The plaintive guitar melody wafts across the night sky. You can hear a male folksinger-type voice crooning that “Ninja’s just another word for … nothin’ left to light.”

Tough Ninja the Shadow Warrior might have been better if I could see what was going on in the first 20ish minutes of the movie. Or perhaps not. It might have ruined the “mystique.”

The movie starts with a bunch of young adult types being recruited to ninja training camp. Turns out that ninja training camp is more rigorous than they expected, so they attempt to escape. Some are killed. A few escape unscathed. Our protagonists are injured in the escape, because the ninjas set dogs on them.

The ninjas. Set dogs (loudly barking). On them. At night.

These are some Ninjas Unclear On The Concept Of Stealth.

Lily is bitten by a dog, but she and Jenny and a couple of guys manage to escape. Luckily, they are found by kindly Uncle Brown. He gets jobs for them.

Whoops, it turns out that kindly Uncle Brown is a procurer of flesh for the mobster Yamada. There’s no way to sugarcoat this. Yamada is Japanese. You can tell by how they refer to him as “The Jap” about every other time. It’s mostly only a wee bit racist. Mostly.

There is a second plot with some ninjas upset about a gang of fake ninjas which are stealing jewels, thus bringing attention from the authorities to the real ninjas. The real ninjas intend on combating this by stealing the jewels from the fake ninjas. Which will somehow make the authorities forget about the real ninjas? Sadly, we never see this.

Lily’s aunt pays her ransom to get her away from the procurers. Lily’s aunt gives Lily a job. As a hostess. This turns out to be a bad idea. The other hostesses don’t like Lily. They try to ambush her outside of work. They claim they’re “the female ninjas.” Lily says that she hates ninjas.

Lily beats up all five of the “female ninjas.” Lily is probably the second-best fighter in the movie (second only to … Yamada).

Jenny is freed from the flesh procurers by one of the guys she escaped with from Camp Ninja (I think — there are a lot of mostly-interchangeable guys in this one). He gets beaten up. He asks his uncle for a job, but his uncle refuses because of Yamada.

There is an entirely-unexpected sequence of extortions (both successful and attempted) in a series of men’s rooms. At urinals. In use.

There is also more foreplay in a gratuitous sex sequence than I have ever seen in a ninja / kung fu movie. Toe-sucking set to a whimsical Casio soundtrack.

There is something wrong with Lily. She keeps getting fevers. She’s very thirsty.

At the end, she is able to defeat Yamada by growling and biting him. Are they intending to imply that Lily is rabid?

At the end of the other part of the movie, a ninja garbed in white shows up (for the first time!) and takes out the boss of the ninjas that ran Camp Ninja.

This movie is produced by Tomas Tang and directed by Godfrey Ho (under a pseudonym). These movies don’t often make a lot of sense, but this one makes even less sense than most. It feels like they were groping in the dark toward their formula — but they hadn’t found it yet.

Life is hard in 1939 when you’re a red-blooded patriotic American young man with a twisted leg who wants nothing more than to ship off to Germany or Japan as a soldier (*).

Danny Coogan makes chairs. Damn fine woodworker. His brother Donny is a soldier.

There is a Monsieur Toulon who has a mysterious glowing liquid and a case of puppets — and he’s being sought by the Germans and Japanese (whose agents have a strange passive-aggressive relationship).

Soon, Monsieur Toulon is dead, Donny is dead, and Donny’s girlfriend has been captured by The Enemy. Danny mixes some of his brother’s fluids into the green liquid and injects it into a new puppet, then sets out to seek vengeance.

Ultimately, don’t think too hard about anything in Puppetmaster: Axis of Evil. The puppets have a better emotional range than the characters. It’s directed by David DeCoteau (**), and its badness is kept firmly under-the-top, tongue only briefly flirting with cheek.

Or as Amy said, “Well, that was terrible … but competently made.”


(*) Don’t come at me, come at the movie.


(**) Per Amy, DeCoteau’s artistic vision was seriously compromised because there is not one scene of Danny, Donny, or Monsieur Tolon wearing only boxer briefs and socks. Similarly, there are no scenes of any humans smearing oil onto smooth, muscled chests. No promises about the puppets, though!

Skinned Deep was a very odd and highly-entertaining movie. Did it start with an actual branding sequence? Yes. Did it have male nudity? Also yes. Does it feature Warwick Davis? Again, yes. Am I getting ahead of myself? Entirely so.

This movie was well-directed, and the set dressing was phenomenal. Everyone involved put a lot of effort into this movie. It was clearly a labor of love. In Greek philosophy, there are 7 different kinds of love: Eros, Philia, Storge, Agape, Ludus, Pragma, Philautia. This falls squarely in the Ludus category. The movie is playful and flirtatious with its audience. It’s a no-strings-attached, something-odd-is-going-on, wait-that’s-actually-bonkers kind of love.

The Rockwell family (father, mother, son, daughter) are taking a road trip, but they find themselves lost, with a flat tire. They hike to a nearby convenience store / gas station. The proprietress, Granny, invites them to stay and eat a meal with her family while one of her sons goes to fix the car. Her sons are: Plates (Warwick Davis), Brains, and the Surgeon General.

It doesn’t take long before the father, mother, and son are dead — and the daughter, Tina, is imprisoned in a room covered in newspapers. The bulk of the movie is Tina attempting to escape from captivity, while at the same time Brains is courting her (to Granny’s disapproval).

There are some fun action set pieces (one involving elderly bikers, another involving moving vehicles). Brains shows Tina how to ride a motorcycle and imagines running naked through the streets of New York City.

Tina discovers the reasons why Granny’s family is the way they are (sort of), and ultimately escapes (…or does she?), but the journey is one that will stick with you like a heaping mouthful of peanut butter: tasty, and difficult to excavate.

“I didn’t know if you were hungry, so I brought you some soup and money.” This is one deeply odd movie that I wouldn’t mind watching again. There is some gore, but it’s not fetishized.

I’m not actually sure what the point of Vortex is. It comes to us from 1967, a black and white movie about a woman and her — husband? boyfriend? partner? — and the partner’s brother, and some other random men. Most of it takes place on a Greek island after the brother has vanished. Some of it takes place the day before they leave London, when the woman has sex with her partner’s brother. None of it takes place in the realm of linear logic and sound reasoning.

There are a lot of pauses. There’s a lot of repetitive action. And periodically there are scenes where you can see the director and the crew. This is clearly not accidental, as there are scenes of the director directing the actors through a scene — multiple times.

Whatever the heck this movie is, it’s not a CMP movie. Maybe there was subtext that I missed. Maybe it just didn’t make any sense. There was an ominous pair of scissors that never were used for anything except atmosphere. Maybe they cut the sense out of the movie?

Let me set the scene for you. This movie is called Neutron and the Black Mask, but neither Neutron (our hero) nor Dr Caronte (our villain) wears a black mask. There is one scene where Neutron wears a black mask (and calls himself The Black Mask), but it’s literally only one scene in the entire film.

The proxy struggle between Neutron and Dr Caronte in this film involves a scientist who invents a bomb so incredibly powerful that it will guarantee peace. You can imagine how well that works out.

The scientist’s evil lab assistant kills him in order to steal the formula. Dr Caronte wants to buy it. Neutron doesn’t want Dr Caronte to have it. The usual policia are their usual marginally-competent-but-not-so-much-as-to-overshadow-the-protagonists selves.

There is also a bit of plot involving the daughter of the lab assistant, who is as noble as her father is treacherous. Coincidentally, she is also quite pretty!

The Neutron movies are fairly interchangeable, and this is, without question, the first one. Apparently the US version removed most of the musical numbers from this movie, and I have to live with that. And so do you. Somehow.