Thundering Ninja (1987)

Oh boy, if you're looking for a ninja movie where the ninjas wear brightly colored outfits and have names like Sidney, then Thundering Ninja is the movie for you.  This is one of the Caucasian ninja movies  where an unfinished Asian film is intercut with unrelated, newly filmed scenes of Caucasian ninjas and dubbed to be an entirely different story. Unfortunately these movies were made to capitalize on the ninja craze and make no sense at all.  Wait, that's why I like them.

The bad ninja boss wants to conquer the world so he sends his ninja goons to get the K16 missile, which is the ultimate weapon.  But the K16 files have been stolen and they need to get them back because it means total control of the world. Yay!  

The dialogue is just ridiculous.  "You know our organization's policy.  We don't allow a second failure."  So failure is okay as long as you don't do it twice?  Hey, when you try to get those files, don't worry if you fail the first time.  

The ninjas aren't all that bright either.  One of the ninjas is standing on a walkway when a stranger taps him on the shoulder and asks "Hey, what are you doing here?"  Then to make things even more ridiculous, the ninja stabs the guy and it looks like he put the sword between the guys far arm and side, just like you'd do when you were a little kid pretending to be stabbed.

The deadly ninja runs away, informs his boss that he ran off because he was afraid and that he had to "waste" the guy.  The ninja boss growls, "You should know what the price of failure is for a ninja."  I can only assume that it must not be this ninjas first failure, since they previously stated was it was the second failure that's not allowed. 

At this point, we find out that a remarkable new agent is going to be sent to deal with the bad ninjas.  Yes, a remarkable new agent called Sidney.  And boy, is Sidney ever remarkable.  Because this ninja  wears track shoes and answers his phone by saying "Yeah, I'm Sidney." That's pretty remarkable since most ninjas don't have a listed phone number. 

Along with the hilarious Caucasian ninja segments, there is an Asian film interwoven with this where a man named David gets involved with some criminals led by Boss Buck.  When David was a child, his mother was murdered. Through a series of flashbacks, we get to see this murder over and over again.  His middle aged mother gets hit on the head, says "oh" and slowly sits down against a wall.  It's the most undramatic murder ever. Why we need to see it repeatedly, other than to pad the film, I have no idea. 

It's definitely a strange film. At one point, the background music is an old Genesis song, and as you would expect the Asian movie and Caucasian ninja scenes do not mesh well. There are a lot of these movies because they were cheap to make and didn't require much effort since they only shot scenes to fit into an unfinished film.  Actually I would love to have someone release just the newly shot ninja scenes as a collection of short films.  They'd be hilariously fantastic.

Questionable Dialogue, especially for a Ninja movie:

"The victim was proved to be killed by a ninja." "Why that's me?! I'm a witness!" "He thinks he's the bees knees." "The ninjas are to blame for everything." "...they're soon going to be sending a remarkable agent to deal with us, called Sidney."

Orange headband? Caucasian? Yup, that's a ninja

Remarkable agent/ninja Sidney works out