyone tried to steer me wrong!” I thought to myself.Īfter this sequence though, the film quickly becomes your standard 80s “little man fights for his home against the wealthy landowner who’ll stop at nothing to acquire it.” This is all well and good, I’m always down for some fun 80s clichés, but Enter the Ninja is just bad. From backflips out of trees and slow-motion jumps off of waterfalls, this sequence has everything a ninja fan could want. What follows is a thrilling chase sequence with the white ninja doing his best to thwart the murderous intent of the black ninja and his team of skilled secondary ninjas in red. After an exciting opening credits with ninjas displaying their martial skill against a stark, black background, the film begins with a ninja clad in white going toe-to-toe with another ninja all in black. The opening ninjutsu sequence is easily the best ten minutes in the entire film. I honestly didn’t pay too close of attention to his motives.
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There he finds a wealthy landowner looking to steal his friend’s land out from under him, presumably to build some high-rise apartments or to farm heroin or some other clichéd 80s action movie shit. A rivalry forms but just as you think it might be going somewhere awesome, Nero leaves Japan to hang out with his old war buddy in Manila. Whatever, he’s a ninja and Sho Kosugi, another student at the school, objects to Nero’s inclusion in the sacred order. Ninja, but I have no factual evidence of this.
I do like to theorize that because of his involvement, somewhere in the world this film was screened under the title Django vs. Yes, that’s the same Franco Nero that starred in Django and Camelot, and no, I don’t quite understand the logic in casting him as a ninja. As a completionist, I scoffed at these suggestions and soldiered on, receiving a film just about as good as I was led to believe it would be.įranco Nero plays Cole, an American war veteran who has spent the last few years training to become a ninja.
It’s been much too long since I watched an 80s ninja flick, so I decided to remedy that with the first film in the unofficial Ninja trilogy featuring Sho Kosugi! Perhaps this wasn’t the best choice to make, as I’d heard from a couple of different sources that this first film is one that can easily be skipped and I would be much better served by the much more famous pseudo-sequel Revenge of the Ninja. Starring Franco Nero, Susan George, Sho Kosugi, Christopher George, Alex Courtney, Will Hare, Zachi Noy, Constantine Gregory, Dale Ishimoto, Joonee GamboaĮxpectations: High, but tempered because I’ve heard this is dumb.