Robot Ninja

My review was written in July 1990 after watching the movie on Cinema Home Video cassette.

This amateur direct-to-video picture is aimed at gorehounds and fans ot the disgusting.

One-man Akron, Ohio filmmaker J. R. Bookwalter dedicates this feature to comic strip artists, and its best aspect consists of black & white comic drawings of the adventures of "Robot Ninja" by David Lange.

Rather inferior-quality live action concerns artist Michael Todd, who decides to fight violent crime in his small town of Ridgway by taking up the silver mask of his fictional hero and going on the warpath himself. In between boring scenes of his problems with his publisher, Burt Ward, are awkwardly staged acts of mayhem. Watching people throw up and expose fake-looking innards is no fun.

Ward is along as an afterthought, making verbal references to the campiness of the proceedings, analogous to his "Batman" tv series. He's named Stan Kane and similar homages are in other character names like Cameron, Spinell, DePalma and Miss Barbeau.

Bookwalter scores low marks in all technical departments, committing a cardinal sin for a tyro filmer of overusing the hand-held camera.

My friend and I rented this movie because it has two great words combined into one crappy movie. Robot Ninja! He got sick of women kickin his butt so he donned a spandex "tank armored" suit and became the robot ninja. It sucked so much it was funny. I recommend it to fans of G.I. Bro and Frogs! Well that's it... time to write my paper on this magnificent piece of crap probably made in someone's closet or laundry room.

...here it is.

I rented this in my early teens sometime, actually hoping for a Ninja movie, or better yet, a ROBOT Ninja movie.

The main character and some inventor guy make this costume, and becomes... THE ROBOT NINJA! dun dun dun....

Well, it's a guy in a dumb looking suit. He's not a robot, and he's not a ninja. I'm pretty sure he never even tried to do any sort of "ninja move" either.

The whole thing was really really boring and lame, and I'm sure that if I watched it again now I'd laugh my ass off at how horrible this thing is. At the time I wanted a damn ninja movie, and this thing just plain sucked.

Could have used more ninjas, robots, and robot ninjas.

Let's just make this clear: you might think a movie like Robot Ninja would be one of those transcendent B-movies that's good despite its non-existent budget, or that, failing that, it would be so bad and goofy that it would end up being hysterically funny and therefore a good time to be had by all.

But if you thought that, you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. Because watching the entirety of Robot Ninja will annihilate your very soul. I mean, I like camp as much as the next guy, but what I DON'T like is an hour and a half of pure torture, and there's simply no other way to describe this tenth circle of Hell. The only, only way I would ever recommend it is if you need to build up your tolerance for the worst movies of all time, so that you might be able to watch, say, Voodoo Academy without dying of lack-of-ambition poisoning, or Teenage Barbarians without succumbing to a fatal case of cultural shame. Other than that, stay far, far away.

In conclusion, Robot Ninja is the devil.

Don't get me wrong, I rented because it looked so bad... call me a masochist. I'll never have that hour and a half back. But I look at it as a positive experience, now I know what NOT to do if I ever make a movie. I especially love when he repairs his arm with the junk on the table, and how the lead bad girl rapes the guy. How does a woman rape a man? Oh well. Like I said, it was fun, but only because it was so bad it was good. Don't rent it expecting anything other than a good laugh at these poor souls' expense.