There's a scene early on in Ninja Wars that I think is representative of the movie as a whole. Jotaro, a young ninja the audience has just been introduced to, is suddenly confronted by an evil monk, who attacks him with a stream of projectile vomit. Our hero climbs a tree to escape the vomit, but is unable to fend it off, and falls out of the tree. A close-up reveals that the monk's vomit has struck Jotaro full in the face, reducing it to a pulsating, bubbling, cheese-like mass. The evil monk leans over his defeated opponent and chuckles. "You have seen the skill of a true ninja!" he gloats. That's Ninja Wars in a nutshell: weird, confusing, frequently disgusting, but undeniably entertaining.





Directed by Mitsumasa Saito and released in 1982, Ninja Wars is a bizarre Japanese fantasy film about an ambitious noble (is there any other kind?), Donjo Matsunaga, who plans to seduce the daughter of the shogun, Ukyodayo (after a fortune-teller informs him that whoever wins Ukyodayo's heart will rule the world or something). To that end, he employs a bunch of evil monks to make a sure-fire aphrodisiac for him. The problem is, one of the aphrodisiac's key ingredients is a bit hard to come by: the evil monks must obtain the tears of Ukyodayo's twin sister, who was separated from her at birth and has since become a ninja.

So, the evil monks (called the "Five Devil Monks") go out looking for the sister, Kagaribi, and find her in the company of the aforementioned Jotaro, who, we learn, is keen on marrying her. Unfortunately for him, he has yet to experience the "skill of a true ninja", i.e. ferocious projectile vomiting. He somehow survives the vomit-attack, but Kagaribi is taken from him and brought to Donjo's place. Now, at this point, the film began to confuse the hell out of me, and I still haven't figured it all out yet (despite the fact that I was taking notes), so you'll have to forgive me if the following sounds a bit vague, but here's the gist of it: Kagaribi cuts her own head off with a magical slicing attack in order to thwart Donjo's plan, but one of the Five Devil Monks possesses the unlikely ability to bring people back to life and to swap their heads on to different bodies -- so, Kagaribi's head winds up on the body of one of the monks' female minions, and another woman's head is placed on to Kagaribi's body. (Part of the reason why this ends up being so confusing is that, in this movie's cosmology, the heart, rather than the head, is the seat of the self). At any rate, the operation nets Donjo the tears he wants, allowing him to create the aphrodisiac. He tests it out on a fat woman, who immediately falls for one of the monks (this is nothing you want to see, trust me).

Before he can make more of the potion, however, the special tea kettle the monks need to brew the stuff in is stolen by another-woman's-head-on-Kagaribi's-body, whom the monks had earlier dismissed as being insane due to the head-swapping operation. She finds her way to Jotaro, and dies in his arms; he, of course, goes on to vow revenge against Donjo and the Five Devil Monks, and to see to the safety of Kagaribi's sister Ukyodayo.





The story eventually grows even more confusing (Donjo changes his plan to have Ukyodayo fall for him via the aphrodisiac, then changes it back, and at one point inexplicably arranges for the monks to lead an attack against a Buddhist temple while he and Ukyodayo and other nobles are present there) but the convoluted story isn't really the film's raison d'etre anyway: the gory fights and the showcasing of ridiculous magical ninja powers are. The projectile vomiting I've already mentioned, but there's other nonsense to be found in here too: one of the monks shoots lasers out of his eyes and has bloodhound-like tracking abilities; another is super-strong (he pushes a tree over with his bare hands). There's also plenty of gore (at least three or four geyserific decapitations, a couple eyeballs being stabbed out) and a little nudity as well. It's not for kids.

The direction isn't anything special, the acting is occasionally wooden, and the story is confusing, but if you happen to be in the mood for a little absurdist entertainment, well, you could do worse than Ninja Wars. It's got Noriko Watanabe, Sonny Chiba, and projectile vomiting. Who could ask for anything more?

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