aka Mirai Ninja, aka Robo Ninja, aka Warlord, aka Future Ninja

• Directed by Keita Amamiya
• Written by Keita Amamiya and Hajime Tanaka
• Starring
  • Hanbei Kawai
  • Hiroki Ida
  • Eri Morishita
  • Makoto Yokoyama

The Japanese film live-action film industry seems to have an even more pronounced dichotomy than the American industry. On the one side, you have the classic works of Kurosawa; on the other side, the tradition that consistently spits out unconvincing rubbery monsters and superheroes that must backflip three times before striking an opponent. Guess which camp this one falls into.

Fool that I am, I held out a glimmer of hope for this one. The video box actually went so far as to compare it to Star Wars. So I pop it in the VCR, and the following title card comes up:

Unfortunately, they had to try to rip it off without any spacecraft whatsoever, so here’s what we’ve got instead: Good guys and bad guys go to war. Both sides use ground troops armed with swords (and clothed in costumes borrowed from Japanese historical dramas, with some extra wires and circuits hot-glued on), followed by mega robot cannons. (The bad guys had an entire line of these robots, each with — I’m not kidding — a wooden outhouse on top!) The mechanical warriors mentioned in the prolog look an awful lot like the Putties that the Power Rangers knock down by the dozen.

There’s also the Cyber Ninja himself — a prototype that the bad guys made from the body of a fallen good guy in an effort to develop a robot with more intelligence, who escaped their control and is fighting against them. (The identity of the Cyber Ninja is supposedly kept a secret until the last ten seconds of the movie, but anyone with two gray cells to rub together can see the “surprise” coming practically from the end of the opening credits.)

Then the princess is captured (on a hovercraft that looks like a flying pagoda), and a bounty hunter hand-picks five soldier to storm the dark fortress and rescue her, and they team up with the Cyber Ninja, and they fight more of the mecha-ninjas plus some creatures that I swear my four-year-old would recognize from the Power Rangers, including one which directly rips off the jackal-headed costume from Stargate. Plus a lot of hokey laserblasts and yadda yadda yadda.

Yeah, this movie could be fun to watch, but only with someone else, and even then you’d have to keep up a steady stream of MST3K patter to keep yourselves amused.