Ninja Wars (1982)

**SPOILERS**

The 1985 video game The Legend of Kage is one of my favorites of all time.  It’s an extremely simple game: You run around forests and castles, killing monks and ninja with your double blades and shuriken until you’re done.  About as basic a video game premise as you’ll ever get.  I don’t think that I would love it as much as I do had I not seen Kosei Saito’s Ninja Wars (aka Iga Ninpocho aka Death of a Ninja aka Black Magic Wars) a few years prior, because the game bears a lot of the touches that make the film interesting.  The Legend of Kage has firebreathing monks with those face-covering, conical straw hats we’ve seen so very many times.  Its main character isn’t dressed like what Americans back then had become used to as the visual idea of a ninja from such magazines as…well…Ninja.  Kage wears a short tunic, and he has long hair and no mask of which to speak.  All the characters can leap almost the entire length and breadth of the screen.  There’s a princess to be rescued from the evil bosses.  There’s a temple that has to be assailed in order to do this.  The game stands out for its uniquely Japanese fantasy elements, in my opinion.  Sure, there were games that had similar components (if there were a video game trope more profligate than musclebound badasses rescuing someone/taking revenge, it was ninja/martial artists rescuing someone/taking revenge), but none harkened back so specifically to Ninja Wars (and bear in mind, up to that moment in time, I was only familiar with the works of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Shaw Bros) in my adolescent brain to the point that I used to believe/fantasize that the game was adapted from the film (which is itself adapted from a 1964 novel by Futaro Yamada).  And still, the film is one I find extremely difficult to both discuss and to love outside of certain facets.    

Try to follow along.  Evil sorcerer/blank-faced cackler/creepy uncle Kashin Koji (Mikio Narita) prophecies to gormless pawn/power-hungry lord/architect(?) Donjo (Akira Nakao) that whosoever wins the heart of the beautiful Ukyodayu (Noriko Watanabe), who is currently married to the even more gormless Lord Miyoshi (Noboru Matsuhashi), will hold the world in his hands.  Easy enough, right?  Kashin gives Donjo five “Devil Monks” (a blind one, a skinny one, a giant one, a woman one, and an acid-spitting (?) one who looks like the Asian Avery Schreiber) to help him achieve this goal by creating a love potion.  Meanwhile, young ninja in love Jotaro (Hiroyuki Sanada) and Kagaribi (Watanabe in a dual role) profess their love for each other and perfect their ninja clan’s Crescent Dagger Technique.  It turns out, Kagaribi is Ukyodayu’s twin sister (separated because she’s Christian[?]), and she’s kidnapped by the monks so they can extract her tears for the potion.  Killing herself by cutting off her own head, the monks take the head from Donjo’s courtesan/wife (?) Isaribi (Jun Miho), plant it on Kagaribi’s body, and rename her Onibi (also Lady Hellfire).  Things escalate from there.

The primary driving force behind Ninja Wars is the conflict between lust and love.  Donjo lusts for power, and thus, he lusts for Ukyodayu (even though she’s gorgeous, we never quite get the feeling that Donjo is interested in her as anything other than a means to an end).  He built Miyoshi’s castle, and that symbol of power and achievement is the chief characteristic of Donjo’s character.  Donjo is allowed to have sex with Onibi like a blowup doll (thankfully, we never see this to my recollection).  The monks are also filled with lust.  One of them rapes Onibi in order to extract her tears for the love potion.  They test out the potion on one of Donjo’s servants who immediately desires the blind monk, exposes her breasts to him, and leads him upstairs for a quick one (he gladly follows along, toying with her boobs the whole way).  The female monk (I think) disguises herself as Ukyodayu (I think) and seduces Miyoshi in order to ensorcell him.  

Conversely, Jotaro and Kagaribi have a very pure, even chaste, love for each other.  After Kagaribi is killed, this love transfers to Ukyodayu in a damsel in distress kind of way.  It’s their love that generates the tension of the story, and their ultimate decision at the film’s finale is the off-center (but still somehow fitting) punctuation to this expression.  Ukyodayu is the center point between Jotaro’s love and Donjo’s lust (let’s never mind that both men more or less use her as a tool to fulfill their own needs, and even though she chooses Jotaro, there’s no real reason for it other than that he’s the good guy).  Between these two extremes is Shinzaemon (Sonny Chiba), master of the Yagyu Clan.  Shinzaemon knows that Kashin is evil, and anything he orchestrates is “wrong.”  He doesn’t lust for anything other than justice, and he is on the side of the young lovers, because they’re virtuous and because their love is “correct.”  The few times Shinzaemon shows up onscreen, it is to save Jotaro and Ukyodayu’s bacon and encourage them to continue along their righteous path.  Thus, anytime the villains are onscreen, we know we’re likely to get something skanky, and anytime the good guys are onscreen, we know we’re going to get something puppy-love-esque.

There is a religious theme running through the film, focusing on the worthiness of Christianity in much the same way as just about every film dealing with Satanism/the occult does.  The monks, and by association Donjo, are either atheists, Satanists, or pagans (maybe all three from the way they act).  They serve the flagitious Kashin, who is portrayed as a quasi-omnipotent demigod, though it’s never stated that he’s anything more than a very powerful human.  The centerpiece of the film takes place at a Buddhist temple, which the monks attack during some ceremony, burning it to the ground (this culminates, in slow motion, with the head of the giant statue of Buddha crashing to the ground).  So, even Buddhism isn’t sufficient to defeat this evil.  Kagaribi (and, consequently, Jotaro) is a Christian, and she wears a crystal crucifix around her neck.  This crucifix inexplicably transfers to Ukyodayu (There may be two crystal crucifixes; Regardless, I thought Ukyodayu wasn’t raised Christian, but all things considered, this could just as easily be a further statement on the power of Christianity in the film).  The crucifix burns Onibi as she attempts to beguile Jotaro.  Ukyodayu winds up on an actual cross set atop a pyre in Kashin’s netherworld/otherworld, ready to sacrifice herself in fire.  Jotaro’s decision to join her is simultaneously an expression of their love and an expression of the messianic dimension of Christianity.  That this act touches Kashin is a testament to the film’s perspective on the subject, in my opinion.

For as much as there is in this film to admire (and the action sequences are sufficiently large scale, well-photographed, and well-choreographed), it really is a hot mess at the end of the day.  This is the sort of film where characters will decide to do something, ostensibly in order to achieve their goals, but really it’s just to have another weird sequence happen.  None of the characters are interesting other than the monks, and even they are only interesting for their peculiarities.  The plot is a massive game of “Hot Potato” that never pays off.  It only exists to bring the characters in proximity to one another.  Ninja Wars is a labyrinth of a film, its convolutions leading to either dead ends or cliff drops.  And like a rat in a lab maze, the viewer is prompted through the movie with the promise of a piece of cheese at the end.  The only problem is that the egress of the maze just leads to another maze, and any cheese there is to be had is picked up, perfectly by happenstance, at random intervals throughout.  So, you still get some rewards, but you’re never fully satisfied when it’s all done.

MVT:  For all its myriad issues, the inventiveness and insanity of Ninja Wars really needs to be seen to be believed.

Make or Break:  The assault on the Buddhist temple, while admittedly a tad overlong, really is wildly impressive on a variety of levels.

Score:  6.75/10

Wolfguy: Enraged Wolfman (1975)

The first manga I ever came into contact with was a little gem called Xenon (aka Heavy Metal Warrior Xenon aka Bio Diver Xenon) by Masaomi Kanzaki.  I found the premiere issue at my local comic shop, and I think it was published in America at that time by Eclipse, though I may be wrong about that.  I had encountered anime series like Battle Of The Planets (aka Science Ninja Team Gatchaman) and Tranzor Z (aka Mazinger Z), and loved the living hell out of them, so I was used to the general visual style and level of insanity.  But the sheer detail carried off in the comic was like something from another world for me (obviously, considering the time, labor, and money constraints between the two mediums this is no real surprise).  Xenon was essentially about a young man who has his body cybernetically modified and then gets attacked every month by a swelling cast of whacked out villains.  Needless to say, this was (and likely still is) like crack for a male teenaged comic book reader.  I think I still have a couple of issues, but I have been meaning to go back, collect the whole series, and re-read them.  I doubt that it would hold up for me half as well today, but I would like to think that, if nothing else, it might stave off the ever-increasing acedia that sits forever poised on the outer edges of my day-to-day.  Sweet fire of life, thy name be comics.  Maybe?

A crazed man careens through the streets of Tokyo, screaming about a were-tiger on his tail (sorry).  Running into tough-as-nails reporter (I think he’s a reporter, at any rate) Inugami (Shin’ichi Chiba), the man is ripped to shreds by invisible claws in front of our protagonist.  Later, the official coroner’s report lists cause of death as “spectral slasher” (of course it does).  Inugami takes it upon himself to find the mysterious singer Miki, who is the key to what’s happening.  Along the way many, many people get killed very violently.

Of course, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi’s Wolfguy: Enraged Wolfman (aka Urufu Gai: Moero Okami-otoko aka Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope) is based on a manga, and this largely accounts for its episodic nature.  However, it has been my experience that a great many of the films produced by film company Toei at this time (The Street Fighter, Sister Street Fighter, Female Prisoner Scorpion, etcetera) had this same narrative structure.  They would introduce a main character and a base storyline, and then they would drop the main character into a bunch of variegated situations (either action-oriented and/or sexual) until they suddenly brought it all back around to resolve the initial storyline.  They are lurid, violent, and they keep moving whether you can keep up with them or not.  This fitful approach can be off-putting to anyone who wants a straight, linear story.  Even though the various sections all relate back to the main plot at least tangentially, they only occasionally have much bearing on it or on developing it or moving it along, for better or worse.  This doesn’t particularly bother me as a viewer, because the sheer inventiveness of what they put the characters through is at least entertaining enough to never be completely boring.  While I’m speaking of style, I have to address Yamaguchi’s direction.  His camerawork is so frenetic, so willfully disorienting and nigh spasmodic, it does become quickly frustrating.  Add to that the fact that most compositions in the film are so tight as to be claustrophobic, to the point that even the blocking of many of the dialogue scenes is muddled.  Consequently, Wolfguy never really took off for me.  Mayhap, those more inured to this fashion of filmmaking will get more out of it.

Being a werewolf (who, incidentally, never actually transforms aside from his hair and eyebrows getting a trifle wilder; Inugami merely gains supernatural powers on the fifteenth day of every lunar cycle), the film is rife with references to the similarities between people and animals.  Reporters in general are referred to as “jackals.”  Inugami is told by a hot government agent that he’s “got sharp animal instincts” and he smells “like an animal, too” right before she has sex with him (just another day in the life of a Wolfguy).  Miki’s song contains the lyric “a woman’s claws are the claws of a tiger.”  Inugami chucks the vegetables from his dinner plate and stuffs massive chunks of steak into his mouth.  The rock band that were instrumental (ahem) in much of what happens are pared down to their basest animal desires.  Characters lick blood off their hands.  But two things emerge from all this.  One, only those truly in line with their animal nature are considered good or even have any sort of worth.  So, Inugami can best an agent given a transfusion of his blood handily, because Inugami can control his bestial side.  Miki’s rage is righteous because of what she has endured, and it has brought her inner nature into focus.  Two, this same feral aspect distances these characters from the rest of humanity.  Inugami is unlike anyone else, and he must remove himself from society because of this.  In a telling visual touch, Miki’s apartment is decorated with a wall-sized photo of herself holding a flower.  Considering how far she has been degraded, it creates a sharp statement about innocence (read: humanity) lost.  Inugami and Miki connect on an emotional level, but they must remain apart, because despite their similarities, Miki is still human and Inugami isn’t.  The only person our hero truly bonds with is someone who directly connects him to his deceased mother, and even this is destined not to last, because she is also human.

There is a streak of individualism running through the film, as well (as there is through the other examples cited above).  In the same way that the animal characters are outsiders, they are also directly in opposition to the massed forces of power in the film.  Inugami fights large gangs of yakuza and government agents all by himself.  Miki remains defiantly herself in the face of her attackers, and even when working at a low rent strip club, she refuses to take her clothes off despite the patrons heckling her and throwing objects at her.  It’s only when a character aligns themselves with the factions of power that they can be considered evil, because they have given up their unique personality and become just more fodder for the cannons of the dominant.  An interesting facet for a film that doesn’t quite manage to rise above its peers.

MVT:  It should go without saying that the film rests fundamentally on the shoulders of Chiba, and he handles this responsibility well.  It is, after all, why he was such a massive star for so long.  By that same token, he plays Inugami about the same as every other action role he attacked, giving no more or less than his usual one-hundred-and-ten percent.  If you liked him in everything else you’ve seen him in, you’ll like him equally here.

Make Or Break:  The opening scene sums up and foreshadows the film as well as any scene could.  It introduces Inugami and the “spectral slasher” angle, gives the audience some nice gore, and may just induce a slight bout of nausea with its cinematography.

Score:  6.5/10

Samurai Reincarnation (1981)

(Please note, the above image may have nothing to do with this film specifically [it may have to do with an anime based on the same source material], but I liked it more than what else was available online)

I absolutely love the video game The Legend Of Kage.  The premise is basic: rescue a princess from the bad guys, who happen to be other ninja and Japanese Buddhist monks.  However, you, Kage, are not a ninja of the traditional variety (at least visually).  You have no mask and full-covering outfit.  Instead, you have long hair, no mask, and shorts.  And did I mention the monks you have to fight can breathe fire?  The first time I played this game, it put me in mind of the film Ninja Wars, which I had seen a couple years before.  Up until this point in my life, I had seen a bit of Shaw Bros’ kung fu goodness here and there, but my experience with Chanbara/Jidaigeki was limited, and my experience with ninja was with the Kosugi/Cannon versions of the archetypes.  The first time I saw it, I didn’t quite know how to process something like Ninja Wars.  It is utterly bizarre and a bit sleazier than I was used to at that point in time.  Kage gave me a way to deal with what I saw in that film.  Jump, throw shuriken, beat firebreathing bad guys, and win the lady’s hand; the game and game play is simplistic in the extreme but so much fun.  To my adolescent mind, this was the video game adaptation of that outré film which had piqued my young brain’s interest, and I loved it, because I got to be a part of it.  Or, you know, as much as you can be a part of a video game you had no part in creating. 

Following the wildly unsuccessful Shimabara Rebellion of the seventeenth century, beheaded Christian leader Shiro Amakusa (Kenji Sawada) returns from the grave, denounces the God he feels is uncaring towards he and his people’s plight, and invites the power of the Devil and his minions into his body to take revenge on the Shogun (Noboru Matsuhashi).  Making his way around the countryside, Shiro assembles a collection of people with various evils in their hearts and regrets on their minds and transforms them into his coterie of evil ghosts.  Meanwhile, Jubei (Sonny Chiba), one-eyed son of the Shogun’s sword instructor, Tajimanokami (the Lone Wolf himself, Tomisaburo Wakayama), has taken on the task of bringing down the demons before they demolish the entire Tokugawa Shogunate.

Like Ninja Wars, the late, great Kinji Fukasaku’s (who most will remember as the director of such classics as The Green Slime, Battle Royale, and Message From Space) Samurai Reincarnation (aka Makai Tensho, the title of the book on which the film is based) was released by the Toei Company, and the two do share some obvious similarities.  They both have ninja who dress like Kage.  They both have Sonny Chiba, though I think his role is bigger in this film, if memory serves.  They both have evil Buddhist monks doing disreputable things to young women.  More than those things, they both mix Chanbara and Fantasy/Horror elements.  Consequently, fans of period films about samurai can enjoy them, though perhaps slightly less than Horror or Fantasy fans will.  

This mixing, however, is something which feels more organic in Japanese cinema than it does in Western cinema.  There are not a lot of Weird Westerns which are all that successful either on the level of audience satisfaction or box office (or any, come to think of it, though the wretched Wild, Wild West came close monetarily, and the animated series Bravestarr was a lot of fun if fairly one-note).  Perhaps this is because, for as much as the country has changed technologically, the Japanese spirit has forever been perceived in the same traditional manner since the West became aware of it.  Therefore, there is a general viewpoint that, no matter how much Japan develops in reality, its spiritual link to the land it’s built upon makes it easy to believe the confluence of nature and the supernatural.  Thus, the inclusion of uncanny elements is exactly that: inclusion.  Unlike in the Western world, the Japanese spectral and corporeal realms crisscross with one another, affecting and reacting to each other in a matter-of-fact fashion.  I admit, these are my own conclusions based upon my experience with cinema on both sides of the pond, so by all means, feel free to disagree.

The film has a theatrical air about it, which Fukasaku plays up at every available opportunity.  The very first scene takes place with the Shogun’s samurai watching a performance (in the Noh form of Japanese theatre, if I’m not mistaken), presumably after having slaughtered about thirty-seven thousand Christians (the timeline is unclear).  The evil Shiro possesses the body of the play’s main actor.  Afterwards, he dresses in a fashion which is extremely flamboyant (and importantly recalls a more Western archetype of sorcerous sartorial cooptation).  The director also makes heavy use of frames within frames, and this is a technique I have always found extraordinarily appealing.  Here, whether the frame is the pillars holding up a roof or the separate sections of a stained glass window, they evoke the proscenium arch of a stage, separating viewers from performers.  Aside from the heavy use of makeup on the ghosts’ faces, Fukasaku further distances the film from the realm of naturalism in his treatment of flashbacks, most notably those involving the master swordsman Musashi (Ken Ogata).  While sitting in full armor, his thoughts are spoken aloud to the audience.  His past youthful triumphs in battle are then recounted via a series of cuts to black and white photographs.  This bit of self-reflexivity reminds the viewer that they are watching a film, as well as very effectively conjuring the same sense of nostalgia anyone may get looking over the pictures they have amassed over the course of a lifetime.  

The settings of the film switch between natural and soundstage (I can only assume as a means of controlling scenes which have a large amount of special effects work in them), but in whatever environ, Fukasaku  goes out of his way to create a strong sense of depth within the frame, mostly via the use of overlapping objects from foreground to background.  Combined with strong, atmospheric light schemes throughout, the filmmaker creates a mildly nauseating mood in line with the sense of tragedy and borderline revulsion the film is intended to evince.  It is, after all, one thing to defy one’s Higher Power after feeling betrayed.  It is another to do so by deliberately sticking one’s finger in the Almighty’s eye and wallowing in the fetid crapulence of one’s basest appetites.  It’s like the difference between breaking up with one’s lover and breaking up with one’s lover and then having really deviant sex with every one of their friends and family on which one can lay one’s hands.  And while the film’s episodic structure does rob it of some much-needed momentum, and the ending itself is a trifle anticlimactic (I’m unsure if there was ever a sequel; perhaps Ninja Wars was it?), it’s the admixture of Samurai Reincarnation’s disparities which makes it as entertaining as it is.

MVT:  I have to give it to Fukasaku.  The man had a sense of style and composition as strong as that of any more well-known director.  Even when working on some less than prestigious projects, he brought his every talent to bear, and Samurai Reincarnation is no exception (though I don’t mean to imply it’s not a piece of work to be proud of, merely that it’s hardly ever mentioned in the same breath with some of his other films, like, say Graveyard Of Honor, though if Wikipedia is correct, Samurai Reincarnation won two of the three “Awards of the Japanese Academy” for which it was nominated).

Make Or Break:  Towards the film’s climax, there is a duel inside a burning building.  From the very first shot of the scene (which has risen to being possibly one of my favorite images in cinema of all time), the fight is staged and filmed remarkably well.  If there was matting used, I couldn’t spot it.  I also couldn’t spot any stuntmen standing in for the actors, so kudos across the board for the bravery and dedication this scene puts on display.  Plus, it’s a cracking good action setpiece.

Score:  7/10