Pigsy's Drunken Demand (Five Element Ninjas Review)

I went back to Dallas recently to see my in-laws because, you know, it's the holiday season, and while I was in town I decided to try and hang out with my three best friends from my junior high and high school days.  It's rare that we all end up in town at once, as one of us lives out of town, one of us lives out of state, one of us seems to have an inordinate fear of leaving home, and the other has no money to travel, so it's usually only the holidays and occasionally the odd summer weekend that finds us all in town at once.  Alas, Rockman works in retail, and we tried to meet up on Black Friday, so Pilgrim, Pigsy and I had to make do without him while he found himself buried under an avalanche of receipts, discarded shopping bags, and crushed dreams.


The problem with this is that Rockman is our group's moral compass.  With him there, we can at least maintain some sense of respectability.  Pigsy and Pilgrim may still tell dirty jokes, but at least Rockman keeps anything more than that from happening.  Without him, though, there is little hope.  As I called Pigsy to tell him that I was on my way with a brand spankin' new Xbox Kinect with which to mess around, he said, a touch too excitedly for comfort, that we should go out and get some liquor, since a boozed-up round of Dance Central naturally sounded like a good idea.  I had my camera with me (for blackmail purposes) and prefer soda to beer anyway, so I said alright.  Unfortunately, I didn't have the right cables to hook up my Xbox 360 to Pigsy's ancient TV, so, after acquiring a twelve-pack of Coca-Cola, a bottle of rum, some kind of beer that Pigsy insisted I try, and an assurance that Rockman would not be joining us for the evening, we returned to Pigsy's humble sty and decided instead to watch an old favorite, Five Element Ninjas, known in America as Chinese Super Ninjas.  I had a beer, Pigsy and Pilgrim loaded up with rum-and-Coke, and away we went.

As Pigsy would later tell me, the problem here is that he loves rum a bit too much.  It is so sweet and tasty, particularly in something like Coke, that before we knew what had happened two-thirds of the bottle was gone, most of it consumed by Pigsy.  After several hours of pausing the movie for a bathroom break or to watch a Youtube video or listen to Pigsy spout philosophical about his personal trainer, we finally finished the movie, but I couldn't have told you a thing about it other than there was a lot of fighting and some dudes wearing copper hats that shot blades out the ends.  The night ended up a wash, and I suspect that Pigsy may have done some serious psychological damage to Pilgrim when, utterly intoxicated, he snapped his fingers in perfect rhythm for at least fifteen straight minutes and repeatedly asked Pilgrim what it meant about God.

While Pilgrim made sure that Pigsy didn't slide headfirst down the stairs to let us out, I snagged the movie and decided to watch it back home, since Pigsy had earlier demanded that I review it as my latest installment of "Pigsy's Gilded Trough Presents" or whatever I feel like calling it this time.  I figured he wouldn't mind me borrowing the DVD for a bit.  He has more kung fu movies than James Bond has one-liners.

Pigsy is the expert on all things Asian cinema, so I'm sure he'll correct me if I'm wrong, but Five Element Ninas is a 1982 film distributed by the famous Shaw Brothers Studio starring Cheng Tien Chi and Lo Mang (a beast of a fellow who, at various times in his life, has had roughly 0% body fat and enough muscle to choke a rhino).  Cheng Tien Chi stars as Tsiau Chin Hau, a man whose martial arts school gets obliterated by Cheng Yun's deadly ninjas, themselves hired by a rival school.  Cheng Yun commands ninjas of the five Chinese elements (metal, wood, water, fire, and earth), so to exact revenge, Tsiau Chin Hau learns the secrets of the ninja himself and battles the elemental ninjas to the death.

One of the greatest aspects of the film is its clearcut sequence of events.  This is the part where the rival schools duel.  This is the part where the ninjas challenge the good school and completely kick their asses.  This is the part where the good school gets attacked and destroyed.  This is the part where the last surviving good guy learns how to fight against ninjas.  And this is the part of the film where the good guy and his three buddies turn the tables on said ninjas.  Even with the horrendous dubbing, Five Elements Ninjas is easy to follow and highly enjoyable.

Each ninja element takes place in a different location, with a different cheesy low-budget indoor set for each (the seams in the "sky" wallpaper are visible more than once).  The metal ninjas are four men (always four, for each element) dressed head-to-toe in copper-colored ninja suits, complete with wide-brimmed copper hats that, as previously mentioned, shoot blades out at all angles.  The wood ninjas hide in trees.  The water ninjas use wooden tubes for breathing underwater before they pull you down.  The fire ninjas use red smoke and set their swords on fire.  The earth ninjas burrow underground and poke your thighs and nether-regions with long pointy things (much like my wife's favorite battle tactic in Soul Calibur IV - sit back and poke until my guy dies or falls off the stage ad THEN dies).  What's great here is that you get to see how to lose against the ninjas at the beginning of the film and then how to win at the end, so while the "before" and "after" ninja fights take place in the same locations against the same ninjas, they feel like completely different fights.

And what fights they are!  You will see every weapon imaginable in this movie.  Straight swords, curved swords, katanas, spears, axes, daggers, bladed rings, staffs, darts, hooks on chains, tridents, naginatas, poisonous rings, halberds, copper hats, bow-and-arrows, fists, water, fire, Wolverine-claws, foot-claws, stilts, and even a giant kanji sign.  This is one bloody movie.  It is an exercise in the ingenuity of humanity's craft for killing.  You will see more people die in more ways here than just about anywhere else, and no one even uses a gun!

Not only that, but the actors and stuntmen for Five Element Ninjas are immensely talented.  What is so frustrating about action films these days, particularly when extensive hand-to-hand combat is involved, is that the director will film a single punch, then cut the action, then move to a different camera angle and allow the actors to learn the next move, shoot that, cut, repeat.  The mark of a talented film crew and cast is when a series of movements are all shot in one cut.  Watch the beginning of JCVD, for example, or any film by Jackie Chan, to see what I mean.  So many of these old Hong Kong movies are just full of sequences where the actors will swipe at each other with real metal weapons for at least ten seconds before the camera moves to a new shot.  These guys had to have their timing down to such a degree that it is some kind of miracle any of them survived filming.  This is further reason why I hate the "shaky camera" effect so pervasive in Hollywood these days (see: Transformers, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood).  All it does is confuse the viewer and mask the stuntmen's and actors' impotence.

The dubbing of Five Elements Ninjas is comically bad, the kind of quality which films like Kung Pao: Enter the Fist! make it a point to lampoon.  It's not that the actors are so abysmally poor - though they aren't exactly Peter Cullen - it's just that they were directed to not speak whenever their on-screen counterpart is not moving his or her mouth.  This means that you'll get odd

gaps right in the middle of a sentence that no normal English speaker would ever say.  Between that and the oh-so-simple plot, Five Element Ninjas is really meant to be viewed as a martial arts showcase, and it certainly does deliver on that.  I leave you now with a clip showing the initial fights against the metal, wood, and water ninjas, spectacularly kicked off with some shining examples of the English dubbing...