Make Mine An American Ninja

Holy Shit! Michael Dudikoff has a fucking website! You can check out the awesomeness here.

While that marinates, I'll tell you that I loved American Ninja as a kid. Apparently, what made it so awesome to me (and probably to the people who made it as well) was that I was oblivious to the idea that ninja are supposed to be stealthy. I mean, the whole concept of a ninja is NOT to be seen and the first thing these ninja do is ambush an army convoy in the middle of the day!

The film centers around a amnesiac super ninja who joins the Army in order drive a truck (doesn't the Army have any skill assessment tests?) and ends up saving a colonel's daughter (so, Hugo Chavez here has the US Army at his disposal?) from a guy named Black Star Ninja (pictured). No, he isn't the most metal band name that you've ever heard, but rather a super fucking badass ninja general who has a fucking laser on his arm (no kidding).

This film is like Rambo 2 if it had been written by A Rebel Without a Cause and sponsored by Blockbuster Video. Apparently, Chuck Norris was originally cast in the lead role, but once he realized that his beard would be covered up in the ninja outfit, he wisely declined in favor of Missing in Action 2: The Beginning. Unlike that film, this one is something my older brother would have written when he was 9, in-between ordering ninja-stars out of magazines.

A few questions that arise while viewing this masterpiece: Would it really be necessary to tell your driver to "follow him" when you're chasing someone? Why don't I have a portrait that depicts John Wayne's disembodied head floating over a desert landscape? Why can't "ninja magic" solve more of life's problems? And most importantly, why would a younger me love this film quite so much?

Rated "R" movies that I couldn't watch when I was too young seem especially quaint now. The idea that there was a time, a me, that wasn't allowed to watch a movie where the worst fight choreographers in the world were gathered together in order to convince the audience that a guy who didn't even know martial arts was the top dog ninja of the land and killed other ninjas with his shinobi-tastic moves is just strange. It's a weird connection to the past that brings on an eerie nostalgia for the days when Nightmare on Elm Street was scary and the only thing to do with a frisbee was to play Tron with it. That link to the days when the bad guys in most movies had an uzi reminds me that things have changed a lot since the days of Reagan, but Ninja will always be cool.

UPDATE 4/7/10: Apparently, Michael Dudikoff's web page has been shut down for failure to pay web-hosting fees, so as a replacement, I give you this. (There's even a phone number?)

The Topo the Weird (Holy) Mountain

Apparently, this film is a cult classic, which translates to:

"You are not going to understand or like this film because you are not surrounded by passionate fans of it."

My theory is that every movie that is considered a cult classic is actually just bad. That is, until one person decides to like it ironically. That person's ironic passion spreads, and there you go.

Don't get me wrong. There are other types of great older, cheesy, cult films (Street Fighter with Sonny Chiba is one). But unlike those films, the ones I'm referring to have no redeeming qualities.

So here we have El Topo, which apparently translates to "the mole". Basically, it's a western that would result if The Last Temptation of Christ and Eyes Wide Shut had a threesome with The Wall while A Fistful of Dollars watched creepily in the corner. In the film, a gunfighter roams the desert in order to kill four master gunslingers in progressive fashion. Sounds pretty good so far, right? Kind of a little like Afro Samurai.

Well, add to that equation a naked 7 year-old boy sidekick that the gunfighter keeps as some sort of pet at the beginning of the film, lots of weird religious iconography, and an incestuous underground town of people dressed like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The questions that arise upon viewing are these: Is there any legitimacy to being weird for the sake of being weird? I mean, if one were to take a mishmash of visualized ideas and barely thread them together with the thinnest veil of a plot, what has one accomplished? If you take away the context of ideas and simply conceptualize them, are you really getting your audience to think about them, or are you just de-familiarizing these concepts under the guise of dissecting them?

But I digress into seriousness...shame on me.

I haven't even taken a moment to describe the scene where a young, athletic black man is rubbing cream on four different old white ladies who are in their underwear. He ping-pongs between them until they finally force him to the ground and lick him while growling like lions. I'm sure it's just a commentary on how changing race relations affect an aging population who were ingrained with the inaccessibility of the "other".

Ah, new beginnings (or how I stopped caring and learned to love blogging)

So, here's the deal. I'm not a fan of this blogging stuff in general. I think too many fuckers enable their own uselessness by resorting to trumpeting their drivel online. No one gives a shit about what they say or do in their real lives, so they hop online and spew to the waiting droves of people much like themselves.

As you can already tell, I'm totally into flattering those who might be reading. And I'm a hypocrite.

I finally realized that there might actually be intelligent people out there who read these things for something other than reinforcing their mouth-breathing. So, here I am. And there you are. I guess I've found you. Or the other way around. Whatever.

Alright, what follows are some guidelines that I'll do my best to follow as I move forward with this thing. If you like them, great, this thing's for you. If not, well, for fuck's-sake get the hell out and don't come back.

-Most of my posts will be movie-related. Look, I have a netflix account and I'm not afraid to use it. I enjoy crap-tastic films and I enjoy the people who enjoy them. The majority of my posts will combine these things into observations about the inane aspects of the sublimely ridiculous films in my queue.

-This is not a fucking diary. You will not read about what I did during my workday, what kind of laundry detergent I use, or how I feel about the political climate. That shit's just boring.

-I'll do my best to keep a sense of humor throughout, if only for the entertainment-value that my attempts at being funny will offer.

-I don't take myself too seriously (and neither should you). There will be a lot of things said and much of it will probably just be adding to the meaningless chatter that populates most of the internet. Consider it disposable.

Well, that's about it. I don't want to box myself in too early in the game. After all, we've got a long, hard road ahead of us. There's no sense in fretting over the first fucking step.