I’ve been a fan of Rob Hill’s exhaustive yet easily digestible film analysis on YouTube for a while now, but he recently hit it out of the park with this humbling hour-long master-class on the ninja movie boom. Watch now if you haven’t, go ahead, I’ll wait…
Approached from solely the cinematic side of things — he doesn’t get bogged down in the parallels and chicken-and-egg of the martial arts boom or pioneering media like comics — this is a highly entertaining journey through the volume of the 80s nin-sploitation craze. Most valuable for me is the chapter on the Joseph Lai/Godfrey Ho/IFD/Filmmark etc./so forth cluster-fuck — a subject I’ve written, re-written, abandoned and re-abandoned seemingly endlessly in the last decade to the point that I can’t effectively monitor some of the bad info I myself have admittedly put out there. Hill tackles it in such a way that gives some much needed organization and clarification while also properly NOT coming to any sort of solid ground on the subject due to the conflicting information out therewith then and now. I just love what he did here…
Also major kudos for his giving proper due to an oft unsung hero of the boom Alexander Lo Rei (Lou), and for crediting what he calls the “Patient Zero” of the Western ninja explosion — the 1976 Filipino oddity Enforcer from Death Row (aka Ninja Nightmare and many other titles). I’ve never quite known how to deal with this film — it’s clearly a ninja-infused film shot outside of Japan, but I question when it actually made it to a grindhouse theater or VHS deck anywhere outside of that country and haven’t investigated enough…
If you like this, check out his equally enlightening look at James Bond knockoffs from around the globe.
As for me, now that I’m past a brutal series of seasonal deadlines that devoured me from October to last week, I’ll soon be releasing something I’ve poked at for years and I feel our world needs — a look at the original ninja/ninjutsu crazes of the early 20th century in Japan, and how the concurrence of popular works in the realms of martial arts study, popular kids literature and silent film mirrors what would happen there again in the 1960s and twenty years later over here.
Stay tuned…
KR — January 2024
