Though the groundwork was laid by 1980’s The Octagon, it was these three films that began a veritable explosion of ninja presence in mainstream action flicks. The so-called Ninja Trilogy comprises Menahem Golan’s Enter the Ninja from 1981, and Sam Firstenberg’s sequels in-name-only, Revenge of the Ninja (1983) and Ninja III: The Domination (1984), all unified by the appearance of actor and real-life practitioner of ninjutsu Sho Kosugi (playing a different character in each title), and all rightly celebrated as showcases for the most egregious, ’80s-inflected cash-in excesses of Golan and Globus’ Cannon Films. Still, exploring is always best done at the outer edges – and so this column will be dedicated to direct-to-video dross, disinterred B pictures and the odd (and we mean odd) films orphaned at the festival fringes. Psychotronic cinema is a hard and loose category of termite art which, whether because too shamelessly genre-bound or just too wacky-backy niche, occupies the critical margins.
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