Ninja III: The Domination

It’s a scientific fact that everyone likes ninjas, so why do ninjas always get shit on? They’re supposed to be the baddest of the bad, able to silently kill anyone anywhere and slink away without a trace, yet movies featuring ninjas almost always have one white guy who’s able to slaughter them by the dozen without breaking a sweat. It’s an insult to the might and majesty of the mysterious ninja that he is used as anonymous cannon fodder for the Chuck Norrises and Michael Dudikoffs of the world, simply because his identity-obscuring face mask allows the same stuntman to be used in multiple scenes.

I’ve long desired a movie that gave the ninja the respect he deserves, and for my sins, I have found it. Naturally, this is another movie that isn’t out on DVD. The Man doesn’t want you to see it, because then you’ll know how powerful ninjas really are. One ninja could take down The Man himself with just a single well-flung shuriken, so this important document has been suppressed so that the masses won’t learn how flimsy and precarious the system truly is. Ninja III: The Domination is like the red pill; once you see it, you’ll never be fooled by the Matrix again.

This amazing film opens with not only the finest display of ninjing I have ever witnessed, but possibly one of the top-ten most impressive first scenes in action history. We first see the shadowy Ninja the Third clambering around on some Wile E. Coyote rock formations on his way to his secret Ninja Cave, where he keeps a cache of ninja weapons. He emerges at sunrise in olive-green ninja garb, the better to blend in with the foliage at the golf course where his target is playing a leisurely 18 holes, surrounded by his ladyfriend and assorted bodyguards. They prove no match for our hero, who easily dispatches them all with throwing stars and his trusty katana. He also displays superhuman strength by crushing a golf ball in his palm, stopping a golf cart with his bare hands, and bending a golf club over his forearm. Basically, golf is for pussies is what this ninja is saying.

This scene then achieves ultimate ninjation when our hero is beset from all sides by an infestation of insect-like policemen. They come in cars, in helicopters, and on motorcycles, bearing the finest assault weaponry that 1984 had to offer, but Ninja the Third lays waste to them as if they were paper targets. He rides on top of police cars and picks off bike cops with Chinese stars. He climbs a tree and boards the chopper mid-flight, slaughtering the crew before leaping to the water hazard below. He eludes the law by making a snorkel out of a bamboo reed, which also doubles as a blowgun. He slaughters his foolish pursuers in their dozens before he is finally surrounded and pumped full of literally hundreds of bullets. But you think that’s gonna stop him? Ninja please. Even poked full of more holes than a saltshaker, he continues to kill and kill and kill again. No mortal man could take such punishment. Is he a god? A demon? No. He is ninja unleashed, and the modern world quakes from his fury.

Even hundreds of gunshot wounds can’t stop his murderous rampage. He throws down a smoke bomb and seems to disappear into thin air. As the police scatter to continue the search, he emerges from the loose dirt in which he had buried himself. Unfortunately, there is only so much damage even a ninjitsu grandmaster can withstand, but luckily, he happens across Chrissy, a sexy brunette telephone repairperson (played by Lucinda Dickey of Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo fame) who also teaches aerobics classes on the side. In an ancient mystical rite, he infects her with his essence so that he can get post-humous revenge on the cowardly policemen who killed him.

Even though all Chrissy wants to do is jazzercise, jazzercise, jazzercise, swinging her taut, sweaty torso to that infectious eighties synth beat, she keeps becoming possessed by the spirit of the ninja, which takes the form of strobelights and a fog machine emanating from all of her plumbing fixtures and electrical appliances, including the arcade version of Bouncer that she has in her spacious loft apartment. Then the ninja’s katana starts floating through the air into her hands, and she sleepwalks up to Ninja Cave to score some weapons and a ninja costume that fetchingly hugs her svelte hips and thighs. Then, possessed with the spirit and abilities of the ninja, she proceeds to hunt and kill the surviving cops from the first scene one by one. You wouldn’t really think a ninja movie would require this much plot, but this was made by Canon Films, the undisputed kings of ninja cinema, so I guess they know their business.

Believe it or not, we’re only about a half-hour into this thing at this point, but its potent mix of ninjitsu and aerobics has already provided us with enough awesome for three movies. From here on out, the plot gets complicated by the fact that Chrissy’s new boyfriend is one of the cops on the ninja’s hit list, so he brings her to a Japanese witch doctor (played by Lo Pan from Big Trouble in Little China, obviously) who makes her go full-on Ninja Blair and start flipping around in circles and talking in a computer-processed demon voice and kicking the wind machine into high gear. Lo Pan says only another ninja can kill a ninja, but luckily, Head Ninja In Charge Sho Kosugi is in town, sporting an awesome engraved eyepatch and a poorly established thirst for vengeance. It’s no secret that I’m not the world’s biggest Sho fan, even though he’s been in some great movies like 9 Deaths of the Ninja and Pray For Death. I’m sure he’s a bad motherfucker, but his fighting style has never come off as all that impressive onscreen. Here, he’s the fucking man, though. He steals the evil ninja’s corpse from the morgue and drags it up to an ancient Japanese temple in the hills of Arizona. Then he somehow forces the ninja’s spirit to repossess his dead body, and the two of them have a rip-roaring ninja-on-ninja battle all over the countryside.

Obviously, you want to see this one as soon as possible, but I know what you’re thinking: “What the fuck, Majestyk? I’ve never even heard of Ninja 1 and 2. How the hell am I supposed to understand Ninja III?” Well, in answer to your question: 1. I don’t understand your hostility toward me; and 2. Ninja III is actually the sequel to Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja, two not-all-that-great movies whose only connection is that they both feature Sho Kosugi in some capacity. Feel free to skip both of those so you can jump right into the bootleg glory of Ninja III: The Domination. It’s like if The Exorcist and The Street Fighter got together and made rough, dirty love to Flashdance while Poltergeist watched. When it finally hits legitimate DVD, I hope they put that quote on the cover.

The Last Shark

What we got here is the last time Italy tried to rip off Jaws. As you know, the Italian exploitation film industry from the sixties through the eighties existed in a sublime state of not giving a fuck. If a movie made money, they’d have 25 knock-offs in theaters within a couple months. But when they tried that shit with Jaws, Universal Pictures sued the living fuck out of them, and The Last Shark (released in the States as Great White) got booted the hell out of America, never to return. So the Italians said fuck it and went back to ripping off Mad Max and Dawn of the Dead, whose creators at least had a sense of humor.

Normally, I’d be like fuck Universal. I mean, it’s not like you guys invented the fucking shark. Other filmmakers have to be allowed to tell shark stories without your legal department calling down the fucking thunder. The problem is, the Italians (principally director Enzo G. Castellari, a spaghetti western specialist also guilty of The New Barbarians and the original Inglorious Bastards) went and told the exact same shark story: gigantic great white stalks the beaches of a New England community, ruining tourism. It’s got it all: the crusty shark hunter (played by Vic Morrow, the guy John Landis killed), the disbelieving mayor who wears hideous blazers and refuses to close the beaches, the buoy that gets attached to the shark and inexpensively announces its presence, etc. It even sort of rips off Jaws 2 by having the shark eat a helicopter. Sadly, Jaws: The Revenge had not been made yet so there’s no way of telling whether this time it is, in fact, personal.

So yeah, it’s like a community theater version of Jaws, but the weird thing is, it still kind of works. For me, anyway. Your mileage may vary. In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am a lifelong sharkaphobe. It’s not that I’m afraid that I’m gonna get eaten by one. I just hate looking at the evil sonsabitches. It’s like nails on the chalkboard for me, especially great whites. There is simply nothing scarier than seeing a Carcharodon carcharias pop its enormous head up out of the water, its black demon eyes gleaming lifelessly, its lips crinkling back over its pink gums that sprout row upon row of triangular teeth as big as restaurant-style tortilla chips, gnashing relentlessly and reducing a wad of flesh to wet, red ribbons. You ever see that Planet Earth documentary? They got this shot of a great white in super-duper slow-mo blasting up 15 feet out of the water, its whole body twisting and turning in midair with a thousand-pound sea lion in its mouth. It’s the fucking scariest thing ever, because that’s not movie magic. That shit exists. These mouthy motherfuckers are off somewhere doing that shit right now. For me, that’s what hell looks like: cold water, flexing gray cartilage, and a black chasm rimmed with serrated death.

That’s why The Last Shark freaked me out in a way that Jaws hasn’t since I was 12 years old and I forced myself to cowboy the fuck up and watch it all by myself in the dark. Now Jaws is one of my two favorite movies of all time, but let’s face it: Bruce the Shark never really looked real. Thanks to the preternatural filmmaking skills of a young Stephen Spielberg, its herky-jerk robotic movements and soggy rubber skin are extremely effective within the reality of the movie, but for someone with the shark fear, nothing can have the same kneejerk revulsion as the real thing. Jaws only has 15 or 20 seconds of actual shark footage in the whole movie, but The Last Shark skillfully edits dozens of shots of real great whites into its narrative. We are talking horrifying slow-mo footage of sharks as big as Cadillacs chomping the fuck out of sides of beef, their flailing fins whipping sea foam and blood into a frothy red meringue. I know this footage is from the seventies, but nobody knows how long sharks live, so those bastards could still be out there for all I know, slicing through the waves and leaving a trail of half-masticated chum in their wake. It’s not something I like to think about.

But the thing that makes The Last Shark such an entertaining blend of the terrifying and the ridiculous is that they only use stock footage about half the time. The other half, they alternate between this full-size shark puppet that can’t move its mouth—it looks like a giant rubber bath toy that would squeak if you squeezed it—and a ridiculously tiny little model that they obviously shot in a fishtank. Neither of the models have any motility at all; they’re just lifeless props that get wagged around by stagehands. While bad rubber monsters are an endless source of hilarity in my life, their presence in The Last Shark does nothing to alleviate my sharkophobia. In fact, it makes it worse. I can watch a nature documentary about sharks and get used to the sight of the ugly fucks after a few minutes, but The Last Shark never gives me the chance. You never know if the next shot is going to be of a preposterous latex armature or a petrifyingly authentic maneater. One second it’s a shot of a plastic fishy on the end of a stick getting poked at styrofoam rocks, and the next it’s a gory closeup of a real shark’s teeth sinking into actual cowflesh. Then the next shot is of a bloody mannequin leg hanging out of the full-size animatronic’s immobile mouth. The constant fear of the real shark popping up in the middle of all this cheesy effects work made me feel really fucking nervous for the whole movie.

For most of you, The Last Shark will just be a fun piece of campy trash. But for me, it’s the scariest movie I’ve seen in years. I’m not ashamed, though. Everyone has their weaknesses. At least I can say that mine is the most perfect killing machine ever devised and not some pussy shit like spiders or something. Arachnophobia was alright, I guess, but it’s not like a tarantula is gonna bite you in fucking half.

The Star Wars Holiday Special

This notorious piece of kitsch is ostensibly about Han Solo’s efforts to get Chewbacca back to Kashyyyk (Really, George? Three Y’s?) in time to celebrate “Life Day” with his family, which raises some interesting questions about Chewie’s character. For one, what the hell is he doing gallivanting about the galaxy, making Kessel Runs in under 12 parsecs and such, when he has a wife and child back home waiting for him? A smuggler’s life is no life for a family man. However, once you get a look at the Clan Chewbacca, you can understand why he’d rather spend all his time cooped up in a cramped cockpit with a Corellian rogue. You can’t really appreciate what a handsome wookiee Chewie is until you see the misshapen swamp beasts he’s related to. His wife, while surely a nice person with a great personality, is clearly a Garbage Pail Kid in a bear suit, while his father looks like a cross between a reanimated Yeti and the sewer monster from Big Trouble in Little China. Plus, the fact that Chewie’s son Lumpawarrump is nicknamed “Lumpy” should give you some idea of why he’s ashamed to be seen with the hairy little abortion.

You will envy Chewie’s space-trotting lifestyle when you’re forced to spend the first 15 minutes of the Holiday Special trapped in his family's Ewok Village-meets-The Brady Bunch domicile. When they’re not grumbling at each other unintelligibly, they’re watching no less than 12 different televisual devices, on which various slumming celebrities perform embarrassing comedy routines and out-of-place song-and-dance numbers. Since the Holiday Special was produced by CBS, it’s possible that its makers found it difficult to believe that anyone—even denizens of a society in which hyperdrive technology makes it possible to travel to hundreds of wondrous worlds in the blink of an eye—would ever want to do anything besides sit on their hirsute asses and watch cheaply produced TV.

To be fair, Bea Arthur escapes her skit with her dignity. As the owner of the famous Cantina on Tattoine, she enforces last call by hustling her hideous clientele out the door with a phlegmatic but serviceable showtune while being romanced by a middle-aged schlub who pours his cocktails into a hole on the top of his head. Other musical interludes include a random but rockin’ appearance by Jefferson Starship, performing the brass-infused non-album track “Light the Sky on Fire.” The band appears in the form of magenta-hued holograms in some kind of Lite Brite contraption viewed by a visiting Imperial Naval Subofficer (for some reason accompanying ground troops on a routine patrol). The creepiest segment is when Chewie’s father Itchy puts on a virtual reality helmet and has implied cybersex with a glittering disco diva. You can’t see his fire-engine red doggy boner pop up like a tube of lipstick, but it’s clearly lurking just out of frame.

Throughout all these shenanigans (which also include a truly insane cooking show with a four-armed host and Art Carney limping through his poorly paced sketches like a wounded tauntaun), actual Star Wars characters occasionally pop up on various viewscreens. Since this was filmed soon after Mark Hamill had his face erased in a car accident, he’s wearing so much makeup that he looks like a silent movie star. Harrison Ford looks understandably embarrassed and in need of a cigarette the whole time, but Carrie Fisher, rocking the iconic cinnamon rolls for the last time, heroically lowers herself to the material by singing a ballad about love and togetherness and all that other crap people cared about in the seventies.

All in all, The Star Wars Holiday Special manages to be completely preposterous yet totally boring. Still, it was worth watching, not least because of the animated short that introduced the character of Boba Fett to the world. Once again, he manages to look really cool while doing absolutely nothing. I guess I’m just a sucker for a dude with a jetpack.

BLOWIN' UP

Black Dynamite, a pitch-perfect blaxploitation parody starring Michael Jai White as the title character, went from Internet sensation to film festival favorite to instant cult classic. Its director, Scott Sanders, talks about bringing the sights and sounds of the 70s back to the screen and the significance of the blaxploitation genre.

By Mr. Majestyk

What was the inspiration for Black Dynamite?

It started with Michael Jai White. We had worked together 10 years ago on a movie called Thick As Thieves. I had approached him about doing another movie. I asked him what he was up to, and he said he’d been listening to James Brown’s “Superbad” and came up with the idea for the movie. He did a photo shoot of himself as the character. He had a picture of himself with the gun, the nunchucks, and the suit that he ends the movie in. He had done the poster image, basically. I looked at it and said I really wanted to get in on it. Nobody had ever really done a movie set in the blaxploitation era. You had I’m Gonna Git You Sucka and Undercover Brother but none of those were set in that time period.

Those movies are comedies, but Black Dynamite is a parody that’s also a legitimate action movie. Was it hard to find that balance?

Our goal the whole time was to make it just 10% more ridiculous than real blaxploitation movies. We figured if we stayed close to what they actually were, then it would be funnier because the jokes would be a little deeper.

What were some of the influences you brought to the film?

The Dolemite movies were a big influence in terms of the comedy. You really did have boom mics slipping into shots, or you could see the sound man’s head. There were all these weird continuity issues. The cool thing about playing with that stuff is that you get to see how movies are made. It exposes the conventions more. For Mike, he was really influenced by Jim Brown. He has a relationship with Jim Brown, and he showed him the movie. That was a very moving experience for him. The plot of the movie comes from Three the Hard Way. There’s a very similar plot in that movie. We draw from a lot of movies. The Mack is a personal favorite of ours. Truck Turner. Willie Dynamite. I mean, they have a pimp council scene in Willie Dynamite, so that’s where we got that from. It was fun, because you have this buffet of blaxploitation movies with these crazy, ridiculous scenes that we could do our own versions of. That’s what’s funny about blaxploitation movies. There are all these things crammed together in one movie. Black Dynamite is talking about beating somebody with a hot coat hanger, but then he’s gotta help the kids. Tyler Perry movies are like that, too. They go from broad comedy to serious emotion at a moment’s notice, logic be damned.

The character of Black Dynamite himself is a one-stop shop for blaxploitation heroes. He’s an ex-soldier, he was in the CIA, he knows kung fu, and he’s kind of a pimp, too.

That’s what we wanted to do. You kind of don’t know what Black Dynamite does. He’s kind of a pimp, but not really. He’s like a pimp’s aide. He has an office in the back of the whorehouse, but he’s not a pimp. He just helps out, whatever that means.

One of the funniest parts of the movie is the outtakes with all the pimp characters during the closing credits. Was that stuff written or was it improvised?

Most of that stuff was improvised, like “I have a midget prostitute and she keeps coming up short.”

Did a lot of stuff end up on the cutting room floor?

Yeah, because we had so many great comedians and actors that day. The pimp scene would have gone on for 20 minutes before Black Dynamite even showed up.

The surprise in that scene was Brian McKnight. You don’t expect a sensitive R&B dude to break out the pimp hand like that.

He’s a friend of Mike’s. I think they’d done some plays together. He was great. He was really funny.

How did you get Arsenio Hall in the movie?

He’s a friend of Mike’s, too.

That’s gonna be the answer for everything, isn’t it?

Pretty much. All the guys on the pimp council were friends of Mike’s. Arsenio’s a big fan of Dolemite, too. Once he read the script and saw that he’d get to act with Captain Kangaroo Pimp, he decided he was in.

You’ve got all these funny people in the movie, so it would be easy for Michael to just be the straight man, but he’s actually really funny. Did you know that he had those comedic chops beforehand?

Oh yeah. He was really funny in the first movie we did together. It’s just that not a lot of people saw it. And he’s done some other comedies, like the Tyler Perry thing. But he does a lot of action movies, so a lot of people don’t really see him that way. They don’t see Gambol from The Dark Knight as being this funny guy.

Talk about the kung fu in the movie.

Black Dynamite is supposed to be a Jim Kelly-level martial artist. Mike did a style called Shodokan, which was prevalent during that time. He uses a lot of Jim Kelly-esque stuff in his kung fu. The Bullhorn character does Dolemite-style kung fu.

It’s shocking that Michael Jai White isn’t already a big star. He’s built like He-Man, he has seven black belts, and he can act. Do you think this movie will finally get him the attention he deserves?

It surprises me, too. This is the first time he’s starred in something that’s getting this much international attention. We’ve been to film festivals all over the world. I’m about to go to Italy, and this is a year after Sundance. You go on this whole circuit. I think it’s going to get a lot of attention for him.

The trailer was huge on the Internet long before the movie came out. How did that affect the film’s reception?

The crazy thing is, when Mike and I first got together, we made a fake trailer before we even wrote the script or anything, just to show people we could do the movie. That trailer cost like $500, and that raised the money for the movie. We just put it on a website, and then a Japanese website picked it up, and it spread everywhere. We hadn’t even finished the movie and people were talking about our old promotional trailer on the Internet. It was this real viral thing.

In that trailer, it says that Black Dynamite was played by “Baltimore Colts running back Ferrante Jones.” What’s up with that?

That’s how Mike got his head around the character. He was an ex-football player who was playing Black Dynamite. That’s the meta nature of it.

The look of the movie is flawless. There’s not one frame that doesn’t look like it was shot in the 70s. How did you achieve that?

We shot it on Super 16. We used a film stock that people don’t use very often, color reversal stock. It’s not a negative. It makes it look really, really contrasty. The reason people don’t use it is that you don’t have any latitude whatsoever. It’s really hard to manipulate in the post-production process. What you see is what you get. What I wanted to do was make something that looked like a pristine copy of an old movie, not add a lot of scratches to make it look rough. We also had topnotch people on our production team. Ruth Carter did the costumes, and she’s been nominated for two Academy Awards with Spike Lee and Steven Spielberg. We were really lucky to get her. We had really good people on this weird little movie. I was kind of shocked.

Why do you think they were attracted to the project?

I think they were just really up for the challenge. In the case of Denise Pizzini, my production designer, there were 70 period sets she had to create. In some cases, she just had four or five pieces of wood paneling that she would move from set to set. There’s one wall that’s in five scenes in the movie.

Did you use a lot of stock footage in the movie?

Yes. The funny thing is, it’s stock footage that we bought from Sony before we ended up selling the movie to Sony. I think they got the best end of the deal, because that’s like a double dip. There was a lot of footage from Charlie’s Angels and Police Woman and pilots from 1970s TV shows.

Did you find footage you liked and then put it in the script?

Pretty much. We knew there was going to have to be a chase, and that was going to have to happen with stock footage, because there was no way we could afford a vintage car chase. Then you stumble upon things, like, here’s a scene with a helicopter picking up a car with a magnet. What can we use it for?

A big part of what makes the movie feel so vintage is the music. Talk about the soundtrack.

In between the two movies I directed, I was a DJ in Los Angeles. I met another DJ named Adrian Younge. Not only is he the composer for the movie, he’s also the editor. He’s always been collecting vintage instruments and trying to make music in his basement that sounds just like Marvin Gaye. He’d have the same kind of tape and all these sitars and stuff. Half the music is his. The second half is from a British funk library from the 70s. A lot of the stings came from there.

There’s such a thing as British funk?

Yeah. It was music from these European session guys who would make music for libraries to put in TV shows. A lot of it is incredibly funky and really hard to find. Our music supervisor is a guy named David Hollander, who was previously best known for playing “Little Earl” on What’s Happening!! He grew up to be one of the biggest funk collectors.

It’s amazing that the new music sounds exactly like the music that was recorded back in the day.

You just have to get all the old equipment. It’s a warmer, more analog sound. The set-up in Adrian’s garage is hilarious. He’s got all these old vintage microphones, and then he starts singing under a blanket.

That must be for that warmth you’re talking about.

Exactly. He’s got this whole configuration that’s fun to watch.

What attracted you to the blaxploitation genre in the first place?

It was the first time that Black people were heroes in movies. Because Blacks played servants in movies for so long, by the time they got the chance to play heroes, they became outsized superheroes. Its place in history is unique. It was such a short period of time. It was pretty much just 1971 to 1975. People forget how short it was, and they call other things blaxploitation movies.

Do you think there’s anything like it today?

There are things that have elements of it, but it’s such a distinct thing to a very distinct period of time, in terms of what was going on politically and musically. Without that, it becomes something else. It’s like the way house music is influenced by disco. It’s not disco, but it’s the disco of its era. Boyz N the Hood spawned a whole generation of hood movies, which have some elements of blaxploitaiton, but they’re not blaxploitation.

Why do you think it died out?

I think the need for it changed. In the world of Black Dynamite, a Black man could never be president. If a Black man is president, then the whole thing falls apart. How are you gonna stick it to the Man if the Man is Black? Who are you gonna stick it to? We wanted to have a scene where somehow Black Dynamite sees the future and suddenly he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Are we going to see any further adventures of Black Dynamite?

Absolutely, at least in one incarnation. It’s going to be a cartoon on Adult Swim. We’re about to do the pilot right now.

Black Dynamite has become a midnight movie. Have you been to any of the screenings?

I haven’t been to any of the recent ones, because they’re in all these odd places, like Colorado Springs and Colombia, Missouri. But it always played at midnight at the festivals. That’s how we started, and it’s funny that it’s how we’re ending.

Black Dynamite comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray from Sony Pictures on February 16, 2010.