Being a fan of the old school insanely long fight scenes -- complete with overblown sound effects -- that permeated Hong Kong and Japan all over the sixties and seventies, I found a little gem called "Ninja War."

Sounds pretty cool, huh? I mean what's the one thing better than a Ninja Battle or a Minor Ninja Incursion? Even the cover looked promising: some dude standing amidst some flames looking really cheesed off. I saw it in the used movies section: only four dollars! Wow, what a bargain, I thought foolishly. Those dollars could have gone to something far more useful, like the purchase of some doorknobs to fill a sack with which I could beat whoever made this movie.

This movie really isn't all that funny -- it's just plain bad. Of course the translations are sometimes a little shaky, but at the same time everything is so deadly serious you can tell there wasn't meant to be an ounce of humor in it.

I forgot a lot of details as I only watched it once and hopefully never will have to witness it again. Basically this one evil Shogun wants to take over Japan or something, so he hires this group of devils to help him. Each devil has a special power: one can heal the others from death, one shoots really nasty crap out of his mouth, one is big and strong, and one is a good swordsman or something. So they kidnap this princess, and they are gonna try to make her fall in love with the evil Shogun, but they need a special kind of love potion.

We cut to our hero, the generic long haired, lanky, good-humored martial arts master, and his protoge running through a bamboo forest. It seems he's teaching her this technique where your hand becomes really bright, and it can cut through anything. Let's call it the Laser Hand Technique. So they're just cutting down every piece of fauna in their path for no reason when the demons show up and kidnap the girl. The hero gets his clock severely cleaned, and the nasty demon pukes this crap at him that makes him pass out.

He wakes up later and wanders around trying to find his student. During this time he plays the flute for no reason. Meanwhile, back with the demons, they have the poor kidnapped girl and the princess together. But the two look almost exactly alike, so there is almost no way of knowing which is which. From now on I'll just call them Kidnapped Princess, KP, and Kidnapped Martial Artist Girl, KMAG. So the demons tell the KMAG that they need her tears to make the potion for the princess.

After a failed escape, KMAG uses the Laser Hand Technique to cut her own head off. Why didn't she use it to cut the demons' heads off? Or a hole through the wall? But this is the only other time this apparently, insanely powerful skill is used in the movie. The demon that can resurrect people sticks her head back on her body and each demon proceeds to rape her while the others gather her tears. I don't think this movie would have lost much if it left out this excessive abuse of an almost headless girl, but, hey, I guess I'm just not a visionary.

So by this point there still hasn't been any action scenes. I honestly don't think the "hero" knew any martial skills, but he wasn't there for his acting ability, so why was he even in the movie? Moving right along, the hero finally decides to do something. He goes looking for the girl, sees that she's kind of just a zombie know with her head stuck on, and then gets really upset.

He fights each of the demons. He pins the resurrecting one against a tree by swinging like Tarzan and sticking his sword into him. He drops to the ground, the demon still in the tree, and then suddenly he has his sword back. The hero and the crap spewing demon fall into this lake where all we see is a bunch of crap floating to the surface and finally the demon's severed head. These demons, by the way, just look like regular guys.

The hero and the big strong demon fight each other really badly. The big demon just bludgeons the good guy twice, then gets run through with a spear. Wow. Now for some reason our hero is transported to some kind of transdimensional plane, where he fights some evil god or something. This is the part with the flames, from the box cover, but all that happens is that he hits the evil god a few times and dies. The only good thing about this movie was that everybody died at the end.

Things that make you go "Huh?": Anything to do with the Laser Hand Technique or the demons.