Slammed as I’ve been, I just now got around to watching the MGM DVD-On-Demand of Enter the Ninja. Full review and some other ETN bonuses going up later this week, but in the meantime let’s just take a moment to appreciate how great the credit sequence of this craze-igniting film was.
It’s not like these supposedly debuting “ninja” were anything new to American audiences in October of 1981. We’d seen them in a Bond film and a Peckinpaw flick, as exotic threats on a few TV series, assassins in Shogun, Norris-fodder in The Octagon, etc. But when a movie brazenly adopts the “Enter the…” naming convention you’re expecting a martial arts vanguard, a genre definer. And with this credit sequence, Mike Stone, Sho Kosugi and Cannon Films gave us that.
Featuring a night mission-clad Kosugi swinging white-painted weapons on a subtly lit blacked-out set, ETN delivered instant weapons fetish!
Shinobi historical pedigree or otherwise, what we saw was the black suit and a ton of exotic martial arts gear. Not espionage equipment, not disguises or trickery, no military intelligence, no mysticism or any other heady concept. Just ninja suits and tons of weapons. They distilled ninjutsu down into its most easily exploited and marketable aspects, then once those visuals were delivered, transposed the notions of the historical art onto the tried-and-true ‘modern-day warrior wanders the world doing right using ancient skills’ model already familiar to Western audiences, and boom – craze formula SET.
This montage of exotic dances of death set to lurid percussion was broken only by the movie’s introductory fight sequence. If you weren’t hooked on the credits, ten bloody minutes of ninja-on-ninja violence followed, and if you weren’t a shinobi-cinemafile by then, it wasn’t going to happen.
Good, bad or indifferent, the formula for 80s American ninja films was pretty much set in stone right here.
More on this film all week.
Robert
As for stealth matters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOcgMYYTYHs