Writer: James R. Silke
After the great Revenge of the Ninja, it seemed that the producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus have found a winning formula for ninja movies. Ninja III: The Domination has the same writer and the same director as the previous movie, Sho Kosugi is here again in one of the leading roles, this time sporting a nice eyepatch over his left eye, and yet this movie is easily the weakest in the series. It's even worse than the first one.
The main problem, as it often happens, is a lack of quality action. Sho Kosugi is almost totally wasted here - he doesn't really start kicking ass until about one hour into the movie and only has time for one final fight with some bad guy, which was OK, but certainly nothing special. In the meantime we have some mainly uninspired killings by a girl who's possessed by some evil spirit, which leads us to another problem...
... which is that the story is stupid beyond belief! I don't know what kind of weed did Silke consume when he was writing this, but he made some kind of horror-action story that features evil spirits, possessions and even an exorcism! Take that, William Friedkin! Your movie may also have demons and exorcism, but it certainly doesn't have any ninjas! While I'm generally not against this kind of genre mixing, here it simply doesn't work. There's no memorable antagonist and the lame "horror" scenes consume valuable time, which could have been better used for some real ninja action.
Actually, the only reason to ever watch this is an amazing opening scene, which is perhaps the best sequence in the entire series. It features an evil ninja (actually another man possessed by the evil spirit or some evil sword or similar crap) killing some people on a golf course and then having an encounter with the police. You don't see such a carnage every day and it will surely fill your heart with joy to see so many dead policemen. This ninja is one mean mother and the way he kills dozens of cops with so little effort is simply amazing. For example, he gets rid of a helicopter pilot by throwing a shuriken at him with his foot (!) and kills some other cop by blowing a dart into the barrel of his gun.
Unfortunately, when this wonderful encounter ends, you can just turn off the movie because the best part is over. While this was the end of the Golan-Globus Ninja series with Sho Kosugi, they immediately went on to create another legendary ninja brand, American Ninja. We will talk about that one (and its sequels, of course) some other time.
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