Streaming Shuffle
What apparently sexy beverage gets name-dropped twice in this review? The answer may surprise you!
This movie opens with a ninja on his way to a golf course in the American Southwest. First, he stops off by the side of the road to visit the fog-machine-serviced cave where he keeps his gear in a fake rock, like a hide-a-key. The fake rock has an internal lighting panel, the better to display his sword and ninja stars.
In a way, Ninja III: The Domination does a good job setting up its audience’s expectations. We’re not even through the opening credits, and already nothing makes any sense. And indeed, director Sam Firstenberg, a B-movie stalwart, is beginning as he means to go on.
The ninja goes to the golf course, where he proceeds to carry out a yuppie massacre. And crush a golf ball with his bare hands, just because it looks cool. The yuppie massacre brings in the cops, and the ninja kills—I counted—twenty-five of them.
He also decimates the department’s motor vehicle pool by taking out a car, two motorcycles, and a helicopter. Because this is a Cannon production, God bless ’em, the car and the motorcycles really bite it; the helicopter limps off-screen, giving us the explosive equivalent of a bedroom door swinging closed. Was it good for you too, helicopter? Call me.
The mortally wounded ninja plays peekaboo with the surviving cops, whose reaction to the wholesale slaughter of their colleagues and the mysterious escape of their bullet-riddled killer I would describe as “mildly perturbed.” I have more of an emotional response if I drop half my bagel. The cops go back to their headquarters to scratch their heads over it all, and the ninja finds his way to our heroine, Lucinda Dickey’s Christie. (I don’t want to steal from Wikipedia, but I cannot top encapsulating her as “telephone linewoman and aerobics instructor.”) He then passes on his magical sword, possessing her and tasking her with a mission of revenge: kill the cops who killed him.1
Christie is only semi-aware of what’s happening to her, since she blacks out while her inner demonic ninja uses her body to make his way down his hit list, but enough weird stuff is going on—like her pop-art industrial apartment putting on a Poltergeist-style lightshow—that hey, she’s starting to get suspicious! To toss an ““emotional”” spanner into the works—somehow one set of quotes wasn’t enough for that—her new stalking enthusiast boyfriend is one of the surviving cops.
If ever there was a work to write up solely via incredulous summary, it’s this one, and obviously I haven’t tried too hard to resist the temptation. But you have to understand that I’m barely scratching the surface here. I’m not even giving you all the details on the V8 seduction trick. Or the human drill. Or a criminally underused Sho Kosugi showing up as the movie’s Max von Sydow.
Mostly that’s because I want some of you to see this and encounter these jaw-dropping marvels of WTF cinema with fresh eyes. But it’s also because I can’t cover this the way I covered the ludicrously enjoyable Pray for Death. As much as it gloried in going over-the-top, Pray for Death was a movie, and a story, in a way that Ninja III: The Domination just isn’t.2 This is a string of separate scenes, a gaudy costume jewelry piece made up of fifteen different brooches from fifteen different Floridian grandmothers.
The actors know it, too. Lucinda Dickey gives it a try, playing her way through snarling exorcisms and upbeat aerobics numbers in a way that suggests that she’s at least awake; she might do better if she didn’t have so many scenes opposite Jordan Bennett, who literally stops acting whenever he’s not in the dead center of the frame. Spotting his “when do we stop for lunch?” expression in the background is the Where’s Waldo of the final act.
So this cannot, alas, be a bad movie masterpiece. The best of those have commitment and vision, even if they’re expressed in ways that are peculiar, unskilled, excessive, or downright alien; too much of this is just trying to get to the 90-minute mark. But I can’t lie about how much fun I had watching it. In fact, when I put it on to get the cop tally, I was tempted to watch the whole thing all over again. A guy dies by being punched through the roof of a car!
Put it on with a friend. Grab a V8.
Ninja III: The Domination is streaming on Prime and Fubo.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
Lauren James’s ProfileTags for this article
More articles by Lauren James
Anthologized
A little slice of American folklore that feels like it's been here all along.
Streaming Shuffle
You make your royal bed, and you lie in it.
Anthologized
Alone in vast space and timeless infinity: one man in a ghost town.
Streaming Shuffle
A beautiful slice-of-life film that helped make a career.
Department of
Conversation
What did we watch?
Justified, Season One, Episode Eleven, “Veterans”
This amps up the larger plot in a dramatic way, though I struggle to find much interesting to say. One thing that sticks out is that it’s so much fun to see precisely, exactly how much Boyd is bullshitting for a change; we know he definitely killed the CI accidentally, so watching him smoothly deny having anything to do with it and try and direct attention elsewhere is really fun. He at least looks like he knows what he wants; I think that at heart, Boyd is a pragmatist who wants to be just about anything else, but ideally a mystic – he looks downright exhausted as he tells Dewey he forgives him emotionally but not practically.
(Also, him literally burying Bobby is brilliant – simultaneously very Leonardian and very Boydian)
The larger plot is two fathers against each other. Bo has a very Vic Mackey line, “I can control my boy!”; he has a very evil-paternal view of the world as a thing falling within his domain, and he dismisses Art as a bad – or worse, weak father for Raylan’s actions. There’s a really funny moment, too, where Raylan reasonably points out that he’s responsible for Boyd getting out of prison but not Bo. I suppose this show is about the ol’ American ideal of Freedom – for a country full of people who celebrate the idea so fucking loudly, you’re also a country full of people looking to control everyone; Bo is a particularly extreme example, granting nobody around him control, and Raylan is a guy who functions on a day-to-day level by implicitly granting other people the freedom to make decisions – though right now, he’s taking on the responsibility of Boyd’s decisions. More to come.
Thinking about how this show has characters taking the long way around a sentence, with that feeling stylish without being implausible. It’s not like Deadwood where I accept nobody is going to interrupt someone saying something clever, or The West Wing where I keep feeling like these people should be interrupting each other. Or even The Thick Of It, where they do interrupt each other.
Biggest Laugh: The really simple gag where Art is genuinely surprised he can’t get into a veteran’s bar just by flashing his badge. Also a fan of this dialogue with Tim: “Are you drunk?” / “I was headin’ in that direction.”
Top Ownage: Raylan beating on Dewey to get him to comply. So sad when he basically admits he figured Raylan was full of shit but had to go along anyway just in case.
Hacks S2E7 – Ownage! (Jimmy getting provoked into a “Fuck you” once he’s told his father would be ashamed of him.) Dramatic decisions! Can see why Jimmy is Tristan’s favorite, he is loyal to a fault in a town where everyone is all smiles and absolute bullshit*, and this means he makes a pretty pivotal move for better or worse, same with Deborah going it on her own and Ava realizing she’s maybe matured beyond the approval of Hollywood, though maybe not Ruby’s. Have noticed Hannah Einbinder has genuine chemistry with most of the actors on the show.
Funniest part: Kayla and Jimmy’s rage-quitting. Deborah’s “side mansion” where Anita Baker is on a loop, this is especially hilarious because I was in a car where “Sweet Love” was on the radio. Good track!
*I can tell even from shallow caricatures that I would despise Hollywood/a lot of LA. See also David Bowie being an internationalist at heart and saying without hesitation, years after living there, that Los Angeles is the one city he’d have firebombed from the earth.
Catching up since I couldn’t post the past few days:
Teorema (1968)
Pasolini really was working on a plane that nobody before or since was working on. Shout out to Criterion bonus features. This is a film about a non-human presence (angel or demon, take your pick) visiting a bourgeois family and completely upending their lives, partly by inspiring everyone’s libido. Terrence Stamp is the form of this creature, and man are his eyes pretty. But the film operates on a lot of levels like the gay subtext (and gay text), the use of sepia tone to introduce the family as if to show just how Stamp’s presence brings life to this family by bringing color and sound, and the religious and economic implications of everything that happens. Pasolini’s Communism and Catholicism are on full display here, but everything is delightfully ambiguous about whether anything or everything is any good for anyone.
The Navigator (1924)
When I was a teenager, I watched The General and kinda hated it because Buster Keaton faced such extreme shame for being too useful as a train conductor to be a soldier, but he never explained that to the family of the girl he loved, and Keaton’s unwillingness to just explain the situation always sat wrong with me. Maybe it’s the autism, but Keaton’s characters always feel real enough that when they do stupid things, it upsets me greatly. The Navigator has possibly Keaton’s dumbest character in a film filled with idiots. I tried to overlook it, but none of the plot would have made sense if anyone had half a brain. Add to that the “islanders are all cannibals” racism, and I just hated this film. A lot of that’s on me, but it just didn’t work at all.
Shoulder Arms (1918)
After watching The Navigator, I was curious about how I feel about Chaplin compared to Keaton, and Chaplin hits on every level for me. His comedy and his characters are just so much more my speed. This is a film about Chaplin’s character (who is not the Tramp, but is basically the same) enlisting in the army to go to WW1. The comedy here was very good, and the twist at the end that it was a dream helped ease any hesitancy about any plot mechanics. Chaplin’s comedic style, in which his character is annoying and incompetent for a gag before learning what to do correctly and then moving on to the next thing he’s incompetent at, is a dynamic that I can work with perfectly.
I wouldn’t put The Navigator on the top shelf of Keaton, but the bit with the painting and the porthole was maybe a top-ten hardest laugh at a movie for me.
The single funniest part of the movie, for sure
“This is a film about a non-human presence (angel or demon, take your pick) visiting a bourgeois family and completely upending their lives, partly by inspiring everyone’s libido” — this is making me think of, of all things, Cronenberg’s Shivers. Which is perhaps not completely ambiguous, there is real horrific stuff there, but it’s also very pointed in how some upending seems to be pretty good for some people. This sounds very interesting!
Racism mars some of Keaton’s movies where I haven’t seen the same thing with Chaplin. (That and identifying with the Tramp more than Keaton’s working bums.)
A Grumpy Lesbian Fixing Her Friend’s Air Fryer – We got an air fryer for Christmas a couple years ago, something I though wholly unnecessary to our kitchen before it turned out to be central to my vision of daily life. A tiny oven that crisps things up and uses a fraction of the energy! But being a modern American-proffered appliance, it’s also a piece of shit, with a simple internal switch that wears down with moderate use over a couple years. I found a lot of bitching online about this common problem before finally discovering a YouTube video where a woman takes out a screwdriver and goes ham on her friend’s fryer.
I love this DIY video to absolute pieces. This woman – I cop to being reductionist, she is perhaps the first straight flannel-wearing woman who sounds like Tig Notaro and owns at least a gallon of acetone that I have encountered – edits the video so the steps aren’t overly long, but includes all essential steps like “how the fuck do you get the cover off this thing” (solution: flathead screwdriver-come-pry bar) and “this design should be illegal” (100% agree). The first half of the video is finding the worn switch contact and cleverly extending its life with a tiny piece of copper wire. The second half is her attempting to reglue the cover she busted. This portion (edited) takes ten minutes and she more or less fails.
This is unironic appreciation for this video which helps my air fryer and my home improvement confidence. This is an obviously capable person being thwarted by engineering specifically designed to frustrate capable individuals until they give up and return to Wal-Mart. She does not give up and if the end result is a little cracked and clouded by glue, it’s still a victory for the consumer. Besides, as she explains in the comments, she only charged her friend ten bucks.
Well you’ve sold me! Time to go to YouTube and search for “grumpy lesbian.”
A Bullet for Joey – George Raft is gangster Joe Victor, who’s hired to kidnap a nuclear scientist for the other side. He’s pursued by Montreal cop (or maybe a plainclothes Mountie?) Edward G. Robinson. Ultimately Georgie takes the side of capitalism over communism and dies for his troubles. But at no point in the movie is he ever called Joey. So the title is incongruous, the decision to set the movie in Montreal when it was entirely filmed in LA is incongruous, and the movie is reasonably entertaining but almost the definition of a 50s B movie.
Kojak, “Lady in the Squadroom” – Sex Crimes Unit detective Joan Van Ark is temporarily transferred to Homicide even though Kojak is a sexist pig. The script is never quite sure how to deal with a woman detective, who is at once clearly competent and entirely unsure of herself or what she’s doing as a cop. Van Ark is pretty good despite this. But for what it’s worth, Linda Lavin had already come and gone from Barney Miller, where she was a semi-regular. Kojak’s writers were behind the times.
Frasier, “The Unnatural” – Bulldog tells Frederick that his dad is a good softball player (and for once Bulldog is well meaning since it’s not like Frasier can make the softball game and even Bulldog wants a kid to look up to his dad). Only Frederick decides he wants to see his dad play. Some interesting stuff here, with Martin trying to teach Frasier to hit a softball, but this one is sort of flat. Except for Frederick having a crush on Daphne and getting all the hugs he wants, and Niles being both jealous and letting the kid know he’s wise to him!
Doctor Who, “The Interstellar Song Contest” – this aired on the same night as the actual Eurovision Song Contest, which is smart programming. In the distant future a similar competition takes place between alien races and is beamed to three trillion viewers, which makes it the perfect vehicle for a hostile takeover. Some fun ideas here but the mix of light and dark didn’t work for me as well as the show can at its best, this is an episode where the doctor rescues himself from death in the vacuum of space by firing a glitter cannon BUT also there’s a terrorist threat that could plausibly wipe out most of the population of the universe. There’s also a bunch of setup here for the season finale and it felt a bit cluttered. But the musical stuff was done well and the song that concludes the main plot was surprisingly moving for being performed in a fictional language.
I suspect even with more Americans knowing what Eurovision is, this one landed in the US with the biggest thud of any DisneyWho episode. But I think that is how it should be. Doctor Who is British and watering that down even a little for anyone is just not right.
Babylon 5 — war is heck! This might as well be the Neutrals episode of Futurama in its introduced/disposed-off conflict, but Disposable Grunt #3 is played by Ken Foree and Ken Foree beating the shit out of guys is an automatic B at least. And there is an insane amount of spin-kicking in this episode, did a bunch of stunt people fall off a truck in the Babylon 5 lot? Also, the captain sees one (1) black guy and asks “hey, do you know my black friend?” Perhaps the true enemy is not the alien but RACISM.
Benjamin Smoke — Benjamin was a drag queen/punk singer in Atlanta in the 80s and 90s, living in a pretty run-down area that has since come up in the world and performing with his dark folk/goth Americana band Smoke. Apparently the NYT dinged this 2000 documentary for not providing much more info than that, there is only one talking head very late in the film (and it is a perfect deployment of said head), and AO Scott is once again revealed to be a dumbass — this is about spending time in and around Benjamin’s life, hearing from him first and foremost and his remarkable band playing complete songs at many points. Jem Cohen and Peter Sillen spent a decade getting this footage, in 16mm and otherwise, and its grainy and at times raggedy nature fits the subject perfectly, there is one interview where the admitted “speed freak” Benjamin is clearly not doing well and that’s part of the story too. But this near-emaciated guy has an astonishing voice, putting Nick Cave in your Tom Waits (and the main comp I had was to the late Robert Foster of The Willard Grant Conspiracy) and whispering/singing/bellowing poetry with the intense musicians backing him. We see who this guy is, not what people say about him — it’s a portrait and an excellent one. Part of the Jem Cohen collection on Criterion right now and very much worth your time, particularly Conor.
Oh yeah this sounds not optional indeed.
doctor who. I have previously noted that Davies has not been subtle about his anti-anti-“woke” politics* this season. So I have some questions about this episode, where someone from a planet that is the victim of an imperial genocide and galaxy wide racism strikes back with a terror attack on a clear stand-in for Eurovision, attempting to kill 100,000 and then an additional 3 trillion people. Of course, on a literal level it would be wrong to kill 3,000,000,100,000 people. Anyway, the tone and messaging here is pretty muddled and the plot too straightforward, and I get the appeal of eurovision less than I get the appeal of literally anything else.
The last of us. A really lovely flashback episode, showing us Ellie’s birthdays over the years. Much like the feature length nick offerman episode last season, it’s nice to take a break from the main plot and just let character relationships breathe for a bit. Also nice to get some Tony Dalton (Lalo Salamanca from better call saul) there at the start; he’s a great actor even if he only gets a cameo here. The realization of Joel’s dad (and in turn if Joel) that he doesn’t know what he’s doing as a father and all
he can do is try to do better than his own dad is really compelling, I assume to everyone who is a dad and possibly everyone. (Are there people with such good relationships with their parents that they would be happy being only almost as good a parent as their own parents?).
The episode also frames Joel’s actions at the end of the first season: he believed a cure was possible, and ellie thinks it would have given her life meaning. Neither of these beliefs would justify the actions of the fireflies.
You’d think they wouldn’t send people out on patrol who weren’t hardened enough to not beg for extra time like eugene. Or they’d already have a protocol for where extra time may be feasible. I’m pretty sure Joel was less worried about Eugene posing a threat than he was about accidentally revealing Ellie’s immunity to Jackson.
Caught up on the second of last week’s Hacks. I don’t think I watched anything else (I assume that there isn’t much interest for writeups about poker streams I watch in the background while I’m doing other things, or that my writeups would make sense to anybody).
The mortally wounded ninja plays peekaboo with the surviving cops, whose reaction to the wholesale slaughter of their colleagues and the mysterious escape of their bullet-riddled killer I would describe as “mildly perturbed.”
This early paragraph makes me think of Hold The Dark which holds a glorious cop massacre – in a small Alaskan town, that is ALL the cops in the town – and the sole survivor James Badge Dale merely breathes, “What a day” like he just didn’t sleep much and had an especially rough B&E.
I meant to see Hold the Dark at some point, because Saulnier, but that level of hilarious underreaction has simultaneously made me warier and bumped it up the list. (Also, James Badge Dale was also in my beloathed Standoff at Sparrow Creek. This guy is constantly getting involved in bizarre plots involving cops!)
It’s definitely the kind of mess clearly made by a competent director, like on a script level I still have NO idea what’s happening in the background.
”… a gaudy costume jewelry piece made up of fifteen different brooches from fifteen different Floridian grandmothers.
If nothing else this review has entertained me and provided me a day’s worth of laughs, may have to see if the movie can hold up to it.
I can promise that if you do, you will find at least a dozen bizarre things I did not mention. (And thanks!)
Companion – Agree with everything Lauren wrote about the film in this space. I’ll just point out neat little things like Patrick the robot dressed as a blood sucking vampire at the Halloween party. Is that a multi-layered mixed metaphor going on? Also, Iris driving off at the end in an analog car and waving to her double with her robot hand.
Airplane! – I’m 11 years-old and I still love this movie!
I went back to watch Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja (eventually) after seeing this one first at a film festival and it’s a really fun trilogy even if neither of the others quite live up to the full-on insanity of this one. The first one is still pretty wacky – it’s based on a story written by the American karate champion who had an affair with Priscilla Presley and the villain has his own synchronised swimming team. The second one is a little more straightforward, it has easily the best actual martial arts action but also some hilariously mismatched fights in which the protagonist’s (on-screen and real-life) son beats up a bunch of adults.
Hahahahahaha this sounded very familiar, apparently Sho Kosugi did the exact same thing with his kid in Pray For Death! Kosugi is running around slaughtering bad dudes while his son is pulling straight up Home Alone shit on others.
Haha, excellent. I clearly need to bump Pray for Death up my watchlist.
It definitely has some 80s-era slow spots but it also has 80s-era action nastiness to make up for it, and James Booth is a god-level Evil Henchman, he basically takes over the movie and is absolutely right to.
I’ve seen Enter the Ninja several times (that swimming pool office fills me with so much glee), but I have yet to see Revenge of the Ninja, which is a gap in my cinematic education that definitely needs to be addressed.
Year of the Month update!
This June, we’ll be moving on to 1983, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jun. 23rd: Sam Scott: El Sur
Jun. 24th: John Bruni: Legendary Hearts
Jun. 30th: Tristan Nankervis: The Big Chill
And there’s still time to sign up towrite about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways