American Ninja

This movie originally came out in 1985 when i was a young teenager. Like many teenagers back then I was obsessed with martial arts and ninjas. This movie (like many others around that time) was made to profit off that obsession. I have not seen the movie since maybe 1986 or 1987. When i saw this was coming on TV i was stoked, remembering how fond I was of it. It took about 10 minutes for it to be painfully obvious that I didn’t have the most discerning eye in 1985. The action scenes are absolutely laughable. I know we (Americans) didn’t know much about martial arts in the mid ’80s but wow was this bad martial arts. Action movie directing has gotten substantially better in the last 15 years or so but realizing that Jackie Chan’s Police story was made in the same year as this, shows there was good martial arts direction going on back then.

So the martial arts was pretty bad. The action editing was bad. The acting was pretty bad (even from some known good actors). The story and writing (especially the dialogue) was bad. Despite all of this, the movie was not too bad. I mean it won’t win any awards but it was better than some $100 million crap fests that come out today. It was 100 time better than the random Lifetime movie. It might just be bad enough to use as a revenge movie when your wife or girlfriend makes you watch the notebook, but maybe not good enough to waste your action movie night on.It has the production value of a high end B movie. It is not Asylum bad but not big budget either.

This movie made over $10,000,000 with a budget of $500,000 which shows you how much young people were into ninjas back then. This is a huge cheesfest but in the end is a decent bit of fun, despite the contrived and easily guessed plot and bad acting.

My rating 6.0 out of 10

Here is the trailer.