I highly recommend tooling around the excellent Wrong Side of the Art poster archive, particularly the martial arts section. You come across oldies but goodies like this Chuck Norris classic: NOW, from the same site, take a look at this … Continued
The 1957 Toei FX romp Ninjutsu Gozen-Jiai (aka Torawakamaru, the Koga Ninja) is the perfect example of the pre-60’s craze kid’s ninja film: mischievous wizard hero, evil sorcerer, spirit-creatures fighting in the clouds, etc and so forth. Before the real … Continued
NINJA ASSASSIN… It goes wrong in the very title. “Assassin.” Can we get past this notion of the ninja cult of hired assassins? Some historians question if there ever was a documented assassination in Japan reliably credited to a shinobi … Continued
It takes 100 ninja to properly celebrate the 100th post on Vintage Ninja! Since going live in June, enthusiastic response from readers and thousands of visits from every continent on the globe have given me a real sense of connecting … Continued
I absolutely adore 60’s animated movie credits, and these somewhat DePatie-esque panels from the opening of the 1965 ninja comedy Furai Ninpocho are just great. The rest of the movie, despite a good cast (including Mie Hama of You Only Live … Continued
If you haven’t seen them, don’t dismiss low-brow Thai/HK exploitation flicks like Challenge of the Lady Ninja (aka Chinese Super Ninjas II) or Deadly Life of a Ninja as mere crap. They are BRILLIANT CRAP – utterly BAT-SHIT, full of … Continued
While the Sonny Chiba / Japan Action Club TV series is more widely known, it was the really strange 1979/80 film Kage no Gundan: Hattori Hanzo by Eiichi Kudo that started the Shadow Warriors ball rolling. Yeah… strange… a real head … Continued
Via The Scandy Factory: great scan of the VHS clamshell packaging from Ninja Kids – which was an edited-down single film version of the three-part Hong Kong ninja-sploitation epic otherwise known as Ninja Death and most recently Venom of the … Continued
Yesterday we looked at the early 70’s TV sword-girl standout Saori – whose taut legs and exposed athletic thighs were obviously secondary concerns to her self-accomplished heroism, kick-ass attitude in a man’s world, and defiance to the salacious agendas of … Continued
As a post Halloween bonus, we’re going to honor the Latin world’s Dia de los Muertos with a look at some skull-masked shinobi. MONSTERS AND MASKS month has been sadly bereft of our beloved Sword Girls, too, so we’ll wrap … Continued