October 17, 2014 - 11:16am by Adam Dravian
Finally, we get to the last of the thematic “ninja trilogy.” Being the followup to Enter the Ninja and Revenge of the Ninja, you’d think it’d be titled something like Curse of the Ninja (which would actually be super fitting, as you’ll soon see), but instead they fuck up the naming scheme and call it Ninja III: The Domination.
Ninja III is the black sheep of the trilogy, often regarded as the worst, but it’s actually my favorite. Why? Because this is the basic premise: a cute aerobics instructor is periodically possessed by the spirit of an evil ninja, causing her to go out and kill cops, slasher movie style.
If that doesn't sound rad as hell to you, you need to check your rad-o-meter.
Warning: Lots of spoilers ahead.
It starts with one of my favorite movie openings.
A mustachioed Japanese dude in a business suit enters a cave, opens up a mysterious glowing rock filled with ninja gear, and becomes a ninja.
This ninja is referred to throughout the movie as the “black ninja,” but he wears olive green, so I’m dubbing him Green Ninja. So Green Ninja drops by a golf course, crushes a golf ball with his bare hand, and then assassinates the fuck outta some rich guy, his busty blonde companion, and his bodyguards. We’re later informed that the rich guy was “a very important scientist,” but we’re never told why Green Ninja assassinated him.
Then the police show up and we’re treated to a long GTA-esque police chase, in which Green Ninja kills so many cops that the Terminator would be jealous. Green Ninja even manages to take out a police helicopter and surf on a police cruiser, Teen Wolf style.
Eventually the cops surround Green Ninja and unload everything they've got into him. The ninja flails about as his body is blasted by handguns, shotguns, and even a machine gun. But apparently he’s the Jason Voorhees of ninjas, because despite all that, he just won’t die. He finally disappears in one of those smoke bombs that ninjas fucking love.
Then we meet our movie’s star. This time it’s not Django, nor even Sho Kosugi, it’s, uh, Christie. She’s a telephone linewoman by day and an aerobics instructor by evening.
While she’s out working on a telephone line, listening to bad ‘80s pop music, she comes across the wounded Green Ninja. He grapples her to the ground and attempts to choke her, but she manages to fight him off. As she starts to flee, he cries out to her in Japanese, and for some insane reason she decides to give this crazy ninja another chance. She approaches and he gives her his sword, then dies.
Upon grabbing the sword, she gets a quick vision of the faces of all the cops who fatally shot her dead ninja friend. She decides to keep the sword as a keepsake of the neat encounter and goes to the police station to report a dead ninja finding. And that’s where she meets our cocky male lead. This guy.
The viewers recognize him as the cop who unloaded his machine gun into Green Ninja, but Christie doesn't recognize his face from her mystic vision because he had been silhouetted by the sun. He hits on her repeatedly in a manner that would probably get him maced in the face today, but Christie just tells him that she’s not interested and that she doesn't date cops.
Cop Dude can’t take a hint, so he stalks her and joins her aerobics class like a total creep. He tries asking her out again, but she’s still not having it. After class, as everyone is leaving, Christie sees a group of meatheads harassing and groping some girl.
Before things can get too rapey, Christie tells the meatheads to let her go. They do, but then surround and start trying to grope at Christie instead.
Now, this isn't in some dark alley at night. This is in full daylight, just outside the gym, with dozens of onlookers, including Cop Dude (who merely stands there and watches). Christie taps into her inner Green Ninja and kicks their asses. After the fight, she notices Cop Dude in the gathered crowd of onlookers.
Instead of apologizing for being a complete pussy and not trying to stop those guys, he tells her she’s under arrest. Never mind the meatheads who assaulted two women. I suppose he thinks getting their asses kicked by a girl was punishment enough.
In the next scene, Cop Dude and Christie are cruising in his convertible and he reveals that she’s not really under arrest, he just wanted an excuse to be with her. She’s understandably pissed off and once again tells him she’s not interested in dating a cop. He then loses his temper, yelling about how sick and tired he is of her turning him down. He stops the car and demands that she get out.
Instead of getting out and being glad to be rid of the creep, this outburst causes Christie to warm up to him. Seriously, as soon as he finishes yelling at her, her face lights up in a flirtatious smile, apparently delighted to have found her future abusive boyfriend. Actually, maybe that’s why she was so quick to forgive Green Ninja for trying to strangle her. She’s probably totally into that shit.
Anyway, so her opinion of Cop Dude does such a one-eighty that she invites him back to her place, showers (despite having apparently just showered after her aerobics class), drops her towel in front of him, and then pours V8 juice down her chest for him to lick up.
It’s movies like this that give dudes the false impression that a girl will eventually let you lick V8 juice off her tits if you’re just persistent for long enough.
Anyway, next we see them sleeping in her bed, after what we can only assume was a night of marathon donging, and then shit gets awesome again. Spooky powers wake her up and compel her to go to her closet, where Green Ninja’s sword floats out to her.
She grips it and suddenly gets an Asian makeover as Green Ninja possesses her.
At this point the movie starts to follow the slasher formula. Christie periodically gets possessed, dons the olive green ninja outfit, and stealthily assassinates one of the cops that fatally wounded Green Ninja.
But she has no idea that she’s doing any of this. All she knows is that she blacks out for long periods of time and when she comes to, she often has bruises. And maybe bits of pool balls that she had crushed caught in her nails. Crushing balls is apparently a favorite ninja intimidation tactic.
Every time the spirit of Green Ninja is about to possess her, her apartment goes all Poltergeist. Her furniture starts moving around, fog billows out of everything, wind blows back her hair like she’s in a glam metal music video. And, my personal favorite: her arcade machine shoots lasers at her face.
Why? Who the fuck knows? Ninja magic.
At one point she tries to fight against the coming possession. She knows it’s coming because her apartment has gone into spooky glam rock video mode, so she tries to fend it off it in the best way possible: she turns on some pop music and starts dancing.
Now you might think I’m just making a joke about what she appears to be doing in this screen capture, but no. I assure you she really is dancing. And it totally doesn't work. The spooky powers just get more pissed off and suck her into the closet for some ninja makeover time.
Cop Dude, now apparently her boyfriend, gets disturbed by her strange behavior (though he didn't have a problem with the weirdo V8 thing), so he ends up taking her to see the local expert on spooky Asian stuff, Lo Pan.
They chain her up and do one of those demon-provoking ceremonies, which, sure enough, causes her to become super-possessed, now with crazy red eyes.
This freaks the shit out of Lo Pan, who rolls around on the walls for a bit until Christie passes out from all the fun. Then Lo Pan tells Cop Dude the two things that no guy wants to hear about his girlfriend.
1. She’s possessed by an evil ninja.
2. Only one thing can stop the evil ninja. As he puts it, “Only a ninja .... can kill a ninja.”
That statement is the only thing in the world that truly makes sense to me.
Good thing there’s another ninja in this movie. That’s right, Sho Kosugi is back, this time playing a stoic and mysterious ninja with an eye patch.
He breaks into a morgue to check out the body of Green Ninja. Then we’re treated to a brief flashback where we learn that Green Ninja killed some old dude Sho cared about, and then took out Sho’s eye with a ninja star.
Once Sho finishes reminiscing over the corpse, he steals the body and takes it to some kind of Asian temple in the nearby mountains.
Meanwhile, Christie, in full-on Green Ninja possession mode, crashes a police funeral, killing even more cops (I’m surprised there are even any cops left in the department at this point). But her cop-killing fun comes to an end when Sho arrives on the scene and chases her into an old abandoned mansion, where he’s promptly kicked so hard that he busts through the floor and falls into the basement. He tries to go back up the stairs, but She-Ninja keeps throwing random debris down at him, like some kind of ninja Donkey Kong.
Finally, the cops surround the house and She-Ninja flees. Sho turns himself in and tells Cop Dude to bring the sword and girl to the old temple on the hill and wait for him. Cop Dude goes to her place to snatch the sword, but Christie catches him in the act and then she finally realizes that he’s the guy that machine-gunned Green Ninja. She gets possessed and goes to kill him …
But can’t! Holy shit, Christie’s love for Cop Dude triumphs over the power of the Green Ninja ghost! Can you believe it?
Instead, She-Ninja takes off. Cop Dude tries to go after her, but fails to keep up. Lucky for him, She-Ninja goes directly where Cop Dude wanted to take her, the old temple.
And it’s there that we're treated to our climactic ninja battle scene. Sho battles She-Ninja, but quickly manages to scare the ghost out of Christie and back into its old decaying body.
Which means we get to see Sho battle a motherfucking zombie ninja (seriously, how can anyone think this movie is the worst of the ninja trilogy?). At first, zombie ninja moves all rigidly and only uses one arm, but they soon drop that gimmick and he fights normally. Not sure if his body quickly fully recovered or if the actor just got sick of trying to fight like that.
Anyway, zombie ninja uses more spooky powers to turn all the monks against Sho. Sho quickly fucks ‘em up and he and Zombie Ninja resume their battle out on the hillside while Christie and Cop Dude stand there and watch. Actually, Cop Dude goes to shoot Zombie Ninja at one point, but Christie stops him. Maybe because bullets don’t seem to do shit to this guy, or maybe because it’s rude to interrupt a ninja duel.
Regardless, she totally changes her mind a few minutes later, when Sho disarms Green Ninja and the sword lands near her feet. She snatches it up and charges Zombie Ninja, thrusting it right into him. Zombie Ninja staggers for a moment, then spins in place and drills down into the ground.
As Christie, Sho, and Cop Dude are standing there, wondering what the fuck that was all about, an earthquake strikes, splitting the ground open and causing Sho to almost fall into a gap that looks like it’s a ten or fifteen foot drop.
Now, if he were a normal dude, I could see him being worried he might sprain his ankle or something, but he’s fucking Sho Kosugi, and we've already seen him jump fifteen feet into the air from a standstill multiple times.
Zombie Ninja takes another pointer from the slasher villain handbook and suddenly comes back for one final attack. He, uh, grabs Sho’s foot. But he looks menacing while doing it. Sho stabs him right in the skull and Green Ninja finally seems to die, with his body fading away like a Jedi.
Now at this point, I imagine Christie is kind of bummed. I mean, for a minute it had seemed as though she had killed Green Ninja, which would mean that she’s now a ninja herself (since only a ninja can kill a ninja). But nope. Sho did the final killing, robbing her of possible ninja status. But she smiles in spite of this. And in spite of the obvious wig that she’s now wearing (I’d guess this was filmed during re-shoots after she’d already changed her hair).
And then Sho gives her a heartwarming smile and the credits go.
It seems the makers of Ninja III were totally trying to get chicks into this movie. Not only did they cast a chick in the lead, but they took the idea of her working a blue collar "man's job" by day and doing a more feminine, dance oriented job by evening right out of Flashdance.
Flashdance was a huge surprise hit with chicks the previous year, basically giving birth to the modern chick flick. Apparently, the makers of Ninja III thought they could get a piece of that action. Even Christie's relationship with the cop who continually hounds her for a date and won't take no for an answer seems pulled from Flashdance. If the filmmakers were trying to appeal to chicks, that might also explain why this movie doesn't have as much nudity or gore as the previous films in the ninja trilogy.
It didn't work out for them, though. Not only did chicks not flock to see a movie called Ninja III: The Domination, but the shift in direction pissed off a lot of dude fans who didn't want to see Sho Kosugi take a back seat to some ninja chick horror drama. Cannon Films tried to correct this mistake the following year by launching the much more macho American Ninja franchise, starring the '80's answer to James Dean, Michael Dudikoff.
But I think Ninja III trying to be so many things at once is part of what makes it so awesome. It's the kind of truly bizarre movie that could only have been made in the '80s.
Ninja Factor: High. We get to see a whole lot of a ninja slaughtering police officers, although the only ninja on ninja action we see is at the very end.
Satan Factor: We've got a kind of demonic possession-thing going on, and a scene inspired by The Exorcist. Also, Christie has an album in her apartment with a big Satan face on it.
Boob Factor: Doesn't rank too high here, unfortunately. Christie never seems to wear a bra, but then again, she doesn't really need one (despite what the poster would have you beleive). We get to see a busty girl in a revealing swimsuit get drowned in a hot tub, but the only nudity we see in the movie is a painting of a nude busty girl in the background of one scene.
Ninjas Crushing Balls to Intimidate Factor: I’m so impressed with how high the movie scores here.
'80s Factor: Really high. We have ninjas, aerobics, bad '80s pop music and dancing, random neon lights. This movie has a strong '80s feel to it.
Overall Rating: Four Pentastars out of five. It’s a bad '80s movie in the best way.