American Ninja 1

american ninja 1-4 02

Nothing says mid 80s like a ninja movie made by Americans and shot in Philippines for tax reasons. This movie is so mid-80’s that its even called American Ninja.

Cannon doesn’t mess around with unconventional plots and shots. This is Pretty straight forward. This movie was released in 1985 and looks like a mix of Rambo First blood of 1982 and 1981’s Enter the Ninja. You have a new guy in the group and he gets bullied and then fights the leader and then becomes a friends with the group and then they fight the bad guys who are attacking them for their army weapons.

It’s a lame movie and there is hardly any blood and gore despite all the fights. Michael Dudikoff is the lead actor that plays the Rambo role and he doesn’t know any martial arts. He just hops around like a clown from platform to platform. I think this lead role was given to him as a favour by the Cannon producers. They kept him too for the next three movies because this one was a big success. It costs $1m to make and made over $10m in sales in the initial release. That’s good going for Cannon. Most of their movies are poor performers. They do even go bankrupt in 1996. They had a good decade of fun. Profit, not so much.

There was a slight twist at the end. The love interest of Dudikoff, was the daughter of some high rank official that commanded the army. But it turns out that the Official was also connected to the bad guys. Thats how the bad guys knew where to get the guns.

Dudikoff says almost nothing for the entire movie. This is supposed to rip off Rambo but Dudi looks like there is something wrong with him.

Non-stop terrible action that is fun to watch. Watch it.