Cannon Fodder: Revenge of the Ninja

REVENGE OF THE NINJA
(R, Cannon Films/MGM/UA, 90 mins., theatrical release date: September 16, 1983)

"Eureka!" After reviewing six movies for this Cannon Films series, I've struck crude.

Yes, Golan & Globus have a deathless reputation for vulgarity, and I'm not going to deny that much of what I've seen has been excruciating. But the part of me that can appreciate entertaining trash, including a couple of Tobe Hooper's mid-1980s work-for-hire projects bankrolled by Cannon, enjoys Revenge of the Ninja for what it is. I think I've found my first official "guilty pleasure" of the bunch.

And boy, should I feel ashamed, because Revenge of the Ninja is a doozy with a capital F.

In case you don't know, Menahem Golan himself directed 1981's Enter the Ninja, which clearly wanted to be a B-movie introduction to the ancient Japanese practice of ninjitsu. Going back to the DVD commentary for 42nd Street Forever, Volume 3: Exploitation Explosion, which I previously invoked in The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood, schlock scholar Chris Poggiali mentions that it was originally called "Dance of Death" and was a self-scripted vehicle for Mike Stone, a martial arts icon on the level of Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee. The production was shut down and everyone, including Stone and director Boaz Davidson, were fired, and Golan hired Italian superstar Franco Nero to take over the lead role (Stone was re-hired to be Nero's stuntman).

Even with the combined star power of Nero, British sex symbol Susan George and American journeyman Christopher George, all three of them were officially slumming by 1981. Enter the Ninja instead broke through Sho Kosugi, a Tokyo-born black belt who officially became the "Master" of his practice and the lynchpin of Cannon's entire series of Ninja action quickies, the second of which is Revenge of the Ninja.

Cannon, of course, were not the first to adapt intense physical combat for the grindhouses of the world. Warner Bros. imported The Shaw Brothers with 1973's Five Fingers of Death and also distributed Enter the Dragon, both kicking off the chop-socky craze which sent shock waves throughout low-budget cinema. By 1985, Cannon were grooming Michael Dudikoff as the "American Ninja" and Dragon director Robert Clouse directed Gymkata for the Warners, which incidentally turned out to resemble what would happen if Enter the Ninja was made for a major studio.

In Golan's dreary film, Kosugi took a supporting role as Hasegawa, the arch-enemy of Nero's noble Cole ("He is NO NINJA!") who would be hired by Christopher George's Venarius to assassinate the heroes. These foes were color-coordinated to match their personalities of "white ninja" and "black ninja." Naturally, Hasegawa is vanquished and Cole achieves vengeance for the murder of his war buddy Frank Landers.

Sam Firstenberg, who was the other assistant director on Operation Thunderbolt besides Davidson to become an in-house director for Cannon in the 1980s, takes the reins here and delivers the relentless fighting and skewering which Golan tamed for Enter the Ninja. Revenge of the Ninja is beginning-to-end violent in that vicariously seedy manner which may not make the critics rave (and I'm feeling pretty half-hearted on this, myself), but gets the job done for boisterous patrons of all-night Sonny Chiba marathons.

Yes, this is a movie which Christian Slater's Tarantino-born action nerd from True Romance might love.

The setup is "Lone Wolf & Cub at Utah": after his family is gruesomely ambushed on his sacred family cottage, noble ninja Cho Osaki (Kosugi) spirits his mother (Grace Oshita) and newborn son Kane away to Salt Lake City (which I suppose is meant to double for L.A. based on the bear flag) at the behest of his friend Braden (Arthur Roberts). Cho hangs up his swords and shurikens to open a doll museum, unaware that his business partner Braden will eventually be smuggling heroin inside these trinkets with intent to unload for Eye-talian mob boss Caifano (Mario Gallo). Or at least until Caifano stiffs Braden on a full payment in advance and orders his goombah squad to intimidate Braden away from shopping around.

Incensed, Braden calls upon his extensive ninjitsu studies to declare war on Caifano's crew, assassinating picnicking henchmen and one-eyed informants with the same tools Cho has sworn off. Lt. Dime (Virgil Frye) and martial arts-trained officer Dave Hatcher (Keith Vitali) try to persuade Cho into helping them crack the case, but it will naturally take a few shady twists of fate, including the kidnapping of Kane (now a kindergartener played by Sho's real-life son, Kane Kosugi), to snap Cho out of his pacifism and confront Braden in a one-on-one battle: "Only a ninja can stop a ninja."

Cannon productions have gained cult renown for being brazenly ludicrous, and Sam Firstenberg is responsible for many of these "highlights," including Ninja III: The Domination and Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo. Revenge of the Ninja doesn't skimp on the insanity, from the violent prologue which lingers over the massacre of women and children to a pair of hilarious fight scenes pitting Braden's blonde moll, Catherine (Ashley Ferrare), against the father-and-son Osakis. The first, in which she attempts to seduce Master Cho, prompts this glorious exchange:

Cho: "If you want to work out, you forgot to wear pants."
Cathy: "You really think I forgot?"

Later on, after Braden activates the hypnotic eyes of his metal mask, Cathy is forced to capture Kane, who resists with instinctive force. This leads to plenty of cartwheels, high kicks and even a staff duel between them, with lots of chuckle-inducing abuse aimed towards Kane. He wins the battle with help from a concealed blade, sparing Cathy's life, but she carries him off to Braden, regardless, like an irate market patron carting off her colicky child.

To list further outlandishness would risk spoiling the entire movie (there are two gangs of Benetton bullies who oppose the Osakis), as Firstenberg tries to spare us any dull moments. Knowing he has a bona-fide craftsman in Sho Kosugi, Revenge of the Ninja is pumped full of risky stunts and sparring contests. There are tawdrier elements thrown in for spice, such as the slasher-style murder of Caifano's nephew and his girlfriend as they screw in a hot tub (they are killed in such a position that it would require a jackhammer to separate them), but Revenge of the Ninja is at its best throwing Kosugi into stamina-siphoning danger whenever the threadbare plot threatens to hit a patch.

Kosugi's stoic demeanor is easily the most interesting aspect of the film acting-wise, as is the perverted glee of Professor Toru Tanaka as he piles on Cathy. The rest of the cast is either blandly competent or outright amateurish between physical feats.

Because this is a case of Israeli opportunists seizing upon Japanese culture, Revenge of the Ninja isn't as cartoonish as Shogun Assassin or The Story of Ricky, which are even bloodier and ballsier distillations of individual honor. Firstenberg is aware that he's making a glorified comic book of an action movie, but there's still a leaden quality to characterization and plot progression that demands more ingenuity than he and writer James R. Silke can manage.

This is still an improvement over Enter the Ninja, though, on the basis of its liveliness, if not its aesthetics. This is a movie where young and old, American and Oriental, male and female, black, white and Latino, are counted on to raise a kung fu fist. Sho ‘nuff!

Cannon Fodder: Operation Thunderbolt

OPERATION THUNDERBOLT
(PG, Cinema Shares International, 124 mins., theatrical release date: January 27, 1978)

This entry in Cannon Fodder is going to be quite different from the norm, given the last two movies I reviewed were The Apple and Bolero. Let me explain before I launch into the review proper:

1) This is not going to be a film which was released under the Cannon Films label, but rather one of the pivotal movies which Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus produced before they bought Cannon. Consider this their humble beginnings, if you will.

2) Compared to the vast majority of Cannon's 1980s output, which could only be recommended to connoisseurs of trashy movies, this one actually is stepping upscale. Even with Golan himself directing, this is not going to be another Apple or Enter the Ninja. This is far more substantial due to its subject matter and the fact that it was made in their origin country before their "heyday."

3) Finally, this is one of those scant Golan-Globus productions which was nominated for an Academy Award, here for Best Foreign Language Film. Runaway Train picked up a few major nods (Best Actor, Supporting Actor and Film Editing), and a Dutch movie called The Assault that Cannon distributed in 1986 (Golan-Globus didn't produce it) won BFLF, a category in which Golan was nominated thrice more as producer (1964's Sallah, 1972's I Love You Rosa and 1973's The House on Chelouche Street).

The movie is Operation Thunderbolt (Mivtsa Yonatan), named after the Israeli military's nighttime maneuver which rescued over a hundred of their citizens from a Ugandan airport. The events circa July 4, 1976 were dramatized in two American TV movies released prior, Victory at Entebbe and Raid on Entebbe. Golan's film, however, boasted the support of the Israeli government, with a few in the cabinet making unbilled archival-seeming walk-ons, and Air Force, whose Hercules crafts were prominently displayed. His version was also the only of the Entebbe dramas to incorporate actual troops/captives from the ordeal, as well as weave in existing newsreel footage from on the ground.

What you get here is basically The Delta Force without all the jingoism (well...they left plenty in here, but I'll get to that), ridiculous action and "Airport '86" stunt-casting.

That later Golan film, of course, was loosely based on a recent hijacking crisis. In fact, based on the IMDb trivia page, it may have seemed that The Delta Force was shaping up to be to Operation Thunderbolt what The Last American Virgin is to Lemon Popsicle, retelling the same story but with a contemporary hook catering to Stateside audiences. That didn't exactly happen, blessedly, but The Delta Force hit much of Thunderbolt's beats, regardless, from the sweltering atmosphere of the hostages' dilemma to the victorious ending which involves the overlooked sacrifice of one particular soldier.

This pre-Cannon production also benefits from a gritty docudrama approach to the material, giving the true-life story a natural propulsion without too many questionable leaps in chronology or characterization. A lot of the tension leading up to the raid involves not just the predicament of the endangered Hebrews, but also the decision by the Israeli Prime Minister to forge ahead with the rescue project commandeered by Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu (Yehoram Gaon), the younger brother of future government leader Benjamin. This is one of the rare movies where the main characters don't spring into action mid-film because of the risk assessment and hesitation of the army's superiors. Golan actually creates an urgent mood which suggests he had real talent as a director which he may have taken for granted, or more likely was avalanched by his own crudities.

The plot begins in Athens, Greece via a connecting flight to Paris from Tel Aviv, humanizing the passengers in the simplest possible way as families bid their traveling kin weepy goodbyes. Although, to be honest, I think the only genuine emotion seems to be shown towards a dog named Bobo. The villains, about to board the same Air France jet, concoct a bogus power failure which allows them to smuggle their concealed arms aboard without suspicion. This coalition of Arab and German menaces, who take over the plane twenty minutes after takeoff, are led by Wilfried Böse, played with fanatical charisma by Klaus Kinski.

Kinski would later appear in Cannon's slasher obscurity Schizoid as a seedy therapist whose patients are being systematically butchered with scissors. If you ask me, his ghost also haunts Richard Lynch's performance as Rostov from Invasion U.S.A., but I might save that thought for later. The volatile Kraut performer was known for taking B-roles in non-Herzog trivialities such as these Golan-Globus products, but there's a structure to his performance that the movie fails to level, although Golan and Co. give it their best.

Böse, a self-described "freedom fighter" revolting against West German money being used to covet Palestine, is unusually diplomatic and collected for such a blatant heavy. He only fires his automatic in the air as crowd control (we never see him butcher anybody), tries to avoid profiling when a passenger claims his name is "Cohan" and is less brutish in his methods of interrogation and coercion than his comrades. Kinski is so restrained that he makes his two weakest foils, Sybil Danning and Mark Heath, come off as amateurs.

Danning is relegated to a harsh Ice Queen archetype, glowering behind unflattering, oversized shades. Her performance is so rote, even hard-up camp junkies would do better revisiting Chained Heat or Howling II to get their fix. But at least she doesn't commit as egregious a sin as Heath, who burlesques Idi Amin Dada to the breaking point where he directly invokes Hitler in his vocal inflection. Not even Kinski and Danning stoop that low. Even though I haven't seen either the other two Entebbe films in order to compare their portrayals of Amin (putting the Oscar-validated Forest Whitaker aside, of course), Heath allows both the late Julius Harris and the still-living Yaphet Kotto easy resting.

I truly believe Mark Heath may have cursed Operation Thunderbolt's chances of winning that foreign movie Oscar just as Norbit did for Eddie Murphy's esteemed performance for Dreamgirls.

Even with its honorable intentions, no-frills pacing and grasps at authenticity (an error involving a black Mercedes did blow the soldiers' cover), Operation Thunderbolt labors under the same fatal flaws which have given Golan-Globus movies a uniformly bad name. Firstly, the film is horrendously unsubtle. There are too many indignant references made to the Nazi genocide of WWII within and without Entebbe, and Golan shamelessly zooms in twice upon a concentration camp tattoo. These simply don't wash. Golan dilutes what is meant to be a "political issue" into cheapjack Anti-Semitism by calling repeated attention to another horrifying, shameful event which has nothing to do with the motives of these terrorists.

Not only was the real-life Wilfried Böse indignant about being referred to as a "Nazi," but one of the actual survivors would go on record to rebuke the hostage situation as purely discriminatory against the Jewish people.

Golan does engender a righteous anger in visual terms, and it's hard to deny the torment faced by the Israelis. But the film is dogged by a kind of noble prejudice that is principally no different from anything Cannon made with Charles Bronson and Chuck Norris. Arabs, Ugandans, Germans, and the French are routinely caricatured and mocked for their callousness; meanwhile, Golan takes a moment to show a woman digging for her British passport from between her legs. Such frequent chasms of taste are poison in the movie's heady brew.

Another blow to the movie's painstaking credibility is the unavoidable corniness of the pro-military theme. Jerusalem-born Yehoram Gaon, a multi-media superstar of the Israeli arts, plays the upstanding hero Yonatan as compellingly as the amoral Kinski. You can still tell he's fulfilling a well-worn cliché from the very first moment he interacts with his fiancée. Declaring his allegiance to the Army over his yen for schooling, Yonatan reads Alistair MacLean and quotes JFK before the impending attack. A born leader or so it seems, but Golan doesn't construct a single training montage worthy of Yonatan's intellect, the opening simulation rendered ludicrous through recycled footage of two grunts darting toward the camera and opening fire. All the while, the sweep of Dov Seltzer's Morricone-style theme song is further diminished by the ridiculous sound of a jaw harp.

Put mildly, this is not The Guns of Navarone, which must have made quite an impact on Golan & Globus seeing how they lured J. Lee Thompson, already busted down to exploitation by the dawn of the 1980s, into a workmanlike late career of lurid Charles Bronson swill (10 to Midnight, Kinjite: Forbidden Subjects) and imitation adventure gruel (King Solomon's Mines, Firewalker).

And yet, Operation Thunderbolt is nowhere near as worthless as what one would expect from the Cannon cousins. It's got two solid performances (Gaon and Kinski), lots of palpable hysteria and a rousing, if ultimately somber, re-enactment of the famous raid. The movie earns its ambiguously victorious finale in a way that Lemon Popsicle doesn't, chiefly because there is more scope to the proceedings and color to the characters. Despite its biases and hypocrisies, Menahem Golan, for once in his directing career, has made a movie that is less of a tank and more of an ATV.

Golan would only get stupider and sillier from here, as would his assistant directors Boaz (Going Bananas) Davidson and Sam (Ninja III: The Domination) Firstenberg. It's amazing to think that Cannon were responsible for a halfway-decent movie that didn't involve lowering your standards, especially as I ponder the cosmic karate kick that is my next entry.

I'm talking 100% grade-U.S. of A. Chuck steak, served raw in a minotaur's skull.