We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
A ninja enters and is followed by sequels to Chuck Norris, Scanners, and breakdancing movies.
ENTER THE NINJA (1981)
This Cannon Films classic starts off with a rather humorous title sequence. For more than two minutes we watch a ninja dressed in a black gi demonstrate various types of weapons while credits appear on the screen. Done with the demonstration, the ninja strikes a pose... and then his time in the spotlight comes to a humiliating end when a ninja dressed in a white gi comes run in and kicks him in the head. That really boils the whole movie down into a 3 minute short; Enter the Ninja is about a ninja dressed in white defeating a ninja dressed in black. For the next 97 minutes, we see that story play out in an extended way.
When Enter the Ninja started filming, it had New Year's Evil director Emmett Alston at the helm and martial arts expert Mike Stone, who also crafted the story Dick Desmond turned into a screenplay, in the lead role of Cole, an American man who becomes a ninja. But after a few days of allegedly "boring" dailies, producer Menahem Golan stepped in to direct and decided to replace Stone in the lead because he "lacked acting ability". That must have been some bad acting, because movies of this sort don't usually ask much from their leading men. It was so bad that Stone's replacement was Italian actor Franco Nero - and while it is very cool to have a ninja movie starring Django himself, Nero wasn't the perfect match for this role because he couldn't do an American accent and he didn't have any martial arts training. His voice had to be dubbed, and Stone stayed on the project as his fight double. Well, Nero certainly does have strong screen presence.
The opening action sequence is about as goofy as that title sequence, because it features Cole, a white gi, being hunted through the Japanese countryside by a group of ninjas dressed in red and led by the ninja in black, Sho Kosugi as Hasegawa. It's goofy because we clearly see Cole kill these ninjas, and when he infiltrates their home base he even decapitates their master, Komori (Dale Ishimoto). But none of them are dead. Komori didn't lose his head. It was all play-acting, Cole's final test as he becomes a ninja under Komori's guidance. They were putting on a show for themselves.
Hasegawa isn't on board with this "American ninja" nonsense, but Komori gladly welcomes Cole as a ninja and sends him out into the world to use his strength to help the least fortunate. Cole's first stop is the Philippines, where he visits his old military buddy Frank (Alex Courtney), who saved his life during the Angolan Bush War. Frank owns a nice plot of land with his wife Mary-Ann (Susan George), and that land is coveted by Charles Venarius (a scenery-chewing Christopher George), owner of Venarius Industries, who wants to drill for oil there. So Venarius sends a stream of henchmen led by 'The Hook' (Zachi Noy) - so called because he has a steel hook hand - to get Frank and Mary-Ann to vacate their property. The trouble with Venarius is why Frank asked Cole to come to the Philippines, and Cole proves to be more than Venarius and his goons can handle.
You see where this is going, don't you? Venarius needs a ninja to fight a ninja. So here comes Hasegawa.
Enter the Ninja is a fun '80s action flick that keeps the action coming at you at a steady flow. This is the sort of movie I would have enjoyed just as much when I was a little kid as I did now, because I was all caught up in the ninja boom of the '80s. The sight of something like that opening with the color-coded ninjas would have brought me much joy in my early days... and to be honest, it's still a sight I really like to see. There's just something cool about ninjas fighting each other while wearing different color gis.
The movie is dragged down a bit by how lame the Frank character is, and there's an odd moment where Cole goes ahead and sleeps with Mary-Ann after Frank confides in him that he "can't get it up for her" in these days before erectile dysfunction meds, that's just how much of a helpful friend he is. But those fight scenes are neat, and I also enjoyed the fact that Cole gets some assistance from an elderly local called Dollars and played by Will Hare, that scary grandpa from Silent Night, Deadly Night.
DELTA FORCE 2: THE COLOMBIAN CONNECTION (1990)
Cannon almost made a sequel to their 1986 film The Delta Force without the film's star, Chuck Norris. In the '87, they announced that Albert Pyun would be directing Spitfire: Delta Force 2, starring Michael Dudikoff and Steve James, the stars of American Ninja and American Ninja 2. Which would have been kind of odd, the stars of one Cannon franchise taking over a different one. But, that didn't happen. Norris came back, Lee Reynolds wrote a fresh script, and Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection was directed by Norris's brother Aaron Norris.
Inspired by real events involving Pablo Escobar, Delta Force 2 is kind of similar to the James Bond movie Licence to Kill in its set-up. The story begins in Rio de Janeiro, where Ramon Cota (Billy Drago), the wealthiest drug runner in the world, is attending a costume party during Carnaval. A team of DEA agents are there to capture Cota, but he has been tipped off by a mole inside the agency, so the DEA agents are massacred by Cota's henchmen. Since the DEA has been compromised, the agency recruits Colonel Scott McCoy (Norris) and Major Bobby Chavez (Paul Perri) of the Army's Delta Force to apprehend Cota while he takes a flight that goes through U.S. air space. McCoy and Chavez are able to do this rather easily, and when we see McCoy threaten to toss Cota out of the plane without a parachute - and then carry through with this threat, only to dive out after him and catch up to him just in time - it reminded me of Mission: Impossible III, where Tom Cruise's character threatens a powerful gun runner during a flight, not knowing that this criminal is going to be free soon and he has just given them more reason to tear apart his life when they have the opportunity. Cota is free very soon, since the judge sets his bail at just $10 million, and just like the villain in Mission: Impossible III and just like the drug runner in Licence to Kill, he sets out to get revenge on the heroes. Chavez, his brother, and his pregnant wife are all killed by Cota's men.
So now it's up to McCoy to bring Cota justice - although he can't go full "eye full an eye" because the U.S. government wants the drug runner taken alive. McCoy goes on an official Delta Force mission to infiltrate Cota's home country of San Carlos, where the government isn't much help because the president is in danger of being overthrown by a military general that Cota has in his pocket. That's okay, Chuck Norris can handle the situation anyway. While the Delta Force team was led by Lee Marvin in the first movie, Marvin had passed away soon after the film was released, so this time Delta Force needed a new leader. Marvin's replacement is John P. Ryan as General Taylor, and Ryan was a good choice for a role like this.
Delta Force 2 is a sequel I can get more enjoyment out of than its predecessor, because it's more along the lines of what I want to see from a Chuck Norris movie - which is to say, it's more of a typical action movie, with even some arbitrary physical confrontations thrown in when McCoy isn't directly dealing with Cota and his lackeys. This is also one of those movies that my memory decided to latch on to for no reason at all. This has never been a particularly important film to me, but for some reason I clearly remember when it was released on VHS. I remember when my parents rented it, and watching it with them for the first time. That was probably early 1991, and yet it's still in my mind 30 years later. The part that has stuck with me most of all is the fight scene between McCoy and Cota's right hand man Carlos, played by frequent Norris collaborator Rick Prieto.
The biggest problem with the movie is that it can be quite nihilistic at times, it shows and tells about some horrible things happening to people that don't deserve it. As mentioned, Chavez's wife is pregnant when she gets killed, and Norris didn't shy away from showing her bloody corpse. That's not the only instance of tragedy striking mothers and children, either. But aside from those bummers, the action is entertaining.
SCANNERS II: THE NEW ORDER (1991)
Ten years after David Cronenberg's Scanners, producer Pierre David decided to build a franchise on the concept of people who have powerful psychic and telekinetic abilities; the scanners of the title. Scanners II: The New Order and a third film were put into production back-to-back, with Christian Duguay directing both of them from screenplays written by B.J. Nelson.
The story of Scanners II involves police commander John Forrester (Yvan Ponton) working with a doctor named Morse (Tom Butler) to build the "new order" the subtitle mentions; they want to use scanners to fight a new war on crime. The problem with this idea is that most scanners they come across are quite unruly and have to be controlled with a drug called Eph2, a new version of the drug ephemerol, which caused them to develop the scanner abilities in the first place. The scanners get hooked on Eph2, and soon they're not of any use any longer. As the film begins, we see two scanners get recruited by Forrester and Morse: one is the clearly villainous and unhinged Drak (Raoul Trujillo) and the other is our hero, veterinarian intern David Kellum (David Hewlett of Pin - read my write-up on Pin HERE, or watch the video I wrote about it HERE).
David is discovered after security camera footage shows him using his abilities to make an armed robber's head explode, because a Scanners movie has to have an exploding head in it. And they clearly knew that they couldn't live up to the exploding head in the first movie, because they put a couple of them into this sequel. Making heads explode isn't something David does regularly, that incident with the robber was his first time, and he's a good guy. In fact, he's too good to be working with Forrester and Morse, because these guys are willing to take unscrupulous, homicidal if necessary, measures to make sure they can see their agenda through. An agenda that involves manipulating the mayor into making Forrester the new chief of police.
While David is dealing with this crime and corruption, he's also on a journey of self-discovery, as he's just finding out that he is a scanner - and that he was adopted. Scanners II is revealed to be set much more than ten years after the first movie when David is told that he's the son of the lead characters from the previous film, and he even has an older sister, Deborah Raffin as Julie Vale.
I could have done without David being connected to the characters from Cronenberg's movie, that doesn't feel like it needed to be in there as far as I'm concerned, but that element - and the part of the movie that involves David taking strolls in the snow and learning his own history - is really the only issue I had with The New Order. This is a pretty good sequel, with a story that's rather well constructed and some cool action beats. I actually had an easier time getting into it than I had getting into Scanners. Like I mentioned in my write-up on that one, the first Scanners was a bit of a struggle for me. This one had its lulls, but I was interested in seeing where it was going. Hewlett handles the lead role well, and Trujillo effectively makes Drak the sort of bad guy you can't wait to see get taken down. I wouldn't have suggested Scanners for the franchise treatment, but I think they did a decent job with this.
BREAKIN' 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO (1984)
At the end of Breakin', it may have looked like Turbo (Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers), Kelly (Lucinda Dickey), and Ozone (Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones) were going to have a successful career together as the dance trio TKO, but Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, the film with the most famous subtitle of all time, has a different story to tell you. Written by Jan Ventura and Julie Reichert, the film begins with Kelly continuing to pursue a dance career on her own while Turbo and Ozone are dedicating their time to teaching dance to kids at a community center in a run-down part of the city. Kelly hasn't seen the guys for a while, since she's been off starring in stage shows, and she's reunited with them just in time to find out that the community center, called Miracles, is in danger of being bulldozed to make way for a new shopping mall. So this is all about TKO doing whatever they can to save Miracles. And what they can do involves a whole lot of dancing.
For a sequel that reached theatres just 7 months after its predecessor, it's crazy just how different Breakin' 2 is. While the first Breakin' was a typical dance movie set in a somewhat realistic world, Breakin' 2 dives all the way into musical fantasy land from the very beginning, where we see a whole neighborhood join in for a dance sequence. Dance was a special skill in the first movie, here it's something everyone can do, and they do it all the time, everywhere. There's a massive dance sequence involving doctors, nurses, and patients in a hospital.
Not only is the story off from the ending of Breakin' and the style of film different, Breakin' 2 also has an unexpected view of Kelly: turns out, she's a rich girl whose wealthy parents have a negative view of her dancing aspirations and her breakdancing friends. There was no indication in the first movie that Kelly came from money, especially with her driving around the city in a questionable VW. But this gives Kelly something to deal with in the film other than the simple set-up of saving Miracles. Turbo also gets his own subplot, where he falls for a girl named Lucia (Sabrina Garcia). There's a language barrier between them, but that is overcome when she sees that he has the ability to dance up the walls of his room and onto the ceiling.
But while Breakin' 2 may not be exactly what you'd expect of a Breakin' follow-up, it is a really fun movie that's packed with dance sequences. Directed by Sam Firstenberg, the movie is 94 minutes of music and entertainment. There's not much too it other than a good time. This was a movie aimed directing and the teens and tweens of the '80s, and I know for a fact that it worked very well for my older brother, who was 11 when it was released. I remember him watching the Breakin' movies a lot when we were kids, and it must have been Breakin' 2 that he watched the most, because it's the one I remember the best.
Sadly, we never got a Breakin' 3 because the TKO trio had a falling out behind the scenes, and Dickey basically retired from acting after this. Apparently, Dickey and Chambers both had their disagreements with Quinones, who wasn't happy with the approach taken to showing the breakdancing community in these movies. He wanted to do something that reflected reality more than either of them, especially Breakin' 2, did. He was also resistant to the idea of Dickey being brought into the mix because she was an outsider to street dancing - which is also what her character was in the first movie, but it still didn't sit well with him, and Dickey says he treated her poorly at times. This is worth mentioning because the same thing happened to her on Ninja III, where Sho Kosugi didn't agree with the story that brought in her character and took it out on her. It's no wonder she didn't decide to stick with acting longer, she kept having to deal with guys who didn't want her there.
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