Enter the Ninja (1981)

(On Cable TV, May 2021) If you want to track down where the popularity of ninjas comes from, maybe you can follow the trail to a B-movie ninja craze in the 1980s, and you can probably pin down the source of that craze to 1981’s Enter the Ninja, a cheap Golan-Globus action movie that took full advantage of accommodations by the movie-friendly Marcos regime to film in the Philippines. The plot is a thin affair, with a ninja-trained American having to defend a friend’s farm from attackers. But that story is merely meant to justify the fight sequences, so as long as good guys and bad guys are scheduled to be at the same place and the same time, then the screenwriters can just call it a day. Unfortunately, we’re not talking Hong Kong-grade martial arts here — this is all fairly basic material, choreographed without much cinematic flair or storytelling sense. Enter the Ninja also has an unpolished first movie’s disadvantage, in that the filmmakers didn’t quite know what worked and what didn’t, and so limp along with substandard fight scenes when compared to later, more self-conscious works. It’s watchable only by genre fans that have an interest in historical work. What’s undeniable is the commercial success of the film — it directly spawned a trilogy of ever-wilder Ninja movies, as well as a few follow-ups (like the very similar American Ninja) and scores of imitators sensing that there was something to do with martial arts in a B-movie context. Not very many classics came out of that subgenre (it’s worth noting that the boom in prestige martial arts films in 2000s Hollywood cinema was far more influenced by 1990s Hong Kong action movies than 1980s low-end Hollywood) but it did create a few enjoyable B-movies, so that’s something.