Ho films are often interchangeable, but Ninja Fantasy (also released as Twinkle Ninja Fantasy and Empire of The Ninjas) remains one of his more easily-identifiable and well-known efforts - particularly thanks to an infamous sequence wherein a blue-clad ninja battles a swarm of red-suited attackers who sneak up on him and his lady friend on a secluded beach by transforming into fish. Nearly all of his films featured the word "Ninja" somewhere in the title and were created by editing newly-shot fight scenes featuring colorfully-costumed ninja into (unrelated) pre-existing low-budget films from Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere in Asia, and then using English-language dubbing to (loosely) tie the scenes together with an entirely new plot. Nobody did more to make ninja a fixture of video store shelves in the '80s (but also targets of ridicule and parody) than enigmatic Hong Kong producer/director Godfrey Ho, believed to have been behind over 80 films between 19 under a litany of assumed names, including Godfrey Hall, Benny Ho, Ho Chi-Mou, Ed Woo, Stanley Chan, Ho Fong and more. Regardless, at the time, seeing kung-fu/grindhouse fixture like ninja sharing the screen with major Hollywood stars was something entirely new and exciting. Instead, the film treats them more as a deadly (but hardly terrifying) part of the Japanese characters' strange/"exotic" cultural quirks. Viewed today it's more of a curiosity item, a chance for martial-arts fans to see ninja presented in Peckinpah's more "grounded" Western style (no wirework, no exaggerate sound-effects, no invincibility to gunfire), though some may be disappointed to discover that when Killer Elite's ninja do finally make their appearance, they don't exactly rate the proper respect from the main (Western) cast. This fairly by-the-numbers thriller about a team of veteran mercenaries protecting a Japanese diplomat doesn't rate as one of the legendary tough-guy director's best, and isn't a particularly enthralling ninja feature, but it's a solid movie and a landmark for ninja fans as one of the first mainstream American feature films to give the shadow-assassins a "realistic" presentation - albeit one confined mostly to the extended shipyard-brawl finale. Sam Peckinpah? one of the greatest action filmmakers of all time, made a ninja movie?! With James Caan, Robert Duvall and Burt Young?!! For action junkies it sounds too good to be true.
Here are the 15 best movies that came about as a result. And when so-called "kung-fu movies" exploded in popularity worldwide in the '70s and '80s, the ninja legend exploded right along with it. This, of course, made them a popular villain for the originally Chinese-centric martial-arts film genre as well. Rather, the world mainly came to know of them through Chinese historical-fiction (the word "ninja" itself is an Early Middle Chinese translation of the kanji 忍者 which is read as "shinobi" in Japanese), where ninja were popularized as an example of treacherous, dishonorable behavior to be expected of Japanese villains.
IS MOVIE NINJA IO DOWN PROFESSIONAL
Some even managed to establish "respectable" houses/lineages of their own, eventually becoming the basis for the "shadow warrior" archetype by which ninja are popularly imagined today.Īs befits professional killers paid to undertake what would today be called "black ops" missions, little is recorded of actual ninja activity in Japanese history. They became highly sought-after for their skills and willingness to do "dirty work" that samurai often felt was beneath them. Two such clans, the Koga and the Iga, became so well known for producing skilled ninjas that some would leave their communities to become professional operatives for specific nobles or the Shogunate itself.
The field was "evened" so effectively, in fact, that the nobles began to hire the best of these clans' so-called "ninjas" as spies and mercenaries. Unable to stand up in traditional combat to the expensively funded and heavily-outfitted samurai, some of these resistant clans developed unique martial-arts techniques and fighting strategies based on mastery of one's environment, along with weapons based on common tools and simple farming equipment, in order to even the playing field in combat. During the feudal era in Japan (largely beginning in the 15th Century), many isolated rural clans were resistant and even hostile to the idea of being ruled over by the laws of nobles - especially when they were being enforced by often oppressive samurai. Let's be clear about one thing upfront: Ninja were (and, depending on who you ask, still are) a real thing.