Martial Arts Month has been a fun one for me. Last week I got to unleash my whip-fast sat sao technique on the Black Needle Gang, who was upset I'd revealed the secret of their Ten Form Fist. Tragically, my life went rapidly downhill and hasn't yet recovered when I had to watch 1989's Robot Ninja, the subject of this month's Big Awful Friday and capper to a feature I'll have to visit again as soon as I regrow the eyes I lost in that fight.
Comic artist Michael Todd has taken his beloved creation "Robot Ninja" to TV, only to see it exploited and betrayed. After a run-in with a local gang humiliates him further and leaves two innocents dead, he's had all he can stand. Overnight, he suits up and turns himself into a real-life Robot Ninja, seeking to take down the gang before they can kill again.
Brace yourself for disappointment: Robot Ninja has neither robots nor ninjas, unless the Robot's Guild has relaxed their standards to the point where a dude in some shin guards and a metal visor can join. It's also very, very bad. Opening with a title sequence that looks like a Hypercard stack, it immediately sets the bar so low you'd need a metal detector to find it and never improves from there.
Never have I appreciated professional actors more than the not-so-professionals here. Reading their lines like they've been up all night injecting horse tranquilizers straight into their hearts, it's hard to imagine a sleepier set of performances.
Then again, you can't put on much of a show when your dialogue is dialogue so corny the state of Nebraska is suing for damages. You've probably never heard of writer J.R. Bookwalter (who also directed, produced, edited, and composed) because he's since been jailed for felonious overuse of the word "man."
Best of all is the plot. As a hero, Todd is a tremendous failure. His triumphant run consists of slashing up a few thugs, watching uselessly as they kill their victims, then getting beaten down so badly by the rest of the gang he has to resort to anatomically incorrect home surgery. Steel plates: they're not the same as skin.
It's the little touches that cement this an awful classic, like the product placement shoved right in the camera's face, as if to prove this really was filmed in our universe and not imported from a far crummier one. Robot Ninja's a tough one to track down, but if you love being reminded that you're wasting every hour of the only life you've got, this is as good as it gets.