I boot up the old Roku last weekend, and HEY! Look at all this new ninja stuff streaming!
Ninja Kamui is currently on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block, and Netflix’s House of Ninjas has dropped. And while I really don’t like the almost-comically dark and gritty look of the new FX/Hulu take on Shogun, but I’m always there for a Hiroyuki Sanada lead role, and there should be a ninja scene or two. But obviously my heart lies in the VINTAGE, and increasingly the Roku or laptop just cannot address my vintage ninja needs like my increasingly packed-to-the-rafters disc shelves can. And from the looks of things, I’m not going to stop buying physical media any time soon.
As experimental motorcars and “horseless carriages” started to infiltrate the dirt roads of turn of the 1900s America, the last manufacturers of stagecoaches and buggy whips were rolling out the best, most refined versions ever of those soon-to-be artifacts. We may be going through the same phenomenon now, when in an age of streaming wars that resembles Sengoku era Japan, the best ever disc offerings are coming out from labels that truly adore the material as much as we the niche audience do.
In terms of quality — encompassing restoration and presentation of picture and sound, as well as library-quality package design and value-added extras — the current wave of boutique discs and box-sets hitting now surpass even the golden age of DVDs we saw 15-20 years ago.
And this is all coming at a time when streaming is letting us down more and more. As media corporations merge and their libraries are less curated by humans that care, we’re finding out the hard way that it would have been a good idea to keep all those discs many of us discarded years ago…
Changes in manufacturing models (lower print runs now being economically feasible), more granular distribution and a smaller but more dedicated audience willing to pay higher prices for better quality, allows labels to target a niche with an obscure release without losing their shirts. It works best with genre films and TV — Italian slashers, golden age Russian fantasy, 80s cult faves, vintage Mexican horror, and yes, the ninja genre is catching up!
The last time a label outside of Japan licensed the Shinobi-no-mono films it was AnimEigo in 2009, who in all fairness underestimated how well-serviced the intended fan base was by the grey and black market in years previous. While an excellent release of the first four films (individually and in a no-frills box), all eight films (Mission Iron Castle was still obscure at the time) were available as cheaper fan-subbed sets already and sadly sales never merited a second wave. This time around, a niche audience better addressed by a deluxe limited edition is salivating for the new set coming from Radiance. Not sure why they got cute with the titles, but the presentation looks great, the extras are ample, and I cannot wait to get my climbing claws on this baby. We all need to support this for the other six films to follow, so get out those credit cards, shinobi-philes!
Read all about it on the Radiance site.
Pre-order at The Goodie Emporium.
You can also get this from the excellent DiabolikDVD.
Radiance is also releasing a box set of Tomisaburo Wakayama’s trilogy of Bounty Hunter films. I like these genre-benders that inject James Bond and Spaghetti Western-inspired arsenals into the regular samurai fare, but regrettably the films lack the presence of the Tonto-like kunoichi sidekick played by the stunning Judy Ongg in the TV series version of this property (my admittedly over-the-top review here). Regardless of their Ongg-lessness, these discs will be a major improvement over the black/grey market prints that have circulated for years and this set is absolutely coming to my shelf in March.
I’ve always been a fan and customer of Shout! and their various efforts in a multitude of genre. Out of the blue last week several new titles popped up on their streaming service both familiar and confounding. Watari the Ninja Boy finally in hi-def! A new remaster of Dragon Showdown (aka Magic Serpent) was nice too, but “Ninja Scope” caused me to tilt my head like a confused German Shepherd. The cheaply dubbed wretched prints of Masked Ninja Akakage (Red Shadow) TV episodes combined into ‘movies’ for the burgeoning VHS market (under titles like The Magic Sword of Watari, Watari and the Fantasticks, Watari the Conqueror, Watari and the Seven Monsters, and yes, Ninja Scope) left a lot to be desired, but now suddenly there’s the Ninja Scope source element in pristine remastered form with original audio — the best presentation of Akakage outside of Japan yet. Turns out these new streams were a herald for a packed box set alongside the original Golden Bat film, Prince of Space, and two more aquatic-themed Sonny Chiba toku flicks, all looking and sounding better than ever. Grab this limited set while you can, a pre-sale package that included a free poster is already sold out…
Pre-Order direct from Shout! here.
No one, and I mean no one, is cranking out more remastered ninja Blu-Rays than Germany, and their library packaging is just to die for! Myriad IFD/Filmmark cut-togethers like Ninja Thunderbolt have gotten some gorgeous releases over the past few years, and flicks we all typically saw on low quality VHS back in the day actually look pretty spectacular when handled with care. I mean, the Golden Ninja Warrior is actually… golden! Now, a more US-market-friendly source is coming from Neon Eagle Video, with the landmark Ninja Terminator giving us that Garfield phone in true hi-def for the first time! Coming in March from Shamrock Media, (although possibly already sold-out on preorder) is Corey Yuen’s landmark HK/Japan collaboration Ninja in the Dragon’s Den with a whopping six cover variants and an alleged ‘longer Japanese version’ of the film. Also for you completists and double/tripple dippers, assuming the repackaging is worth the price and foreign shipping, Kosugi’s Canon trilogy plus Pray for Death are being released in those book-like library cases, and collected in one deluxe box, with some gorgeous new art.
One of my favorite labels/importer/champion of lost gems is Vinegar Syndrome, and they’ve got several off-the-beaten-path ninja releases at sale prices right now, including the much-vaunted New York Ninja (and other John Liu fare), home-made but fun-as-hell titles like Justice Ninja Style (I actually kind of loved this one), and the bewildering Unmasking the Idol in all its ninja-monkey glory!
Then there’s The Haunted Samurai (orig. Kaze no Tengu, aka Shinobi Demon: Duel in the Wind), new on Blu from Surviving Elements. This is a movie I’ve chased for years, and a disc I’ve had for a while but with no time to do a proper review… I highly recommend picking this up from DiabolikDVD ASAP because it’s a limited one-time pressing! While not your black hood-filled battle royal set in the rafters of a castle — this 1970 film was part of a transitional movement away from the then stale black-and-white 60’s ninja boom aesthetic — Kaze no Tengu is thoroughly shinobi down to its DNA. Coming from Katsu Productions and based on the work of Lone Wolf & Cub’s Goseki Kojima, it has a very familiar tone and feel, and some signature exploitive and bloody accents. It’s also one of the best explorations of the well-trodden ‘you cannot escape the shadow life’ theme of the entire genre — a noir-ish downward spiral of a character-driven story that peels like an onion of back-stabbing and noble efforts gone wrong. There’s more talk than action, but that’s made-up for in superb scripting and just a ton of little-seen budo weapons and outright weird ninja gizmos. And when the action does kick in, it really delivers, ending with a final duel between rogue ninja just as a full solar eclipse occurs. Each man is desperate to enter a new life with the dawning sun, but one of them will die in the dark as he was born to do…
Also out there on the grey market is The Hunted Samurai (Mushuku Zamurai), a more ambitious than usual TV series from 1973 under the creative force of Hideo Gosha. With a virtually identical theme set up for an ongoing episodic series, this show had better than usual cinematography, an Ennio Morricone-inspired musical score, and some really unique execution in ninja costuming and fight choreography. This is really like The Master, just in jidai-geki form… and actually good-good… and I really hope more episodes surface.
In conclusion… look, everybody, I get it — streaming, at its best, is the bomb. What’s better than summoning American Ninja on Prime or Samurai Spy on Criterion Channel at the press of a button, or finding something that never saw disc release like Ninja Vengeance just sitting there on Tubi, all without getting up from the couch or out from under the blankets to load a disc. The problem is… streaming is never at its best… and it is getting worse, not better. Titles come and go over myriad platforms like Whack-A-Mole, entire tv series just disappear when one studio buys out another, movies get censored for political agendas, music tracks get altered when billion-dollar media conglomerates don’t want to pay royalties to independent musicians, and don’t even start me on titles that should be available but remain mysteriously absent (I’m looking at you Disney, its been years now and still no Scarecrow of Romney Marsh). And with increasing alarm, a far-from-ideal version of an essential classic is only streaming the latest commercial transfer, instead of a pure archive copy (MGM’s extended cut of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly with all its intrusive extras and replaced audio is the only version of that film in the streaming realm, and generations of kids only know the original Star Wars trilogy in Lucas-diddled “Special Edition” form).
But knowing I have the best-ever release of the essentials like Shinobi-no-Mono on my shelf, and it will never just disappear for no reason or be tampered with via some third-party agenda, does my heart good. If you aren’t on board already, starting a nice and safe library is really something to consider.
These films are the sacred scrolls of ninja fandom, and we all know what lengths a true shinobi hero will go to protect those scrolls…
Keith J. Rainville — February, 2024
