You know the film. It’s a film you have never heard of. The cast might be composed of actors you know and love or complete unknowns. You stumble across it on streaming and wonder if it will be worth two hours of your time. This series will be devoted to reviewing films like these, the strange items that pop up when you are looking for a flick on the streaming service of your choice. This is “We Found It On Streaming”
FILM: New York Ninja
Release Date: October 2021
Run Time: 93 Minutes.
Streaming Service(s): Showtime Anywhere, Paramount+
Rating: Not Rated
Sometimes, movies can travel through time.
No, I don’t mean that there are time travel movies. I know that. You know that. I just did a review on musical based on one not long ago. And I don’t mean that some movies are timeless either.
No, sometimes a movie can be made in 1984 and simply disappear only to reappear decades later. New York Ninja is that kind of movie and hoo boy is it a doozy.
New York Ninja was shot in New York City in 1984 with the intention of it being released that year. Written, directed and starring John Liu, the completed film was shelved when the production company responsible for it filed for bankruptcy. The film stock was purchased by archival house Vinegar Syndrome, but they only got raw footage–no soundtrack, no final cuts, no storyboards. Kurtis M. Spieler was tasked with “re-directing” the film, cutting it into some sort of narrative that made sense. He cast B-movie legends such as Cynthia Rothrock (China O’Brien), Don “The Dragon” Wilson (Bloodfist), Linnea Quigley (Silent Night, Deadly Night), and Michael Berryman (The Hills Have Eyes) to dub the voices in the re-directed film.
The film revolves around John Liu (John Liu–yes, they named the lead character its creator and actor), a sound engineer for a TV news unit that is investigating a series of disappearances in the city. After John’s wife is killed after witnessing one of the kidnappings, John is left looking for vengeance. When the police cannot do anything to catch the men that killed his wife, John takes matters into his own hands. Using his martial arts training, he becomes the New York Ninja to fight crime in the city. His efforts get the attention of The Plutonium Killer, a radiation-poisoned head of a sex-trafficking organization that killed John’s wife. This set the two men towards an inevitable conflict.
I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. New York Ninja is not a great film. I’m pretty sure you could have known just by looking the title that this wouldn’t be Oscar-worthy fare. But, unlike, Supercon, it falls into the so-bad-its good territory, a classification that I’m sure Spieler was aiming for when he tried to reconstruct the random footage into some kind of story.
What makes the film do bad? Well, for one thing, it’s low budget. Carl Morano, who worked on the special effects for the film, said he only had $100 for the special effects budget. That comes out to $294.22 in 2023 money. That is how low the budget was.
That fact makes the film worth a watch in and of itself. I was entertained by seeing how they cut corners. For example, almost every scene takes place outdoors. The TV producer gives John and his team their assignment from his car as he is leaving. The romantic dinner John was going to have with his wife takes place in broad daylight on the roof of their apartment on folding chairs. When John talks to the detective investigating his wife’s murder, he doesn’t set foot inside a precinct. He speaks to him in a parking lot outside it. You get the impression that there was a lot of guerilla filmmaking going on here, because I doubt that they could afford the permits to shoot on these New York City streets. But the fines they got were probably less than building sets or renting locations so that’s the way they went.
Another piece of awfulness that could be laid at Liu’s feet, or perhaps Spieler’s in his reconstruction of the film, is the fact that it seems he wanted this film to appeal to everyone. He crams in so many divergent elements into the mix that the film gives the viewer whiplash. Hey, we need to bring kids in to see the movie! Okay, here’s a scene where a group of school children beat up the bad guys. But sex sells too! Great! Let’s throw in a sex scene. Roller skating is a big craze at the time. Fine. We’ll have John fight a battle on roller skates (I am not making that last one up. Look at the picture above.)
Now, whether Liu intended for all these contradictory shots to be included in the final product, we’ll never know. He could have shot extra scenes with the intention of deciding whether the final film would have been an R or a PG rating in editing. Spieler tried to track Liu down but was not successful. But Spieler’s cut makes for one wacky, gonzo roller coaster of a film.
However, I feel I should say here that your mileage may vary. There is a lot of nostalgia at play here, and that is why I like the film. This takes me back to my early teens in the 1980s. It takes me back to the video store hunts, when the hot new release we wanted was all rented out and we had to scurry for a replacement weekend viewing from whatever was left. I rented a lot of low-budget bad movies back then, so, I have a soft spot in my heart for them. And this reconstruction captures a lot of what I loved about them. But if you didn’t have that background, you might not like this as much.
For me, it is one heck of an enjoyable ride. From the martial arts action to the synth-heavy score by Voyag3r, Spieler has captured the so-bad-its-good feel of the 1980s low-budget film. Whether it is what Liu intended or not is another story. But if you like good bad movies, you should like this.
Have you found a film on streaming that you’d like us to look at? Leave it in the comments and it might appear in a future installment of this feature.
