Ninja III: The Domination

They say that confession is good for the soul, so here it goes.  I don’t get nearly as excited for new movies as I used to.  Oh, there are still releases that I look forward to from filmmakers whose work I respect, but in the main it’s difficult for me to get all fired up over a lot of what hits my local cinema.  The last part of that last sentence is much of the problem.  Very little of what I consider to be of value (read: worth paying more than a rental fee) ever actually makes it onto one of the ten screens at my local theater.  They are too booked up having the latest bland pseudo-comedy drivel or massively over-produced, ultra-homogenized blockbuster play on multiple screens to make room for more low key or artistic fare.  Bear in mind, this is from someone who considers himself to be a fan of both drivel and blockbusters (and if you ask me nicely, I’ll gladly cry on your shoulder about the demise of the Hollywood Independents era and bemoan the apparent ignorance of the vast majority of studio executives currently in power who have likely never seen, nor care to see, a film produced before the day they were born), and not that more artistic fare imbues it with an innate superiority, but the lack of choice becomes a frustration, particularly when one hears about the myriad films being released for which your only choice of viewing is waiting for it to hit video and watching it at home.  This is the second part of the problem, to my mind.  There is a difference between experiencing something in a movie theater and experiencing something at home, and it’s not simply the size of the screen that counts.  Film watching is intended as a communal affair (yes, modern audiences seem to have lost all sense of common courtesy when it comes to behavior in public, but we only have so much space here to get into that whole thing [not entirely true; we actually have all the space in the world, but I only have so much time, as I’m sure you do as well]).  Some piece of humor which may leave you cold while watching from your sofa may be uproariously hilarious when in the company of fellow moviegoers.  Also, watching everything at home takes a certain specialness away from these films, in my opinion.  They become little more than something else on your television, complete with the level of control to which we’ve become accustomed to wielding in that regard.  You can pause a movie to go to the bathroom, rewind to inspect some detail or decipher some bit of dialogue, do chores as a film unspools (and I’ve done all of the above, so I claim no innocence).  These two main issues have diminished my joy in regards to new cinema, and it’s sad.  Not sad enough that I’ll give up my passion for film, but sad, nonetheless.  Having said all of that, I’m sure there are those reading this who may find it hard to believe that Sam Firstenberg’s Ninja III: The Domination (aka Trancers [no, not that one]) actually played pretty widely in cinemas.  But it did, and more’s the pity that the theatrical distribution of pictures like it is a thing we have to talk about in the past tense.

An evil ninja (David Chung) attacks and kills “a prominent scientist” and his small army of bodyguards before being gunned down by the local police force.  While moribund, he manages to pass his sword on to hot telephone repairwoman Christie (the divine Lucinda Dickey) along with his maleficent spirit which is hellbent on revenge (even though one would think that getting killed is merely an occupational hazard for a professional assassin).  Later, Sho Kosugi shows up and fights some people while wearing an eyepatch.

Like all movies with possession as a subject, the most prominent aspect of Ninja III is one of identity.  Christie blacks out when the ninja takes over; she completely loses herself.  More than this, her physical appearance changes.  Her skin becomes pale and the eyeliner on her eyes becomes more “Asian” (all the better to match the guy-liner on both Chung and Kosugi).  This physical manifestation of a change in personality is something we’ve seen from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to The Exorcist and everywhere in between, and here there is an implication of sexual assault involved.  When the ninja first grabs Christie, he violently wrestles her to the ground and claws at her, and there is the sense that he is about to rape her (never mind how illogical this would be, considering his situation).  Later, when the strobe lights flash, the fog machine kicks in, and the wind fan threatens to blow everything to Oz (as you get when a spirit possesses your body), Christie is hit with a laser show that plays across her face and neck, and again there is a level of violation at work here, because the way she reacts is sensual, as if she were simultaneously being hypnotized and taking a lover.  The communion between Christie and the ninja is both sexual and violent by nature, and the two are inextricably linked as such by the filmmakers.

In this same way, the film deals with gender roles to some extent (perhaps even more than simple character identities/personalities), although it does treat this element rather problematically.  Christie works as a telephone repair technician, a trade more commonly associated with men.  She owns a cabinet video game (Bouncer), which at the time would be more associated with men (or at least I don’t recall a vast array of hot women at Aladdin’s Castle, one of our local arcades, back in the day).  She becomes a ninja assassin (certainly not a common female role back then).  Christie is hit on by our hirsute romantic lead Billy (Jordan Bennett), one of the cops who we first saw in the film’s beginning, while giving her statement to a detective.  She also doesn’t especially care for cops (we don’t know if this is the ninja’s influence or not) or soft drinks, so she’s rebellious in this sense.  Christie also teaches an aerobics class (since, after all, she’s a riff on Alex Owens from Flashdance thus requiring a tough, working class exterior and a softer, passionate interior along with a plethora of shots leering over her toned body), and she wears Billy down when he attends it with the assumption that it’s easy (after all, if chicks do it…).  Later, Billy dismisses Christie’s “weird” feelings with an air of condescension that’s maddening (and let’s just get this over with: this guy is a Grade-A handjob and a chauvinist pig, and he never fails to irritate every moment his smug character is onscreen).  Billy is a repressive force in Christie’s life, for conformity to traditional gender roles.

After the ninja takes over Christie’s body, she becomes even more masculine (read: aggressive) and more deadly, but she also uses her good looks more to her lethal advantage in this regard.  One of the first things she does with her ninja skills is beat the crap out of a group of musclebound would-be rapists from her gym who accost one of her friends (let’s not question the thought process these guys had, since they’re all gym members attacking another member, and not only in broad daylight but also right outside the gym’s door).  This is all done while Billy (remember, he’s a police officer) stands there gawking, after which he hauls Christie off for another pushy attempt at getting together with her (which works this time, mind-bogglingly enough; cue the legendary V8 [the juice, not the engine] scene).  But it’s Christie (or at the absolute minimum, Christie’s physical body) who is in control of most situations in the film, even when possessed, and this lasts right up until she decides to try and exorcise this spirit.  At that point, the two halves become more divided, and Christie grows from this ordeal, this encounter with the ninja’s masculinity, to a small degree (it can be argued that she should be viewed as a double for the evil ninja from the start [note that her work uniform and the ninja’s uniform are very similar in appearance], and all her possession did was give her an excuse to act out her discontent in the war of the sexes)to the point that she takes a more active part in the finale (though by that point she’s also become something of a background character).  And here’s where the complications arise.  Christie’s adversity if both freeing and repressive.  She gets to act out her aggressions against male society (embodied by the police) while being subjugated by a more powerful male persona personality.  It takes an even stronger male than that to set her free, and then the world she returns to is very traditionalist (possibly even Neanderthal) in its definition of gender roles.  Consequently, Christie does little more than go from the frying pan to the fire, from my perspective.  

I grant you that this film, for all the love it gets (and it gets a lot from me, as well), is essentially hollow.  The romantic relationship completely doesn’t click.  Kosugi seems like a character from another film who just shows up in time to fight the bad ninja and nothing else (they try to give him some pathos with a brief flashback, but it adds zero).  The plot is episodic and undeveloped; the film feels incomplete in some ways, as if they meant to add more and/or connect more of the dots but then didn’t, and there are filler scenes galore as a result.  Yet visually, there is a ton of Eighties flavor and texture, and it’s the collision of pop rock, pop art, aerobics, Ninjitsu, and the supernatural that makes Ninja III stand apart from the pack.

MVT:  See above.  The blending of some of the most disparate elements in the history of cinema makes this little gem shine all the brighter.

Make or Break:  The climactic fight (and it should be said that the action scenes in this film are both extensive and impressive) stands out for being well-shot and kooky in equal measure.  Plus, ninja (I’m pretty certain the plural of which is “ninja,” like the plural of “moose” is “moose”)!

Score:  7.25/10

Cracking Up (1977)

It’s interesting to me that audiences in general are more willing to go along with comedies centered on the end of the world than on natural disasters (of course, the end of the world may be a result of a natural disaster, and I’m not completely certain that there are all that many to make comparisons to, regardless).  I think this is largely due to the fact that we have no real world frame of reference for the destruction of the Earth (or at least crossing the finish line of our time upon it).  Sure, we know all about what happened to the dinosaurs, and we can define an extinction level event, but outside of this, it’s entirely what’s in our imaginations.  By contrast, we have seen quite clearly what avalanches, volcano eruptions, tidal waves, et cetera look like, and we have seen the havoc wreaked upon the lives of their victims.  Thus, we can have some fun with apocalyptic concepts, like in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World or It’s a Disaster, while actual disasters tend to be confined to films like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno (or seemingly everything Irwin Allen ever put his hand to).  You could say that films like Airplane! are successful disaster comedies, and to some degree or another that’s true.  But Airplane is more a sendup of the disaster film tropes, specifically those developed in films like Airport (astonishingly not produced by Allen) than something making light of aviation tragedies (and that’s another point: the difference between focusing on the events or the characters).  At any rate, it’s the devastation of a 9.7 magnitude earthquake that forms the backdrop for Rowby Goren and Chuck Staley’s sketch comedy film Cracking Up, and it’s also a fairly good example of why this setting doesn’t work one hundred percent (but it does work a little).

After the above mentioned quake, intrepid reporters (wait for it…) Walter Concrete (Phil Proctor) and Barbara Halters (played in drag by Peter Bergman) saunter around Los Angeles, interview survivors for their stories (read: skits), and pause often for commercial breaks (read: more skits).

I do not know the complete backstory of this film, but if I had to guess, I would say that it’s a collection of sketches by different comedy troupes (you can tell they’re disparate because the same groups of actors tend to appear in their own individual scenes) that were thrown together around a flimsy wraparound concept.  Another thing that points to this is that the quality of the visuals varies quite drastically between segments.  In fact, it appears to me that either some of these scenes were recorded on video and transferred to film, or they were recorded onto film from a video source (but I’m no tech expert).  Nonetheless, it’s not the visual aesthetics for which we come to this film but the jokes, and as with almost every portmanteau film and/or book I’ve ever encountered, some of the separate sequences kind of work and some of them are dead on arrival.  For example, in an early voiceover we are informed that “the damage is approximated at nine-hundred-billion dollars, plus tax and license.”  Sister Simple (Edie McClurg) uses some chump to unwittingly bolster her televangelism ministry (one of the better scenes).  A greasy spoon diner has a maître d’, an emcee, and a floor show complete with bad comedian, worse psychic, and eyeroll-inducing songs.  There’s even a variation on the classic Abbott & Costello “Who’s on First?” bit, featuring Harry Shearer and David L. Lander (the Squiggy of “Lenny and Squiggy” fame), which centers on the bands, The Who, The Guess Who, and Yes (I’ll let you parse out the syntax).  

A lot of the comedy is quite politically incorrect, with one sketch involving people with neurological disorders and one advertising a little something called the “Nigger Bopper” (and, in fairness, the “Honky Stopper”), to name but two.  So, if you’re the sort that gets offended by things like that, Polish jokes,  Irish jokes, jokes about “Orientals,” and homosexual jokes (which showcases the great Stephen Stucker as Bruce “Tushy” Smith), you’ll find a lot to be offended by herein.  For myself, I don’t particularly mind off color humor all that much.  A lot of it doesn’t necessarily give me side stitches, and it’s not the sort of thing I gravitate towards by nature, but if I hear a joke about an Italian, a Rabbi, and a horse walking into a bar (or whatever), I also don’t instantly hit the righteous indignation button.  Still and all, I was more letdown by Cracking Up for the dearth of actually funny material in it than the content of the material that is present.

***The following paragraph contains an old man rant***

The film does point to the rapidly approaching twenty-four hour news cycle which, in my humble opinion, has done terrible damage to journalism in general, and has helped shorten people’s attention spans, has conflated and confused entertainment with reporting more than it already was, and has augmented (my own personal) distrust of the fourth estate for the volume of non-, half-, and disinformation which is regularly doled out as gospel truth (despite any apologies that may come later on, which are always in much quieter voices if they come at all, the damage already having been done and accepted as actuality, never mind pesky things like facts).  Further, the focus on minutiae so popular now emphasizes current over events (with hours of drudgery feeling like televised closed circuit feeds from a parking garage of a mall scheduled to be demolished) and devalues the function of journalism, I believe.  The news is supposed to provide the receiver with facts, not try to sway the receiver toward a point of view or preach to a particular choir (those would be editorializing, which has its own place, but to interchange the title of one for the other only harms both and does a disservice to the public.  End rant.  

Being based ostensibly around television culture and the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality of news reportage, the film does make some points about the hypocrisy of not only the American media but also of systems of American society (religious, political, et cetera) in a way which is far more biting and insightful (if not necessarily sophisticated and humorous) than we see often today.  Walter claims he’s looking for survivors to interview for the show, but when a bloodied victim approaches him and Barbara, he’s beaten back and kicked aside like a bum.  Most of the dialogue in the news scenes is one-liners (some groan-inducing).  The reporters don’t care about the people involved in this disaster.  They want to get some juicy stories and sell ad time (evinced by the faux commercials interspersed throughout).  Yet, none of it makes any logical sense, since we’re set up to be based in the here and now.  Nevertheless, the stories that people tell invariably cut away to the sketches that we naturally read as flashbacks, which, of course, can’t be filmed by a television crew from someone’s memories, so it breaks the conceit of the film (not that it’s all that strong to start off).  Is this asking too much of a sketch comedy film?  Probably, but I was consistently drawn out of the film by this practice.

Another odd aspect is the various non sequiturs inserted at random moments.  Take, for example, the two naked women who just pop out of a building and go streaking down the street (we’ll see them again with just as much build up and payoff later on).  Or the montages of victims lurching around the rubble, set to the strains of light-pop songs like What Do You Want from Life.  It feels as though sometimes the filmmakers wanted to connect the film in some kind of flow, and sometimes they didn’t, and they really couldn’t be arsed to differentiate between the two approaches (but, hey, it was the Seventies).  It’s like piling your plate at a buffet with everything all at once rather than using separate dishes: the food mingles together, and that can be a good or a bad thing, but you won’t know until you take the next bite.

MVT:  There is an enthusiasm at work underneath the film’s surface.  These guys REALLY want to make you laugh.  You may find that charming, or ingratiating, or both.

Make or Break:  The Polish talk show segment, featuring Lander and Michael McKean (the Lenny of “Lenny and Squiggy” fame) is particularly funny without being especially insulting to the intelligence (unless you get insulted at Polish and Irish jokes).  I mean, it’s no Cheech and Chong, and your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for ethnic stereotypes, but it worked quite well for me. 

Score:  6/10

Hot Pursuit (1987)

Dan Bartlett (John Cusack) is distracted the entire night before his big chemistry final, resulting in his flunking.  Oh, no!  And here he was all set to go off with his girlfriend Lori Cronenberg (Wendy Gazelle, who spends about half of her screen time doing gymnastics wherever she happens to be [skilled though she is at it], because that’s just what you do, I guess) and her family to the Caribbean.  After his professor has a last minute change of heart, Dan must catch up with his gal, and all sorts of wackiness is supposed to ensue.

Steven Lisberger is most likely far better known as the writer and director of Animalympics (an animated film that was a staple of early HBO programming, and to this day, I vividly recall the scene where a male goat and a lioness fall in love during a marathon set to the strains of super-soft-rock ditty, “With You I Can Run Forever,” for better or worse) and TRON (a film I can appreciate for its technical achievements, but I’ve never found it all that entertaining), and with Hot Pursuit (aka See You Later Mr. Alligator) he tries his hand at light adventure comedy.  This is a generic mingling which can backfire pretty easily, because in order to satisfy both facets, there needs to be both humor and danger, obviously.  The problem lies in the ratio of one to the other and/or the way the two are blended.  For example, Martin Brest’s Midnight Run gets it right, primarily, I think, because it keeps the tension going in both the action and the comedy scenes.  The violence is never over the top, and it fits within the context of the narrative.  Conversely, the danger in films like Hot Pursuit feels like what it is: a device to motivate the adventure portions of the film, and the sight of dead bodies in a film, ostensibly about a puppy love relationship and the nutty lengths to which young love will go, is always jarring to me.  It’s been said that the line between horror and comedy is a fine one, and I agree, and I would further state that films such as this one are proof of just how fine a line it is (while it’s not a horror film in any way, there are those “horrific” elements).  After all of the “zany antics” (and yes, that phrase should be in quotes in regards to this picture) Dan gets into to reach his goal, suddenly he’s running around with grenades and a machine gun, and the villains are considerably bloodthirsty and savage (bolstered by the presence of a very young Ben Stiller, an actor I’ve never been especially at ease watching).   But the filmmakers’ attitude is that they want to have it both ways.  They still want us to consider this as a lark.  I’m not totally sure of what my internal criteria are for what makes this mix work or not work (in the same way that what triggers fright or laughs is very personal), but when it works, it really works, and when it doesn’t, it flops like a fish.  Hot Pursuit is just about a Muskie, in my opinion.    

There is a very sharp divide among the film’s characters along class lines.  Dan is the classic disheveled, working class attendee of an upper class boarding school (we don’t need to be told this explicitly; everything about the character and his introduction practically screams it).  He wears his tie loose, his top shirt button undone, his hair mussed.  Lori’s father (Monte Markham) is affluent and acts the part.  Nothing is too good for his daughter, and Dan will never be good enough.  He also sees Dan as a coward, and this at the very least does play into the eventual macho-fication of Dan.  But even our protagonist has preconceived notions about others in society, and the film does its best to get us to play into these prejudices.  When Dan lands on whatever island he lands on and the only taxi available gets snaked out from under him (with the warning to watch out for “the natives”), he spots Cleon (Paul Bates), Alphonso (Keith David), and Roxanne (Ursaline Bryant) in their rusty jalopy.  After making the (far-fetched) assumption that they work for the marina where Lori is staying, Alphonso invites Dan to come along with them.  Yet, the way he says it, combined with the reaction shots of Cleon, leads us to believe that something nefarious is afoot (never trust someone who smiles all the time, especially when they show you all their teeth).  Likewise, Mac (Robert Loggia) conscripts Dan into being a deckhand on his boat while in pursuit of the ship on which the Cronenbergs are cruising (actually in pursuit of someone on board; guess who).  But where Alphonso and company were all smiles, Mac is all scowls.  Everything about the grizzled old guy is rough, antagonistic, and maniacal.  Nevertheless, both groups have the same sort of attitude toward life and their place in it, as is summed up succinctly by Alphonso with the statement, “We’re not planning it, we’re just doing it.”  Furthermore, both sets of people prove to be better friends to Dan than he could hope for, a tad dubious considering how scant the amount of time they’ve known one another.  Lori’s family is not necessarily evil in contrast, they’re just generally elitist and less desirable to have as amigos.  All of this culminates in the rather facile theme of not judging a book by its cover, which we already knew, but one thing Hollywood has always loved to remind us of is how much we need to be reminded of the basics of life.

Hot Pursuit is an innocuous film in every sense of the word.  It is innocuous in characters, in plotting, in cinematography, in direction.  Everything about the film plays it safe, so the whole never ascends much past the middle ground.  The humor is cutesy and not very funny at all (again, your mileage may vary).  One could call these traits innocent since they’re seemingly ignorant of not only how the world works but how both adventure and comedy (and by extension, adventure-comedies) work.  It’s like eating pretzels without the salt.  Sure, they’re still pretzels (hell, they may even be butter pretzels, which I love), but without the coarse salt they don’t satisfy in the same way, they’re not complete.  This is the sort of film you keep on in the background while you fold your laundry or clean your house.  No real attention needs to be paid, because there is nothing going on that you haven’t seen before, and you’ve likely seen it more entertainingly done, as well (yes, I know I say that a lot, but dammit, it holds true, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it).

MVT:  Cusack has his put upon, boyish charm going in full effect, and you can see there’s a reason why he was so popular in the Eighties, even while lamenting that his assets are not thoroughly utilized in this film.

Make or Break:  The scene where Dan confronts Stiller’s Chris is satisfying in that you get to see a prick get his due.  But like so much else herein, it simply doesn’t fit or work especially well enough to be all that memorable.

Score:  5.5/10