Review of Ninja Commandments

The film Ninja Commandments is one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen. It is what I like to call a 'Frankenstein film", as the actual movie is really two movies that have nothing at all to do with one another cut together to form one unholy experience. The bulk of the film looks like stock footage.. Most likely a Chinese drama made in the late 1970's which was acquired for an extremely affordable sum by the financial backers of Ninja Commandments. The rest of the film, which includes the incredibly poor fighting sequences featuring Richard Harrison as the celebrated Ninja Master Gordon, was filmed in 1987. This is without question one of the absolute worst films I have ever seen. Case in point: The cover, which features a red-clad Nin – Ja with sword and shield, and another yellow clad Caucasian Ninja above him. The background portrays three men on motorcycles surrounding another man in a white shirt. Behind them is some sort of futuristic sky-scraper monolith. Nothing on the cover is representative of any thing that actually happened in the movie, besides the existence of the yellow clad ninja.. There is nary a motorcycle in the whole of the film. The film opens with some sort of Ninja tribunal talking about excommunicating one of their ninjas for having premarital sex. The film now switches over to its poorly attached stock footage section about some average drunken fellow, who is obviously not a ninja, though he is supposed to be the Ninja who was exiled for engaging in premarital sex. In one sequence his girlfriend is harassed at a bar by a gaggle of drunken locals. The disgraced Ninja quickly engages the bar folk with an odd running head-butt attack, which has little affect. He is promptly beat down by the gaggle and humiliated. This section of the movie is long and slow, and completely and utterly unrelated to ninjas in any way. It drags on and on about the banished 'ninja' and his troubles at home.. The details are too numerous and agonizing to review but I do seem to remember that most of the issues plaguing him are resolved by some sort of suicide. The film takes sparse focus on the actual Ninja story, where the heroic ninja master Gordon battles a treacherous peer who has assassinated the leader of the Ninja sect. These sequences are fraught with unbelievably bad costumes and equally poor fight choreography. It all looks as if it was filmed in a local park; apparently these ninjas require no structures whatsoever. There is never any attempt made to reconcile the two different movie plots, other then the exiled for premarital sex edict. Ninja master Gordon vanquished the bad ninja in the end, and the other 2/3rds of the film are left without correlation or explanation. I would highly recommend this movie to anyone, until one has sat through this they could not possibly fathom exactly how poor a film can be.