“Twenty men? He got rid of twenty men? That’s impossible!”

Drake’s rating: Ninja U was my safety school.

Drake’s review: You may not know the name Mike Stone, but… well, honestly, there’s no reason you should, unless you’re maybe an Elvis Presley fan. Stone was a karate champion in the 1960s along with a bunch of other guys who participated in the plethora of tournament events across the nation, but it was his affair with Priscilla Presley in the early ‘70s that really got his name out there in the press. The tabloid press, at least. Heck, Stone himself was the one to popularize the affair when he sold the story to the Globe, and titled it “How I Stole Elvis’ Wife From Him.”

I mean, you just can’t buy class like that.

After that, Stone stuck around the fringes of Hollywood, doing some stunt work and a bit of acting. He also spent his time working on a story that he planned to star in, and sold it to Cannon head Menahem Golan. Golan turned the story into a script, then turned Stone the hopeful star into Stone the fight choreographer and stuntman as he hired Italian actor Franco Nero to be the lead.

Now while Nero was a veteran talent with a long list of Italian films under his belt, he had never really hit the American mainstream. He was a solid actor with a certain intensity, but his forte was in crime dramas and Spaghetti Westerns, not martial arts flicks.

“But wait,” I hear you ask. “Isn’t authentic martial artist Sho Kosugi the star here? Isn’t he the ninja?”

And I have to reply with a sad shake of my head and tell you no. Kosugi is a ninja in Enter the Ninja, but he’s not THE ninja. Kosugi is in fact Hasegawa, the bad ninja who, at the beginning of the film, is rather understandably incensed by Franco Nero’s Cole getting full ninja accreditation from the local ninjutsu academy. Cole even graduates with honors and gets a cool scroll, which makes Hasegawa just seethe.

Cole also wears a very white, very visible ninja outfit that makes him stand out while the other ninjas have to dress in the more traditional black.* Haasegawa never mentions this, but I think it’s a real sticking point with him.

Cole doesn’t stick around after graduation, though, because that’s always kind of awkward. He knows it’s time to move on and put his degree to use, so he hops on over to the Phillipines where an old war buddy of his owns a plantation. Frank, the war buddy, is pretty laid back, all in all, drinking beer and watching rooster fights with the locals because running a plantation sounds hard and he’s just not up for that. So it’s up to his wife, Mary-Ann (Susan George, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry) to keep the place up and running.

Which is harder than it sounds because bad guy Charles Venarius (Christopher George, The Exterminator, who is not related to Susan George but was married to Lynda Day George) wants Frank’s land since it might have oil under it. So Venarius sends his henchmen out in ever-growing numbers to make life difficult for Frank, not realizing that the plantation owner has a fully-certified ninja living under his roof.

But to be fair to Venarius, you don’t look at Franco Nero and instantly think, “Ninja!”

So we get a bunch of fight scenes with Stone subbing in for Nero as everyone gets to the punching and kicking, and Venarius becoming increasingly frustrated that his local amateur toughs are no match for a professional ninja who graduated summa cum laude from Ninja U. Once Venarius gets wise to all the ninjutsu going on, he hits up a talent scout, tells him to find a ninja looking for a paycheck, and then sits back and wallows in his evilness.

It turns out that putting out a want ad for a ninja does work, though, since Hasegawa shows up, looking for some payback at being passed over for the “Ninja Most Likely to Succeed” award back in school.

Cue a black ninja versus white ninja showdown and a hilarious death for Venarius and you’ve got yourself a box office hit big enough to spawn two sequels as well as a fistful of American Ninjas and other related mayhem down at the ol’ Cannon place.

Enter the Ninja is not a very good movie. It has a plot you’ve seen before in scores of Westerns and the martial arts sequences were only just OK even by the standards of the day. The actors save the film a bit by being reliable screen veterans, and Christoper George seems to be having a pretty good time playing the cackling villain, but really the only thing that sets this one apart from dozens of other martial arts flicks is the inclusion of the concept of the ninja as a main character. Surprising as it may seem now, ninja protagonists were virtually nonexistent, at least in American films, before Enter the Ninja,** and soon after they were everywhere.

Besides launching Sho Kosugi’s screen career, that’s probably the only lasting legacy Enter the Ninja has. If not for this flick, we might have just had Teenage Mutant Turtles, and what fun would that have been?

*Although some do wear red, because they evidently haven’t ever seen Star Trek.

**The Chuck Norris film The Octagon did have ninjas, but they were strictly of the supporting bad guy variety.

Intermission!

• I mean, he’s in a white ninja costume and hiding in the grass. He should be easy to spot.
• Oh, there are red ninjas as well. Those look kinda cool. I think I’d want to be a red ninja.
• Wait, they’re getting mowed down left and right. I don’t think I want to be a red ninja anymore.
• Cole even has a white scabbard. This guy commits to a theme.
• Beautiful waterfall, nice trees… seems like a pleasant spot to kill a dozen ninjas.
• Unexpected decapitation!
• Aha! It was all a test! And he passed. You get an A for unexpected decapitations.
• When you get the nickname “The Hook,” chances are you’re a bad guy.
• Nero has flashbacks to the war. Which war? No idea. Some war, somewhere.
• “Well, I want a ninja!” He’s in luck, because the local Ninja Mart is having a sale.
• Baseball bats are 100% ineffective against ninjas.
• Hasegawa burns the local village down, just to be a jerk. Of course, that probably ends the rooster fights so maybe he’s the secret hero?
• Filipino stuntmen doing the heavy lifting here.
• That death scene! Man, Christopher George hamming it up until the very end.
• Franco Nero literally winking at the audience. I should screencap that and use it at the end of every review.