‘New York Ninja’ Is the Movie That Never Was — Until Now.
Vinegar Syndrome Resurrects an Abandoned Classic of 80’s Action Schlock
Let it never be said that nothing of value can be gleaned from New York Ninja, the “newish” release from Vinegar Syndrome. I learned, for instance, about Metsubushi — an ancient weapon of Japanese provenance, which is more colloquially known as “ninja blinding powder.” Sometimes concealed in a hollowed-out egg, a wily ninja would toss the Metsubushi into the face of his opponent, where it would explode in a puff of dust, either temporarily or permanently(!) blinding them.
I know about Metsubushi (as now do you — you’re welcome) entirely thanks to New York Ninja, where it is featured a lot. The titular New York ninja, in fact, utilizes this deadly contrivance in nearly every single fight scene in the movie. And New York Ninja has a lot of fight scenes. That’s the good news. The bad news is that most of those fight scenes are not particularly well done, so the viewer has ample time to let his mind drift elsewhere and think about other things, like whether or not those little flour-bombs that the ninja keeps tossing into people’s faces are actually authentic weapons of the trade.
None of this is to imply that New York Ninja isn’t worth watching. In fact, I loved every minute of it. But your mileage will surely vary based on your affection for such things as plotless 80’s action schlock, 70’s kung fu movies, or “so-bad-its-good” cinema like The Room. If you love any — or all — of those genres, you’ll no doubt love New York Ninja, too. If not, well, you’ve been warned.
You can’t discuss New York Ninja without first discussing its circuitous route to the big screen. Originally begun in 1984 and starring obscure actor and martial artist John Liu (who also directed), New York Ninja’s filming proved to be a troubled affair — the production was short-staffed, underfunded, and when the film’s would-be distributor, 21st Century, folded, the movie was all but doomed. Shooting was halted, the existing footage was shelved, and New York Ninja was relegated to oblivion, presumably never to be seen again.
Flash forward thirty-five years. Vinegar Syndrome, a Connecticut distribution company dedicated to the preservation of overlooked genre films, acquires the back catalog of 21st Century. Discovering the incomplete footage of New York Ninja buried in a box of musty reels, director and Vinegar Syndrome employee Kurtis Spieler is so wowed that he floats the idea of restoring and, at long last, releasing New York Ninja.
The problem, of course, was that New York Ninja wasn’t really a movie. It was unfinished; a mere collection of (largely ridiculous) scenes. Worse still, there was no sound and no script, so bringing the film back from the dead — at least in the way that John Liu originally intended it to be seen — would be impossible.
Undeterred, Spieler hit on the idea of editing the existing pieces of the film together, connecting them all with a new script, and recording new dialogue and sound. Such a wholesale cinematic reinvention had some historical precedent, most famously with Woody Allen’s 1966 What’s Up, Tiger Lilly? — where the director re-dubbed a Japanese spy film to create an entirely different narrative — but Spieler, to his great credit, wasn’t interested in turning New York Ninja into a deliberate parody, telling the New York Times that he wanted to “maintain the spirit of the original.”
That was a good instinct. New York Ninja works as well as it does because it isn’t a comedy — as silly as it might have been found then (and as silly as it definitely would be found now) Liu’s film no doubt took itself seriously, or at least seriously enough, and so does Spieler.
Ridiculing the goofy source material would have been the easy route to take, but it would have been the wrong one. Younger fans of these sorts of films may not realize it, but there was a time in the 80’s and 90’s when movies like this weren’t viewed through a cynical, mocking lens. To really drive the point home: for a (very) short time, we all thought Steven Seagal was legitimately cool.
Sure, we knew the plots of these movies were bad (and friend, New York Ninja’s plot is bad) but no one came to action and martial arts movies for high art — we came to be wowed by stunts, gripped by explosions, mindlessly entertained. Spieler and Vinegar Syndrome get that, and in deliberately choosing to place New York Ninja back into the historical context it sprang from, they’ve not only respected the original vision of the cast and crew, they’ve delighted genre fans in the process.
That’s doubly impressive when you watch these scenes. New York Ninja, it must be admitted, invites parody. As mentioned, it’s re-imagined plot is still barely understandable, it’s fight scenes (perhaps owing to being unfinished) are ridiculous (street toughs simply stand still, patiently waiting to get whacked by Liu), and even its re-recorded dialogue has all the nuance of a cut scene from Street Fighter II. But — if we may make a completely controvertible assertion — the spirit of Liu’s original film remains intact — or at least the spirit of the times in which it was made does.
That’s New York Ninja’s greatest achievement, and in an age where smirking derision seems to be the default mode everywhere, it’s something worth celebrating.
