After his wife (voiced by Ginger Lynn) is murdered, TV sound man/martial artist Liu (John Liu; voiced by Don ‘the Dragon’ Wilson) masks up to fight for vengeance and justice as New York’s Ninja!
A bridge between Wuxia cinema, the eighties Ninja craze and the New York-based grindhouse fare of Frank Henenlotter, William Lustig and James Glickenhaus, New York Ninja is a glorious one-off.
Shot in 1984 guerrilla-style on the streets of New York, the film was unfinished for decades until Vinegar Syndrome’s Kurtis M. Spieler set about resurrecting and releasing it.
This a movie of refractions - original auteur John Liu’s adoption of the then-popular Ninja craze, and ‘re-director’ Kurtis M. Spieler’s reassembly of the film, with the mostly unknown cast given voice by an assembly of martial arts luminaries.
Despite the extended postproduction, Spieler’s reconstruction and the celebrity stunt casting accentuates and supports the film’s home-made qualities.
Like the filmmakers behind Hundreds of Beavers, the re-post-filmmakers behind New York Ninja seem to recognise the potency of the film’s aesthetic choices and limitations.
The specific effect of watching actors running through undressed New York streets has a visceral, tangible sense of place. The cheap visual effects makeup gives a queasy, uncanny edge to the villain’s degeneration.
Because of how shaky the actual production values are (including the dubbing), the reconstructed New York Ninja bottles a specific vibe of the era and style of pictures its original creators were striving towards.
It is no mere homage, but a renovation. It is reclaiming something that already existed and polishing to make it the best version of what it was intended to be (at least in spirit, if not literal narrative).
In some ways it feels like a Cannon movie made by talented amateurs, yet there is a sweetness and warmth to the film that feels all of its own.
My one regret is that, like Miami Connection, I did not get the chance to discover this movie for the first time in a theatre, with a crowd.
I cannot say I loved it, but its scrappy can-do spirit, and the atmosphere of the New York locations are something to be appreciated.
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