Curtis: “Ninjas. (sighs) Not again.”
American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt isn’t much of a movie, and the truth is that it didn’t have to be. In late 1988 The Cannon Group was on the ropes once again. It had already sold off most of its quality product to Warners for home video distribution, and was still sinking. I was an employee at Cannon in Los Angeles for most of 1988, and every week was another crisis. Partner Menahem Golan split off and took the subsidiary company 21st Century with him: one afternoon I was told to look out the window and saw Golan with his loyal retinue, walking across the street to his new headquarters.
1988 saw the release of a few decent pictures, but Cannon no longer had the money to distribute anything properly. Both Powaqqatsi and the excellent Shy People were just dumped. The idea of a mainstream Cannon film became things like Rockula, Charlie Matthau’s Doin’ Time on Planet Earth and various Albert Pyun movies, one of which (Cyborg) was a surprise hit. The distribution executive upstairs was forever furious. He couldn’t get Cannon films into theaters, and he couldn’t get the theaters to play Cannon trailers.
Cannon had made money with Charles Bronson, in awful sequels to Death Wish directed by J. Lee Thompson. They had another solid star in Chuck Norris, whose series of Missing in Action movies pandered to audiences in denial that we lost in Vietnam. Cannon ‘found’ Belgian martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme but couldn’t hold him; he moved on to greener pastures. The first two American Ninja pictures had little to praise except halfway decent action scenes. Like all of Cannon’s low-grade genre efforts, they were sold through excellent trailers (one by the late Marcel Mindlin) that jammed so many dynamic action cuts into 100 seconds that you’d think the actor Michael Dudikoff was a major draw.
American Ninja 3 was produced in association with producer Harry Allan Towers, who from the late ‘sixties forward moved from country to country, continent to continent, chasing governments that wanted to encourage investment in their film industries. In 1988 he was based in South Africa, even though reputable studios in the U.S. and Europe had joined a general boycott over oppressive Apartheid policies. Cannon had its own mini-studio in Israel, but suffered a money crunch and the need for product, any product in the pipeline. They contracted with Harry Allan Towers for a string of adventure and horror movies using actors willing to go anywhere for a job, even South Africa.
Actor Michael Dudikoff claimed that he turned down Ninja 3 for political reasons. The right thing would have been to promote the American Ninja’s sidekick Curtis Jackson to the top spot. The popular actor Steve James was deserving and audiences thought he was funny, but I doubt that Cannon ever considered elevating a black martial arts actor to star status. Enter unknown body builder / martial artist David Bradley, who had the muscles and good white looks to take over.
My assessment of Ninja 3 mostly states the obvious about a film (and most of a genre) that aims at what reviewers used to call ‘undiscriminating audiences’ — people that will watch anything. Ninja 3’s story is juvenile pap of the sort that might appeal to 6 year-olds that get hyped up when TV’s He-Man shouts, “I’ve got the power!” Evil cardboard mastermind The Cobra (evangelist fraud-turned actor Marjoe Gortner) is in cahoots with the evil general Andreas (Yehudi Efroni), who coincidentally murdered a young kickboxer back in 1980, during a raid for the box office receipts of a martial arts contest (!). That incredible cash score has financed The Cobra’s insidious evil mad lab on a Caribbean island. The slain kickboxer’s son has grown up to become international karate star Sean Davidson (David Bradley). Sean, Curtis Jackson (Steve James) and Dexter (Ivan J. Klisser) are invited to the island by the lovely Chan Lee (Michele B. Chan) for a competition, unaware that The Cobra and his nasty assistant Dr. Holger (Mike Huff) have staged the contest to lure the best fighters in the world, to prove that their new scientifically-enhanced Super Ninja warriors can best any normal human. Chan Lee is the secret leader of Cobra’s invincible army of Ninja assassins. She uses the art of disguise to impersonate various people — the Minister of Interior’s secretary (Adrienne Pierce), and Sean’s own sensei, Izumo (Calvin Jung).
Credited with the original story is none other than ex- I Was a Teenage Frankenstein Gary Conway, in a second career as a writer. South African director Cedric Sundstrom re-wrote the script, but it’s difficult to detect any real writing — the only dialogue is awkward exposition, usually telling us what we just saw or restating the obvious. Attempts at humor are pathetic. As directed, the actors sound as if they’re talking so the recordist can get an audio level — there’s no pacing or comic timing, and people barely seem to be addressing each other. A scene where they meet some women in a street cafe is so un-directed that Steve James just sits down and starts caressing the hand and arm of a total stranger. Other scenes are disconnected verbal pronouncements, none of them convincing:
Dev: Let me get this straight — he’s selling out to a terrorist? That’s wholesale slaughter!
Chan Lee: Exactly.
Curtis: That sounds like real bad news to me.
Chan Lee: Hey, don’t underestimate that man he’s not called The Cobra for nothing.
Dev: It’s your call Curtis.
Curtis: OK doll, let’s go kick some ass.
One doesn’t expect great acting in these things, but what we get is the bare minimum. Marjoe Gortner hits rock bottom in his film career, that’s for sure; the supposed camaraderie between the three hero leads is nonexistent. All we get are declarations of revenge and setups for righteous killing scenes. The worst Hong Kong chopsocky epic is better.
But the audience comes to pictures like Ninja 3 for action and the release of hostile energy. Since Ninja are identity-challenged masked nobodies, they appear to have no human rights. It’s all for the better because our heroes kill them by the bushel — snapping necks, stabbing them and tossing them from great heights. I have a feeling that the group scenes simply hired all the martial arts clubs and classes that could be found in Durban, or better yet invited them to participate for free. I’ll bet that the action scenes feature the same five or six kickboxer-karate stuntmen, who fight and die over and over, ad infinitum.
The action is terrible, but it’s not the performers’ fault. These are very special Ninja that cleverly do not use any of their special skills. In fact, being a Ninja seems a real liability. They announce their presence at all times, usually performing some fancy spin or tumble from a high railing, and then politely waiting so Curtis or Sean can whack them with a high kick. The direction is okay, but the camerawork ignores the fact that the really good Hong Kong-based martial arts films do a lot more: the Chinese filmmakers vary camera speeds, use frame-snipping trick editing and more elaborate special effects to create convincing rapid-fire fight action. The first two American Ninja pictures at least had a couple of scenes each of amusing dance-like choreography. The fighting here often looks like a rehearsal. They are kicking feet and swinging weapons about as fast as can be while also being reasonably safe — but when filmed at normal sound speed, it all looks s-l-o-w. David Bradley is buff and moves well, despite being in the second half of his thirties. Big Steve James entertainingly overacts the exertions of fighting. But almost everything is patently fake. Bad guys wait their turn or balk so that the heroes have time to strike them. The pantomime would be good for small children, if necks weren’t being snapped.
Throw in weak synth music, flat lighting and bad sets and you get the whole picture. American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt is for enthusiastic Cannon fans that are somehow nostalgic for the pictures of this kind. The lack of polish on this particular picture really pops out when Dev and Curtis drive a limo up to the Evil Lab, and jump out ready to do combat. We see The Cobra’s defender guards shoot their guns into the air, and then wait so that Curtis can shoot them all down, in three separate groups, with three bursts of automatic rifle fire. James makes sure he poses while firing, grimacing and flexing his muscles. It’s pathetic. Yes, the conservative in Savant sees in this an evil conspiracy against American male children: first, violent, macho-imperative cartoons like He-Man, Master of the Universe, then silly but violent goofball action pictures like Ninja 3, and then on their sixth birthdays, an initiation into their older brothers’ violent video games, that teach disrespect for human life in general. Oh, yes, there’s trouble in River City, my friends…
Olive Films’ Blu-ray of American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt is a fine transfer of this very plain-wrap picture, with the gaudy colors of the tacky sets popping just as they should. Director Sundstrum does use some dramatic lighting effects during Sean Davidson’s final ‘spiritual’ self-cure against The Cobra’s evil mind-altering injection. The thin soundtrack is in good stereo.
Olive is to be commended for coming up with such good extras. The featurette Strike Me Deadly gives us director Cedric Sundstrom explaining his background in South Africa. He was an assistant on the superb Zulu Dawn, so gets a pass in my book any day. He oversells the movie a tiny bit, but that’s nothing compared to producer Avi Lerner, who blabs out some nonsense comparing Ninja to Batman. David Bradley doesn’t appear, but Michael Dudikoff lets us know that he was also supposed to play Spiderman, in the infamous unfilmed Cannon version co-written by Ted Newsom. Gary Conway shows up just long enough to say that his script wasn’t used.
We do see David Bradley’s thirteen-minute VHS audition tape. His line readings are from hunger but his kickboxing is great, and he definitely has the required fine-tuned action figure body.