Blogorium Review (kinda) - Bionic Ninja

Folks, this is the danger of imprecisely titled movies, particularly ones about ninjas.

This is what I thought I was going to see:


But there is no such movie available on Netflix, or Amazon. In fact, they rerouted me to Bionic Ninja, which has an IMDB page that sure looks like the trailer above. But it turns out what I was looking for is this movie. That movie (Rage of Ninja) is only available on VHS, so the Bionic Ninja I picked up for $4 (with three other Ninja movies) is pretty much a bust.

See, Bionic Ninja, while from the same director (Godfrey Ho, using one of his many aliases) is nowhere as interesting as the trailer above. Since there's no trailer for Bionic Ninja, I can't show it to you, but it wouldn't matter. The plot is incomprehensible:

Bionic Ninja has something to do with the KGB using ninjas in Hong Kong to steal a secret formula for... something, except that they fail to steal the formula before some other guys do. A CIA agent then arrives, but is really British, or something, and he becomes fascinated by the "magic" ninjas. I say "magic" in part because he calls them magicians but also because the ninjas are able to appear and disappear at whim. Not "sneak off into the night" disappear, but literally just pop in and out of a scene as though editing trickery were at play (hint: it is).

There are at least ten other characters I counted that have something to do with the plot, but they're so poorly identified and are piled on top of each other so quickly that it's impossible to figure out exactly what's happening, who is doing what to whom, or what any of it has to do with the formula, the KGB, or the ninjas.

After a while, I got bored and hit the "fast forward" button until I saw instances with ninjas, which it turned out were few and far between. There was a kind-of training montage with the hero, and then a pretty lousy fight in a storage yard with two guys in ninja costumes shooting Uzis for no good reason. There is no Bionic Ninja that I could find, nor do the ninjas even really do anything except jump around. There are some other fight scenes, but when you don't really know who is fighting or what they're fighting about, it's pretty easy to lose interest, so I tuned out about halfway in.

More than anything, I was bummed that this wasn't Rage of Ninja, which was what I was hoping for. When I watch a ninja movie, I'm not looking for sleek assassins hiding in the dark and being badasses; I want truly nonsensical fight scenes coupled with bad dubbing and a white dude who has no business mixing it up with martial artists. Something like this:



Huh. Funny, I think that's the other half of the double feature with Bionic Ninja. Maybe all is not lost...