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.

A friend rented this movie a few years ago are a party, and a few people ran to the bathroom to puke their guts out. This movie is basically low-budget violence for the sake of low-budget violence, done in an incredibly disturbing and violent way. Unlike other movies that disturb you and are thought-provoking, this just leaves you feeling cheap, dirty, and sick to your stomach. No good story, terrible acting, obviously no budget. This could have not even looked good on paper. If you take pleasure in seeing a man get his forearm stabbed repeatedly by a girl gang, only to have him stick a metal plate into the wound, this is the movie for you.

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.

Me and my brother rented this when we were about 10 and 11. You know ninja's were cool back in the mid 90's. Even back then we decided that this was garbage. Don't eva eva eva buy or rent this. It is a disgrace to the ninja movie era. Ninja turtles, surf ninja's, those were awesome they just went over board here I guess. The way that the ninja fights in this is horrible what was the guy thinking an artist to a crimefighter. Place this film in a capsule and fire it into the sun with your milli vanillie cd's. Plain and simple don't waste your money. If you really want to see ninja's in action, get a hold of ninja vs. shaolin or revenge of the ninja. Just don't give up hope for martial arts flicks.

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.