Only the best ninjas may use the Garfield Telephone™. Of all the relentlessly released cut-and-paste ninjamatics to emerge during the 80s, Ninja Terminator is seemingly the most popular of the bunch. The gateway drug to a realm where reason and logic are merely a suggestion, biting you from the moment you set foot in its domain, one that makes for hilariously mangled viewing filled with incomprehensible absurdity, and the film I've ultimately decided to pop my Godfrey Ho cherry with. Amidst all the unrelated fight scenes and nonsensical dubbing lies a plot that should be relatively straightforward but is instead told in the most ridiculous form possible by going off on a dozen loopy tangents; even with its use of shamelessly pilfered soundtracks which I'm sure someone will recognise but the one that stood out to me was the inclusion of Tangerine Dream's score to Thief of all things, the film filled to the brim with incoherence and ineptitude to the point where Richard Harrison clearly doesn't have the faintest idea what’s going on. There's espionage, double-crossing, triple-crossing and secret meetings, as well as a little casual torture and a lot of ninjutsu. That additional ninja footage can be genuinely entertaining, even when the film is battling itself in gaudy, dayglo getups for control of this messy, uneven, and downright demented venture, where the joins are always painfully apparent, the action is more than worthy of its own Golden Ninja Warrior statue, it's not by any means good but the sheer energy of the stunt team is to be applauded. Thanks to Ninja Terminator's sheer entertainment value, it's hard not to be impressed with the audacity of its existence, which I can only put down to the purest ninja magic.
