Movie review: ‘Enter the Ninja’

FloridaGator80

The 1970s and 1980s were chock-full of films that focused on the martial arts and, of course, Bruce Lee and his seminal “Enter the Dragon” from 1973 remains the gold standard even today (click here for my review). However, it was the 1980s that benefited the most from an explosion of martial arts in cinema and a majority of those films stink, but, in some ways, are worth watching today simply because they’re so bad but have … well, martial arts and martial arts weapons. “Enter the Ninja” with Franco Nero from 1981 was at the vanguard of the “ninja” genre and it gained cult status over the years. Check it out, it’s not a complete waste of time.

‘Enter the Ninja’
(1981; 99 minutes; rated R; directed by Menahem Golan and starring Franco Nero, Susan George, Sho Kosugi and Christopher George)

A BAD MARTIAL ARTS FILM WITH CULT STATUS

In “Enter the Ninja,” you’ll find many scenes of martial arts moves, nunchaku, a “butterfly” knife, samurai katana (swords), shuriken (throwing stars), masked Ninja fighters and other exotic weapons including a blow-gun. However, you won’t find much in the way of thespian talent. “Enter the Ninja” suffers from awful performances by the actors, the director, the martial arts choreographer and even the stunt men doing the moves. Still, you shouldn’t give up on “Enter the Ninja” – especially since it makes a turn for free on some streaming services.

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“Enter the Ninja,” like many of its contemporaries, tries to infuse the audience with an exotic mysticism of Asian martial arts and, in this specific case, the Ninja of Japan. You get treated to extended scenes of martial arts action with fighting as well as weapons. In the end, though, you don’t get exceptional martial arts and the story and the filmmaking has a very thin veneer. Heck, they even dubbed headliner Franco Nero’s voice because he couldn’t do a Texan accent (his character “Cole” is from the Lone Star state).

If you can manage to put all that aside, make sure you check out the film because it tries to accomplish what almost all martial arts films have at their heart: The good overcoming the bad; the right overcoming the wrong; and the honorable winning out over the evil. “Enter the Ninja” pushes a failing effort in trying to convey any of those dynamics.

Of course, the story of “Enter the Ninja” is malnourished and totally familiar:

An American, who is a martial arts specialist, visits a friend; the friend is having trouble with bad guys; the hero comes to the rescue of the friend and the friend’s wife; the friend is killed; the wife kidnapped; and Nero has to dispatch just about every bad guy to save the lady and restore order.

The details don’t really matter much, such as the film is primarily set in the Philippines after starting in Japan or that you see a couple of cockfights and the bad guys have a lot of assault rifles that don’t help them against ninja tactics.

Actually, the details don’t matter because the thin storyline is just a thread to bring you to each of the martial arts fight scenes. The scenes themselves lack the style and verve of Brue Lee’s movies, few flicks can come close to the standard set by Lee. The martial arts put on display in “Enter the Ninja” are a bit mechanical, but you get a bunch of martial arts weapons and you won’t lose interest.

Now, let me take a look at some of the cast …

  • A Golden Globe nominee (certainly not for this one), Nero is stoic in this one because his character is obviously not frivolous. However, he should have been able to inject more than just a grimace or two here and there in the film. Since his voice is dubbed, its difficult to judge his true acting talent and the only other film in which I’ve seen him is “Force 10 from Navarone” and that one stinks just as bad, if not worse, than “Enter the Ninja.” Franco has been incredibly prolific in TV and films with 226 acting credits spanning seven decades since the first in 1961 (and he has 13 more upcoming as of January 2023). He was nominated in 1968 for New Star of the Year for “Camelot” from 1967 with Richard Harris.
  • Alex Courtney plays “Frank Landers” and is the doomed friend who Nero tries to help. Like all the others, Courtney doesn’t do much of a job in both establishing or elevating his character. At least he offers a better range of emotion than anyone else in the film, but Courtney’s performance is forced and offers little more than a way to convey what passes for a back-story about Nero. Courtney has been in interesting films such as “And the Band Played On” about the early days of the AIDS crisis (click here for my review) and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” with Diane Keaton and Richard Gere. Courtney has been in a variety of episodes on popular TV series from his first acting credit in “Get Christie Love” to “McMillan and Wife” to “The Bionic Woman,” “Starsky and Hutch” and “The Paper Chase.”
  • Susan George also gives a forced performance as “Mary-Ann Landers” that, while basically incompetent, fits this film perfectly. She tries to be tough, but winds up the typical lady in distress who is rescued by the hero. Susan George at least tries and I guess that counts for something. I liked her better in the car chase cult favorite “Dirty Mary Crazy Larry” and she’s been in films as varied from serious drama such as “Straw Dogs” with Dustin Hoffman and directed by Sam Peckinpah to oddities such as “Mandingo” and “Kiss My Grits.” Like Nero, her career has spanned seven decades with the first in 1962, but she has 67 acting credits to his 226.
  • A Golden Globe nominee (not for this one), Christopher George, who is not related to Susan George, does a very bad, nervous job of playing the always-agitated “Charles Venarius,” who is the baddest of the bad guys. It’s too bad the screenwriter made this character so one dimensional – it’s impossible to understand why he’s always choleric and a verbal bully, not just when an incident demands it. Still, Christopher George doesn’t work his character well, but I guess he does as good a job as a bad movie will allow. George is best known for the World War II television series “The Rat Patrol” and he earned his nomination for it. He was a friend of screen legend John Wayne and was in the classic westerns “El Dorado” and “Chism” with Wayne and was also in iconic series such as “Bewitched,” “Love, American Style,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Fantasy Island,” “Charlie’s Angels” and four episodes of my personal favorite: “The Love Boat” (click here for my look at the kitschy series). Sadly, George died youngish at 52 of a heart attack two years after “Enter the Ninja” – see notes at the end of this review for more details of his death.
  • Shô Kosugi plays “Hasegawa” and he hates “Cole” because “Cole” is not Japanese and learned to be a ninja. Of course, this conflict figures at the end of the film (the middle, too). Like others, Kosugi has no chance to elevate his character and you don’t get much of a chance to see his acting ability, even though Kosugi’s character gets a nice emotional part at the end. Kosugi has 19 acting credits with the first in 1974 and the last in 2009. Most are martial arts films but the two most well-known names has him in uncredited crowd scenes in “The Godfather: Part II” and “The Bad News Bears Go to Japan.”
  • Constantine Gregory plays “Mr. Parker” (he was listed as Constantin de Goguel in the credits) and does the best job in this one – and that’s damning with faint praise. “Mr. Parker” is the stiff-upper-lip British aide to Christopher George and does an acceptable job complete with his ending one-liner of “but, sir …” after being shot by his boss. Gregory is another actor in the cast with a career spanning seven decades and his first of 134 was in 1967 on a TV series and he was credited as de Goguel – which he used as a stage name until the year after “Enter the Ninja.” Gregory has been in 2012’s “Kon-Tiki,” “The Russia House,” the Tom Cruise movie “Mission: Impossible” and the 007 effort “GoldenEye” (click here for my review).
  • Zachi Noy plays “Siegfried ‘The Hook’ Schultz” and does the best job of anyone in the cast after Gregory. Unfortunately, he’s playing a vile, nasty yet obsequious bad guy who snivels his way from one scene to another and its sad that such a worm of a role offers one of the best characterizations in the film. Noy hasn’t been in anything else you’ve ever seen, so I’ll move on to the next actor now …

If you are looking for character development, then you probably need to find a film in a different genre of cinema. There’s really nothing about “Enter the Ninja” that speaks to character development and no one should really mind.

I couldn’t find any box office ranking in 1981 for “Enter the Ninja.” Wiki reports that it made $15 million, but that’s not reflected on either Box Office Mojo or The Numbers websites of top movies for that year. The top three films of the year were “Superman II,” “Stripes” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Neither of the websites above can agree on which was top money-maker and the studio has renamed “Raiders” as “Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Ah well, pathetic is as pathetic will be in Hollywood. Here are the films from 1981 that I’ve reviewed for my blog:

Assorted cast and film notes (via IMDb.com):

  • “Enter the Ninja” has no spoken dialog in the first 13 minutes of the film.
  • The film’s producers decided on using “Enter” in the title because of the success of Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon.”
  • Nero had no martial arts training, so Mike Stone, who wrote the story and choreographed the martial arts scenes, was his double.
  • “Enter the Ninja” was the second successful film of the 1980s to influence the sub-genre of “ninja” flicks after Chuck Norris’ “The Octagon” in 1980 (click here for my review).
  • Directly from IMDb.com: “Even though (Christopher George) was a heavy drinker and frequent smoker of cigars both on and off camera, his fatal 1983 heart attack stemmed from a 1/4/67 mishap on the set of The Rat Patrol (1966). While filming a chase scene, George’s jeep flipped over, pinning him beneath the vehicle. He sustained a concussion as well as a muscle tear to his neck and chest which included a cardiac contusion. The injury to his heart never properly healed and scar tissue subsequently developed on his heart.”
  • I used the accented “ô” in part of the review as it is how Shô Kosugi spells his name. I used a conventional “o” once in this review so his name can be found by search engines – the accented character is sometimes missed by search engines. Kosugi’s name was spelled with the conventional “o” for “Enter the Ninja.”
  • Gregory is the actor’s second stage name after de Goguel. His birth name is Constantine Liebert (sometimes spelled Leebaert). He has a Dutch father and a Russian mother.
  • Finally and directly from IMDb.com: “Menahem Golan said of this movie after being asked about this film kick-starting a ninja craze: ‘It started when Chinese karate films became popular. I looked for something new in Asian martial arts and found information about the Ninja culture in an encyclopedia. The Ninja were middle-class people in Japan–lawyers, government clerks, etc. It was a secret organization that helped the feudal government. It actually preceded the Chinese karate battles. They used very special methods, developing their sixth sense. That fascinated me and I said I could write story ideas out of it, so we made ‘Enter the Ninja’ and American Ninja (1985) later on. Many imitations followed.’”

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