Rage of Honor

This movie had won me over before I even watched it.  Look at that DVD cover!  There is a ninja dropping several stories (or, I suppose, the building could be rapidly erupting from the ground while the ninja jumps) with a helicopter in the background.  Awesome!  And what a great title!  Rage of Honor: it says "I have principles and standards that elevate me above most men, and am filled with an all-consuming fury because of it."  How can you go wrong with a movie like this?  Oh.  Sho Kosugi is the star.  Surely, even his poor command of the English language cannot derail a movie as promising as this, right?  ...Right?

The movie opens with Shiro Tanaka (Sho Kosugi) and his partner, Ray, cleverly blending in on a drug lord's party yacht by posing as waiters.  When the opportune moment arrives, look out --- it's a drug bust, courtesy of the DEA!  No...?  I guess somebody in the government didn't want the public to know how they do business, so the drug enforcement agency in this movie is the Drug Investigation Bureau.  Anyway, it's an in-your-face extreme bust, thanks to the notorious DIB!  Man, those drug lords are so confident in Miami...wait...that's not Miami.  That's Buenos Aires!  Um...so the movie starts with an American drug agency making a bust in Argentinian waters?  You know, reading it summarized in one sentence makes that sounds completely reasonable.

When Shiro and Ray (with the help of one other guy, from the looks of it) make their move, Shiro's first action is to walk halfway up some stairs and stick his gun muzzle right between the buttocks of the guy standing at the top of the stairs.  Remarkably, the guy with a gun centimeters from ruining his rectum does not follow orders when told to freeze.  Actually, nobody freezes.  That's when Shiro breaks out a DIB agent's best friend: the shuriken.  Shiro shoots some baddies and shurikens a few more in the face, but one guy tries to escape!  The nerve of some people!  Come take your shuriken to the face like a man!  This is where Shiro's extensive DIB training becomes important.  He follows the department manual to a tee: he jumps off the pleasure yacht, does a triple flip, and lands in a civilian boat that happens to be passing by at the time (apparently, gunfire just made them curious).  Shiro kicks the driver in the face, throws him out of the boat and chases the escaping (presumed) felon.  When guns don't stop the bad guy, a shuriken to the face does, and the boat hits something and explodes.  Just like in the DIB manual.  Back on shore, as Shiro and Ray mop up the remaining bad guys and bring them into custody (whose?  I'm not sure...), their boss shows up (in Argentina!) and gives them some BS about "blah blah blah police force in foreign nations blah blah blah."

And that's just the first scene!  The rest of the movie has the Argentinean drug lord (who is white, wears white pants at all times with a scarf, and maintains a proud curly mullet) track down Shiro and Ray.  Well, Ray tracks down a drug hideout and infiltrates it without backup.  Not because he's stupid, but because Siro was on a date that night.  Ray is murdered and Shiro vows to avenge his death.  This involves Shiro and his girlfriend (one of about thirty worn-out blondes in this movie) traveling to Buenos Aires to take on the evil drug lord in the jungle.  Of Argentina.  A country that is normally jungle-free.

Some of the more noteworthy bits of awesome knowledge dropped in this fine example of Lefty Gold cinema:

• Somersaults and flips are apparently bulletproof
• The best way to disguise yourself is to adjust your collar and shift your eyes frequently
• The DIB has its base in the political hotbed of Washington, DC Phoenix, Arizona
• Shiro's jerky behavior is explained away as a symptom of his Japanese upbringing.  That's not racist, it's just a fact of life
• The best parties feature homoerotic Swiss cowboys doing exhibitions.  But you already knew that
• Local news programs report on the progress of two-passenger planes traveling internationally
• The heaviest flow of illegal drugs in the Western Hemisphere is from Buenos Aires to Phoenix, Arizona
• Running through the jungle does not make your clothes sweaty or dirty
• Argentina apparently grew a jungle
• Indigenous tribesmen in the jungle hide in the shadows, using fluorescent body paint to blend in
• Ninjas jumping out of helicopters always have camouflage ninja suits

There's more, but I'm going to save them for my thesis paper."So, how was the movie?"  Poorly acted, ineptly directed by Gordon Hessler, probably written in crayon, and absolutely ridiculous.  As a film, this is a stupid one, even for Sho Kosugi.  It deserves worse, but it's actually kind of fun.

But as pure entertainment, it rates a bit higher because, while bad, it's not painful.  The action is frequent and the oddities in the film are so numerous that you don't even have to pay attention to notice some.  As Lefty Gold, I give Rage of Honor

Pray For Death

When you look closely at this movie poster, one question comes to mind: why do ninjas wear guyliner?  The answer, of course, is style.  Deadly style.

Many years ago, a young man named Akira (Sho Kosugi) was being raised as a ninja in a secret ninja temple.  One night, he interrupts another ninja from stealing something ninja-esque from the temple.  You can guess what happens next.  They hash out their differences over some herbal tea and a bowl of noodles.  They fight.  The masked ninja has a sword, so Akira grabs a torch holder.  They fight for a little bit, flipping and diving all over the place, until the masked ninja finally disarms Akira and stabs him through the heart cuts his head off throws his sword at the now helpless do-gooder.  He misses, although he threw it hard enough to stick in a two-foot wide wooden pole and have the sword tip sticking out the back (impressive!).  The masked ninja then trips and falls onto the sword, killing himself (less impressive!).  The masked ninja was Akira's brother.  Gasp.  And Akira felt so guilty that he hid his ninja past from the world, later becoming a respected businessman, husband and father.

And that's just the back story!  As an adult, Akira and his family (who speak English all the time, like all Japanese people) move to America and buys a storefront with living quarters for his family in the back.  This storefront has been out of business for years, and local mobsters have taken to hiding loot under the floorboards in part of the building.  When the mobsters arrange for some valuable jewels to be stolen and hidden in the storefront, the jewels get stolen; a crooked cop on the mob's payroll decides --- oh, what do you care?  The point is that the mob targets Akira's family, killing his wife and kidnapping one of his two sons.  Uh-oh...when Akira busts out his ninja moves, these baddies had better pray!  ...For death!

If you are unfamiliar with Sho Kosugi, then you have watched far fewer 80s ninja movies than I have.  Sho was in a slew of B-movie (or worse) quality pictures for about ten years, beginning in 1983.  His acting style can be described as wooden, but you wouldn't want to leave it that vague; soft woods, like pine, are far more expressive than Sho.  When you add little to no acting skill to a gruff voice and thick Japanese accent (yep, the stereotypical one where Ls become Rs), you get two things.  One, you get the only Asian actor that bothered to make (American) ninja movies in the 80s.  Two, you get some of the least convincing romantic subplots since the Death Wish series.

As far as the acting goes, this is one of Sho's better efforts.  It's not good, mind you, but he at least makes an effort here.  There's a montage (it's the 80s, of course there is!) where Sho is training to take down the mobsters and he caps it off by breaking a necklace and pouring water all over himself...in slow motion.  While that scene failed to convey grief or anything but a vague sense of irritation, it was light years beyond what I've seen him do in other films.  The supporting cast isn't particularly notable.  Kane Kosugi, an occasional supporting cast member in bad martial arts films and (not coincidentally) Sho's son, gets an early role here as (wait for it...) one of Akira's sons.  The film's villain, Limehouse Willie, is played by the screenwriter, James Booth.  Booth is as good of an actor as he is a writer (he wrote American Ninja 2: The Confronatation, as well), both of which are nothing when you compare them to his skill for naming characters.  Limehouse Willie?  That's awesome; I think I just figured out what my Halloween costume is this year.  With this much acting talent, you would think that this was Gordon Hessler's finest moment as a director.  It's up there, sure, but he has worked with a lot of talented people over the years, so this might be his third-best work.

Are there some awesome moments in this movie?  Absolutely.  Some bad guys get shurikens in their skulls, others get slashed by a katana blade, and still others collapse after receiving a clearly non-fatal hit.  The best moment has to be when one of Akira's kids breaks out his tricked-out bicycle, complete with weapons like a smoke screen, blow dart, nunchucks, and a testicle basher --- it's a ninjacycle!  And while the ninjacycle was clearly the greatest invention of the 1980s, it just isn't enough to overcome the stupidity of this movie.

The stupidity starts with the conflict.  Why would anyone hide valuables in a stranger's house and then get mad at the owner of the house when the valuables go missing?  If I find twenty bucks in my winter jacket pocket, I'm not going to leave it there; found valuables are the sweetest kind.  That could just be a difference of philosophy, so I'll leave it alone.  But these bad guys stake out Akira's house and every time they do it, they park in front of a fire hydrant.  Every time.  Way to keep a low profile, geniuses.

The main reason anyone would ever want to see this movie is to see some serious ninja skills, right?  Well, that's not the case here.  I would say that about a third of the ninja sequences are edited so you miss the most impressive parts.  For example, if there is a ninja-powered leap being shown, you see the lift off, then there's an edit, and then you see the landing; the edit implies that the guy jumped over a semi truck or something equally unrealistic.  This is a constant problem with Sho Kosugi movies.  I have no doubt that, in real life, Sho is a trained martial artist.  As his fellow karate master, Steven Seagal, can attest to, those skills don't always translate to the big screen.  As a result, a movie that should be pure dumb fun with ninja skills frequently on display ends up being a very dumb movie with some guy wearing black pajamas practicing karate kicks.  The ninjacycle was pretty awesome, though.

Ninja Assassin

Every so often, a movie lets you know whether or not you will like it within the first five minutes.  If you like seeing people being sliced into bits with ridiculous amounts of obviously CGI blood on the screen, then this movie is for you.  If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, then perhaps you shouldn't watch a movie with the words "ninja" and "assassin" in the title.  Speaking of the which, I'm pretty sure the working title was *Redundant Ninja Redundant*. 

The lead in this movie is Korean pop star Rain, known for his brief time as Stephen Colbert's nemesis

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as well as his role in the movie Saibogujiman Kwenchana, which translates into "I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK."  Oh Asia, how amusingly random you are.  There are other actors in this movie, with such diverse talent as Rick Yune (The Fast and the Furious) and Sung Kang (The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift).  The real talent on display though, is the violence.  This might be the most gratuitous use of stylistic violence since Riki-Oh: the Story of Ricky.  To put it another way, this movie is so ridiculously over-the-top violent that, when Rain does some sweet moves and completely cuts a man in half, you won't stop to rewind it because you just know something even bigger will happen in a few minutes.  I have to say that this film embraces ridiculous violence with more joy than any new release in years; the amount of blood makes even Kill Bill: Volume 1 look realistic.  It's not a huge surprise, coming from director James McTeigue (V For Vendetta), but it is a pleasant one.

What?  You want a plot?  It's called Ninja Assassin!  What do you expect, a script by a Hugo Award winner?  Well, that's what you get from two-time winner and top-tier comic book writer J. Michael Straczynski.  Apparently, JMS opted to forget about his writing history when co-writing this script, but it does have about half of the movie (45 minutes) devoted to plot development.  Apparently, ninja clans kidnap orphans and raise them to be ninjas.  Training to be a ninja isn't much fun.  Frowny face emoticon!  In some states, it might even border on child abuse.  Rain decides to rebel, which means killing his entire clan.  Of course it does.  There are some British people that act as point of view characters, but they are ultimately disposable.  Unfortunately, they manage to get the British military involved, so there is a scene where ninjas fight tanks and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare-esque ground troops without the benefit of shadows.  That sucks.  But it's the only action scene that doesn't fully deliver.

What do you get with this movie?  About 45 minutes or so of super violent death and dismemberment.  Sure, there's a plot, but it's not important.  Go make some popcorn or go on a beer run (just don't leave until the first scene is over).  By the time you're done, things will be just about ready to rock.  Sure, they needlessly lengthen the movie by shoehorning a plot into it, but this is a film that knows exactly what it is (Hollywood pitch: "Ninjas kill stuff --- the movie!") and delivers with a smile.  I just wish the whole movie was as totally awesome as the opening scene.