DVD Ninja Girl
Seiji Chiba is a well-known name within the world of budget action flicks. Focusing predominately on martial arts, he combines impressive choreography with farfetched plots, often adding elements of comedy for good measure. Following the success of his last film Alien Vs. Ninja, a science-fiction comedy that entertained due to its relatively ridiculous premise, it is a shame that his latest effort doesn’t manage to hit the mark.
"There’s a poorly conceived plot, with outlandish characters dressed up in S&M costumes!"
It is easy to dismiss low-budget b-list films as a result of poor cameras and often uninspiring sets, yet this doesn’t do justice to what can often be highly enjoyable pieces of cinema. However, in the case of Ninja Girl, there are a number of deviations which the director has taken from his standard style that has resulted in the film losing elements of its integrity.
Centred around a feud between two warring clans, Iga and Kouga, the period piece is set up when a number of girls are revealed to have been kidnapped by two lower class ninjas. It is slowly unravelled that the two men are merely doing the dirty work for their superiors. Coming from a village with virtually no women, they have been forced to steal members of the opposite sex from neighbouring towns to allow for the continuation of their own people. Whilst the heads of the village are the only ones who get to enjoy the fruits of these crimes, the lower men are castrated at birth to prevent any sexual urges.
When the kidnapped are helped by a mysterious man (Yuichi Sato), later to be revealed as a member of the Kouga clan, a game of cat and mouse ensues as the ninjas attempt to round up all the women. One by one, the women are recaptured, and it is up to our heroine, Kisaragi (Rina Takeda), to come to the rescue, enacting revenge along the way…
What has been provided is the premise for your standard revenge-style action film, and yet what ensues misses the point completely. The premise of a martial arts film generally revolves around its fight choreography, as it is rarely the case that it is able to offer the same quality in terms of story or acting. Successful kung fu flicks tend to keep the story relatively simple, concerning some feud or another between families or organisations – never aiming to be in anyway enlightening or thought provoking, because the point at which a martial arts film tries to be something other than that, it collapses. By limiting the amount of time spent engaging in acts of violence, there is a tendency to ostracise the sort of people that are likely to want to watch the film in the first place. This is exactly the downfall of Ninja Girl; for a martial arts film, there is relatively little in the way of fisticuffs.
The focus seems to be more on the obscure plot than the fighting.
The focus seems to be more on the obscure plot than the fighting. It becomes increasingly more convoluted, with twists being constantly added, even towards the end of the film, which seem entirely unnecessary. The story becomes more confusing and arguably just plain strange when we hear of Sato’s character’s plan to get the kidnapped women impregnated by a man with a terrible sexually transmitted disease in order to destroy the Iga clan once and for all. However, even this has a twist added to it, making it even more bizarre.
There is only one legitimate fight scene, which occurs about forty minutes in, between Kisaragi and Shimotsuki (Mitsuki Koga), and this illustrates that both actors clearly have a talent in martial arts and that Chiba has the potential to be a good choreographer, despite what we see in most of the film. Like many of his other films, Ninja Girl is clearly over the top, yet this appears hard to justify when it lacks much definitive action. Instead, there’s a poorly conceived plot, with outlandish characters dressed up in S&M costumes!
It is clear that Takeda has potential, and were she given the opportunity to appear in a higher end production, she could really illustrate her evident talent in martial arts. There is a definite feeling that fans of the genre, even of the director, will be disappointed in Shiba’s latest offering. Ending on something of a cliff-hanger, there is clearly room for a sequel, yet it is debatable whether this would be a particularly wise idea.
By Ali Quaile
Ali Quaile is a budding arts journalist with a passion
for film that began at childhood. He has contributed to…
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