Cobbled from episodes of the children’s TV series Masked Ninja Red Shadow, this Japanese feature has popped up under numerous titles in its lifetime. Thanks to importing, white people like me are apt to encounter it as Ninja Scope. Whichever name it bears, the flick packs a lot of action in a mere 52 minutes.
It pits the red-masked, swoopy-haired superhero Akakage (Yuzaburo Sakaguchi, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart at the River Styx) and kid-ninja sidekick Akokage (Kaneko Yoshinobu, Watari) against a cult. Do you think the cult leader is cool with this? No, he is not, so he sends in his clowns to battle. By “clowns,” I mean creatures of all shapes and sizes and sativa-inspired designs, including a:
• rock monster
• giant, flame-breathing toad
• rectangle-faced goon with sawblade sandals
For these and other colorful storybook shenanigans in which our heroes find themselves, the matinee movie occasional pauses to allow Akakage to bust that fourth wall and inform audience members to don their 3-D viewers. With each fight sequence, Ninja Scope diverts to black and white to allow for anaglyph antics; while it’s kind of a bummer to lose color, when it comes to pushing objects toward the lens, the filmmakers didn’t dick around.
With a pantyhose-headed puppeteer, exploding plums and a dude on a kite, Ninja Scope never rests to allow itself to get dull. It’s as if your eyes ate 12 bowls of cereal in a sitting. —Rod Lott