Robot Ninja (1990)

Posted on May 18, 2002 under Action-suspense |

Produced, written and directed by J.R. Bookwalter
Starring
- Michael Todd
- Bogdan Pecic
- Maria Markovic
- Floyd Ewing Jr.
- Burt Ward
- Linnea Quigley
Executive produced by David DeCoteau

Huzzah for Spidey! The webhead’s on top of the box office right now, fulfilling every fanboy’s dream (and fervent prayer: “Please don’t suck please don’t suck please don’t suck please don’t suck…”). So in celebration, the B-Masters Cabal is exploring superheroes on the big screen. Click that adventurous little graphic over to the left to see what my compatriots have reviewed for the occasion. After you’ve read mine, naturally.

For background: The auteur here, J.R. Bookwalter, burst onto the scene at the ripe old age of 22 with his first film, The Dead Next Door — not one of the greats of motion picture history, but pretty damned good for his age and the paltry resources available. Among the people who sat up and took notice was David DeCoteau, who had with several films (Dreamaniac, Nightmare Sisters, Creepozoid, Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, Dr. Alien) established himself as a fixture in low-budget genre flicks through the middle of the ’80s. Most of his pictures had been produced expressly for distribution by one Charles Band, whose name has been mentioned around these premises a few times; around this time, DeCoteau had decided to branch out and start his own line of shot-on-video cheapies under the label of Cinema Home Video. He turned to Bookwalter to crank out the product, and functioned as executive producer on Bookwalter’s next project: Robot Ninja. (Bookwalter had also produced his friend Jon Killough’s movie Skinned Alive in 1989, but Robot Ninja was his first writing/directing outing after The Dead Next Door.)

Robot Ninja was actually produced on 16mm (a step up from the Super-8 used on DND), with a budget of $15,000 — quite high for the Cinema Home Video titles Bookwalter would produce (budgets dropped substantially for such features as Zombie Cop and Humanoids From Atlantis). Not bad for a kid who essentially put together a fanboy appreciation flick of George Romero’s trilogy and has managed to springboard it into a career.

Upholding the high standards of law enforcement.

Following that trend, then, Robot Ninja is very much a fanboy response to comics, just as DND was a fanboy response to Romero’s Dead trilogy. Unfortunately, it’s not as successful a movie as the earlier one. It’s got a pretty high suckiness quotient, to tell the truth. In fact, it plays just like the movie version of an amateurish little black ‘n’ white comic.

Lenny Miller (Michael Todd) is a comic book creator who’s hit the big time: His series, Robot Ninja, is one of the big bestsellers, and that’s created one of his worst headaches: It’s been translated to TV, and the series is intentionally harking back to the campiness of old Batman show, despite the grittiness of the comic. (We get to see his pubisher Stanley Kane (Burt Ward) and his secretary (Linnea Quigley) chuckling away as they watch an episode on TV.)

Unfortunately, the publisher has complete control in this arena, so Lenny can only grit his teeth and bear it. Which I found kind of confusing, given that the 1990 release date puts the production right in the middle of the first wave of creator-owned characters that followed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (a fact explicitly referenced in the script). So how he managed to give his publisher so much control is puzzling.

After whining at the TV production facility (the new darling of Must-See TV is produced in Ridgway, Ohio?), Lenny drives home, only to encounter along the way a phenomenally ill-conceived rape. I mean on the part of the rapists. Two guys (James L. Edwards and Bill Morrison), lead by heterodyke Sanchez (Maria Markovic), grab a couple right and throw them in their van right outside a restaurant, then drive them off somewhere and rape them. Lenny stumbles onto the scene and tries to play the hero, getting roughed up and left for dead in the process. (The guy and girl were also left for dead, the big difference being that they actually were dead.)

This is the hottest artist on the market?

Recovering rather easily, Lenny decides that these events would make a good storyline for Robot Ninja, and draws it. Time for a sidenote on the artwork, because you gotta at some point: David Lange did the art (and gets a credit for creating the character), and he’s exactly what you’d expect from an independently-published black ‘n’ white comic book in the late ’80s. In other words, it’s pretty amateurish. Very little sense of perspective, anatomy, or any of those other basics. It’s been a while since I’ve had my hand in the comic-illustration field, but I coulda whupped this fella hands down when I was trying to make a go of it. (And I gave up because I wasn’t good enough to do it for real.) He’s gotten better since (for a while, Tempe Entertainment was distributing copies of his self-published series Sybil War from 1999), but at this stage of the game he was just another generic not-ready-for-prime-time self-taught wanna-be. Point not being to rag on Lange, but to state that it’s hard to accept the Informed Attribute of Miller being the hottest thing on the market when the art we see so blatantly contradicts this.

Anyway. when Lenny turns in the rape storyline, Kane chides him for not going with their agreed-upon plan to make the comic more an adaptation of the TV series, rejects the artwork, and threatens his contract on renewal.

Between this rejection and seeing on the news that there’s been another rape assault (bringing the total up to five attacks), Lenny decides instead to become the Robot Ninja.

And this is where I’ve got real problems. Obviously we’re going for a dark, Batmanesque vigilante here, who’ve all gotten a big boost since Frank Miller (hey, gee, maybe that’s where Lenny Miller got his name) gave the world Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. True to form, there’s usually an inciting incident that drives the tortured hero to don a getup and patrol the night streets for evildoers. In this case, the incident was supposedly the double rape-murder, even though Lenny knew neither of the victims. Okay, I thought, that’s a misstep not having him be emotionally attached to the victims, but not a fatal error. But then it turns out that Lenny’s almost happy to have had the whole thing happen, just for the story fodder. It’s only when his artwork is rejected that he decides to put on a costume. Anyone besides me find that to be a less-than-compelling motivation, and not terribly sympathetic to boot?

Lenny sells his reluctant friend, “Inventor” Dr. Goodknight (Bogdan Pecic) on creating the suit for him; “I figure the costume alone’ll freak’em out,” he says. It’s like “Criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot,” but dumber. But, um, here’s the problem. Raise your hand if you’d be freaked by someone in a somber, dangerous costume in a dark alley. All right, that’s most of you. Now raise your hand if you’d be as frightened once you realized that it was a Batman costume. Nah, you’d assume he was off to a masquerade or a supermarket opening or something, not out on the prowl fighting crime. Same thing if someone met a costumed crimefighter dressed exactly like the campy superhero on Wednesdays at 8pm. Pop-culture familirity’s gonna work against the whole fear response.

“I can’t see a thing in this helmet!”

Goodknight macgyvers together some stuff from the hardware store based on Lenny’s drawings, and at the end of the day, ta-dah! Lenny’s in a suit appropriate for a convention appearance. Which leads to another problem: What, exactly, are the Robot Ninja’s powers? (To be honest, Robot Ninja is at best a robot cyborg, being showing in both the comics and the TV series as a guy in a black suit and metallic mask.) Lenny certainly seems pleased with the suit and its protection, but frankly, the only thing it has going for it is paired claw-blades extending from one wrist. That, and a metallic mask with a red visor and a voice modulator. In other words, it looks like Lenny’s bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Lenny goes off into the night in his Camaro, looking for trouble, and discovers the vanful of criminals knocking over a suburban video store. (Because, you know, video stores just rake in the dough. Plus you could steal a tape or two.) Lenny manages to get in the way of the getaway and slash a rapist to death, but not before the thugs’ twelve-year-old hostage gets knocked to the ground and dies (!!) from hitting his head on the pavement.

So Robot Ninja’s being blamed for the kid’s death as well as the thief’s, and Goodknight goes ballistic on Lenny the next day. (Um, Goodknight, you knew he wanted to play superhero, and the only weapon you gave him was twin ten-inch blades. You thought maybe he’d hit with the flat?)

But that doesn’t stop Lenny from going out again the next night. As far as he’s concerned, hunting down and killing these rapists is the most exhilarating way to spend a weeknight. He dirves out again, hits the right place at the right time (again), meets Sanchez and her new half-dozen thugs — and gets the robotic snot beaten out of him. Even without shooting him (which, you gotta admit, is what any half-decent gangbanger would have done in the first five seconds), they overpower him and, with only a couple of casualties on their side, beat dents into his mask, plus Sanchez carves a deep hole into his forearm. It’s only through the gangbangers’ own stupidity (they decide to take him home to finish off, instead of doing him in right there) that he manages to get away, taking a couple of bullets in the process.

Yeah, it looks cool, but just trying playing the piano with it on.

Something to be said about the conceits of the fight scenes. In between his escapades, Lenny chronicles his encounters in comic-book form. During the fights, there are edited-in comic panels that mirror the combat going on. It’s a nifty idea, in theory… except that the real-life fight choreography is pretty substandard, and so is the art, so that in switching back and forth, you’re only reminded that both are pretty lame.

Being smarter than the average bear, Sanchez easily follows Lenny’s car back to Goodknight’s place; she immediately assumes that he’s Goodknight, and therefore they plan to come back in the morning and do some damage. Goodknight’s not actually home, though, so Lenny gets to remove his own bullets using Goodknight’s tools and do a little bit of reparative surgery on himself. For instance, he takes a length of rubber tubing and inserts it into the bloody gap in his forearm to replace a severed vein, then shoves a metal plate under the edges of the skin to close the wound.

Which is just cool enough to be really, really annoying. Because if they did anything with this plot thread — that Lenny is in a sense becoming a real robot (or cyborg, or whateverthehell) — then the movie would experience a quantum leap forward in coolness. Is Lenny truly becoming the Robot Ninja?

Well, it never comes up again, so let’s just pretend the scene didn’t exist. And remember, we can’t tell if Lenny’s becoming the Robot Ninja anyway, because we have no idea of the Robot Ninja’s powers anyway.

So. While Lenny’s home drawing with his bad hand and sleeping the night off, Goodknight comes home and gets accosted by Sanchez and her little helper. Miffed that he’s only the techie, not the actual guy in a suit, they blow his brains out and leave him strung up from the ceiling struts for Lenny to find when he limps in that night, a note attached for Robot Ninja to meet them in the junkyard.

“wanna know what happened to the last guy who called us ‘bad in plaid’?”

You know, sooner or later I ought to mention the police officer. Apparently in Ridgway, Ohio, there are all of two cops, and one is Officer Hickox (Floyd Ewing Jr.). Since Ewing played an ex-cop named Hickox in the previous year’s Skinned Alive as well, I can only assume he got his life cleaned up and got back on the force. He spends most of the running time here showing up too late to catch the bad guys, arriving in time to find bodies and looks around morosely. Except for the time that he got to Lenny’s apartment before Lenny got home from Goodknight’s, when means he showed up too early and look at the locked door morosely.

And naturally, he finds Goodknight’s body and the note about the junkyard too late, so Robot Ninja takes on the baddies armed only with his blades, his red visor (which gives him night vision, via the trick of filming his POV shots during daylight through a red filter), and enough painkillers that he could probably impersonate Pacino in Scarface. There’s some asskicking and faceslashing, Robot Ninja vanquishes the last of the bad guys, and then goes home and blows his own brains out (just in time for Hickox to arrive too late and gaze on the corpse morosely).

Oh, and the final unfinished issue of Robot Ninja is published and becomes a bestseller. The end.

It’s really not that inspiring a movie; the dialogue is pedestrian, and the acting rarely rises to community theater standards. And it’s pretty generic as comic books go. As I mentioned way back when, it reminds me of nothing so much as all the half-baked black ‘n’ white limited series that were self-published at the tail end of the ’80s by a bunch of fanboys who hoped that the TMNT lightning would strike twice.

Nevertheless, remember that J.R. Bookwalter is really one of the grandpappies of the microbudget film movement. It’s easy to critique now, but back in the day, there wasn’t a thriving internet community supporting pocketchange filmmakers. He may have stumbled on this movie, but one might say that it is only by standing on his prone figure that today’s microbudgeters have reached as high. (Dear sweet mama, that’ absolutely the worst metaphor I’ve come up with in ages.)

And as I pointed out, there were some good ideas here which were never developed. The fight scenes intercut with comic panels (with a slight intimation that maybe fighting crime isn’t quite as easy as they make it look in the funnypages). The idea of becoming a makeshift cyborg. Both of which still have potential.

In fact, what I’d really like to see is a couple of the hyperactive low-budget action filmmakers around today, specifically Alvin Ecarma and Eric Thornett, draw inspiration from Grandpa Bookwalter’s Robot Ninja and make their own costumed crimefighter flick (maybe with some scripting assistance from, I dunno, yours truly), one that plays up those ideas and brings the energy level of the fight choreography up to cartoony levels (in a good sense).

Bonus:
As a very few of you may recognize, the illustration for the Cabal’s banner for this roundtable is a genuine Shumate original. So why, you may ask, is “Captain B” only pictured from the torso up?

Well, to make a long story short, our promotional budget for this roundtable was a little tight, so we only managed to get half of a suit put together. Here’s our illustrious model, in all of his glory.