Watchcast Schedule for November 2023: NINJASPLOITATION IS SUPREME

Greetings, Nextlanders! It is I, Alex, bursting in here a little later than usual to give you the rundown on what we have in store for our Watchcast listeners this month. As you may have guessed by there being no show this week (or if you heard the announcement on last week's episode), we took this week off, as I was out in the Bay Area visiting some friends and family. But fret not! We've still got three films for ya this month, and for the glorious month of my birth, we are celebrating one of my favorite things to do around this time of the year: watching delightfully terrible movies.

I grew up watching a LOT of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and frankly still watch more of it than is reasonable. One of my favorite things about the American Thankgsgiving season was the Turkey Day marathons they'd run on Comedy Central. Nothing like ignoring family that's come to visit so you can watch Mitchell and Overdrawn at the Memory Bank for the thousandth time, you know?

So in the spirit of those glory days of bad movie watching, we're gonna dig into one of my favorite subgenres of cheesy movies: ninjasploitation! Any child of the '80s undoubtedly remembers the ridiculous ninja boom that swept the nation, with dozens and dozens of movies, video games, cartoons, and whatever else dedicated to the shadowy Japanese assassins. Of course little of that media had anything to do with the actual historical concept of the ninja, and most often served as an excuse to dress a bunch of stunt men up in black hoods and let them do the most cheaply choreographed sword fights you could toss together for next to no budget. And while a few of my favorites from this genre unfortunately still fall under the struck work banner we're trying to avoid until the SAG-AFTRA strike ends (sorry American Ninja and just about everything with Sho Kosugi in it), I've gathered up a trio of films that not only honor the spirit of the strike, but also dishonor the very concept of the ninja like only cheaply made action schlock can!

Here's what we've got.

Monday, November 13th: Ninja Terminator (1986)

It is illegal to do any kind of bad ninja movie marathon and not include at least one Godfrey Ho film. After all, no director did more to capitalize on the ninja craze than our man Godfrey, and no director did it with less money, to boot. Ho is notorious for directing somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 films just in the '80s alone, and all of them bear the hallmarks found in his best-known film, Ninja Terminator. To be clear, Ninja Terminator isn't really all that different from The Ninja Squad, Full Metal Ninja, Ninja: American Warrior, or Ninja Strike Force. Like those movies, it's complete fucking nonsense that cobbles together footage of D-movie actor Richard Harrison dressed up in a ridiculous ninja outfit and footage from a completely different movie redubbed for Ho's nefarious purposes. This is as grimy and z-grade as this genre ever got, and I'm very excited to expose this to anyone who hasn't seen it.

Where to Watch

Note: I don't know which version Tubi has up for stream, but two things to note: One, if you get the English dubbed version, do not fret. That is the version just about everyone in the west has seen. If there is a Chinese language version, I've never seen it. Second, odds are they have a full-screen version, as that's the most available version in western territories. There is a widescreen version up on Archive.org if you really want the full experience, but let me be clear here: it extremely does not matter.

Monday, November 20th: New York Ninja (2021)

2021? "But Alex," you ask, "didn't you say this was all about '80s ninja-exploitation?" Yes! And I promise that I'm not breaking my own rules here. New York Ninja was filmed in the '80s for an '80s audience, and also never came out. The film was unfinished until a few years back, when the good folks at Vinegar Syndrome got a hold of the footage. They then went to work editing the film and recording all-new audio (because the original filmmakers never got around to doing that). The result is New York Ninja, a film I snatched up the second it came out and have been meaning to sit down to watch for like two years now. Is this month's theme just an excuse for me to finally watch this? YES!

I cannot vouch for the content of this film (as, again, I have not seen it yet), but this is the one I'm most excited to dig into. People I trust tell me it's a delight.

Where to Watch

Monday, November 27th: Miami Connection (1987)

We're closing out November with a bad movie that has heart, dammit. The insane passion project of taekwondo master Y.K. Kim, Miami Connection tells the story of a band of martial arts students who take on ninjas and drug dealers and mailboxes by day, while literally working as a new wave band at night. The movie was an abject failure in its extremely limited release, and Kim nearly bankrupted himself in the process of making it. But many decades later the Alamo Drafthouse people found a copy of it, screened it for an enthusiastic audience, and suddenly a cult hit was born. 

Most of the movies in this subgenre are a fairly predictable sort of incoherent and sometimes offensive, but Miami Connection is the rare, infectiously earnest one. There's a real "we're getting a bunch of our buddies together and making a movie whether it makes any sense or not" kind of vibe here, and while it is not what I would call "good" by any definition, it's so sincere and delighted in what it's doing that it's hard not to go along with it. This will be my first time watching the 4K edition (!!!) Vinegar Syndrome put out. Yes, that is something that exists.

Where to Watch 

And that is our November! As always, thanks for taking this very silly journey along with us. We'll see you at the (bad) movies!

--A