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.