Director: Emmett Alston
Writer: Emmett Alston
From: Cult Cinema
A special anti-terror taskforce is sent to rescue a busload of hostages taken by an ex-Nazi drug-running terrorist cult leader.
I feel like I could just describe this movie by saying, “1985,” and be done with it. Spike Shinobi, Steve Gordon, and Jennifer Barnes are DART, an elite anti-terror squad that works for someone… somewhere? I’ll admit to being fuzzy on that element since the opening is Spike and Steve infiltrating what is either a Mujahideen camp or a foreign US Army base. To be fair, in 1985, the two are synonymous. Spike and Steve manage to bomb the hell out of the place and then some general shows up, calls a halt to it, and praises the DART team for showing what they can do. So are they mercenaries?
Who cares? Because a terrorist leader has been arrested and is being held in the Philippines. The drug cartel run by Alby the Cruel and his second, Honey Hump and her all-female warrior brigade, plan to break him out of jail by taking a busload of tourists hostage. Alby, of course, is a former Nazi. Also, he’s a wheelchair-user and has a pet monkey in a diaper. Because why not add more?!
My notes at this point read, “A TERRORIST PLOT TO BREAK EVIL LEADER OUT BY HOLDING A BUSLOAD OF TOURISTS HOSTAGE ON AN ACTIVE VOLCANO! THIS IS HOW THE 80’S SAY FUCK YEAH!”
Unfortunately the energy drops pretty quickly after that point. The volcano never even comes up again.
The movie has some good craziness: the hostages are taken by the terrorists disguising themselves as a wedding party, and the actor playing Alby (the father of Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) camps it up delightfully. The problem is the movie never holds its very few elements together. We have DART, the terrorists, and the hostages. Only the hostages disappear from the movie relatively early only to, surprise, still be part of this movie at the end. Also, DART is pretty terrible at their job. They spend most of the movie investigating the terrorists, but the leads go nowhere and it’s really only by chance that they find the villains’ base at the end.
I could put in a good word for Shô Kosugi here, although I don’t need to (because he’s Shô Kosugi). He plays Spike, the only active member of DART in contrast to smirking incompetent white guy and literally-reading-the-script white girl. Kosugi has nearly all the action sequences and, since he choreographed them, they do all right. It’s just that none of them matter to the story. When he eventually faces off with the big terrorist who they let out of jail, the terrorist literally stops a bullet with his bare hands.
If you’re movie’s a cartoon, nothing has any consequence.
Anyway, the terrorist is released because DART can’t do their job. They try to follow him, lose him, and then eventually learn where the villains’ base is. They go in, Kosugi fights some ninjas (who’ve been absent from the film since a flashback early on), save the hostages, and don’t get the villains.
Yeah, they don’t get the bad guys in the final climatic fight. Instead, the villains come to the place where DART is hanging out to try to get revenge, but it’s a trap. The villains are caught without a fight and Alby gets trampled by horses in a polo match when he tries to escape. THE END.
I feel like I’m enjoying this movie more writing about it than I did watching it. My notes include the lines, “We Rented a Helicopter: The Movie,” and, “Maimi Connection meets Rambo fight sequences,” which sounds like a formula for a good-bad movie. However, Nine Deaths of the Ninja is mostly boring.
The movie feels either like a pilot for a tv-action series or a movie cut together from several episodes of said series. The events never wholly follow one to the other. Plus, tonally it’s all over the place. For a taste, just watch the opening credits. 80’s torch song over interpretive dance and sword practice in a smoke-filled void. The movie purports to be a ninja-action flick.
So, despite the occasional moments of exuberant madness, I have to recommend giving this movie a pass. It starts strong and then gets real boring real quick. If I can clarify how badly the movie misses its mark, it stars Shô Kosugi but tries to make the white people matter. You have Shô Kosugi. I don’t care about anyone else. Also, I would never care about Tad and Muffy or whatever the hell their names are. “Steve Gordon and Jennifer Barnes”? My fake white names are less white.
Fist of the B-List did a write-up of this movie for their Ninja-vember as well, and, as always, describe it with style and erudition. Furthermore, they hit on several points I didn’t mention due to space. I recommend reading their review more than I recommend watching the movie itself.
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