White men can’t jump … or even know how to execute martial arts properly in Ninja vs. Monsters, a crazy light-budgeted indie horror that’s arriving on DVD and VOD this week.
This movie tries to be too much of everything in a tight run time of 95 minutes. It’s campiness is not a bad thing, but the question of just how this film manages to put a finality to a supposed trilogy of NInja versus films to people who have no knowledge that there were past films will put some folks off from checking out. Apparently, some familiarity is required. People who saw 2008’s Ninja vs Zombies and 2011’s Ninjas vs. Vampires will understand how this third film continues.
Whatever these kids did to piss off Dracula (Sam Lukowski), he decided to come to suburbia to dish out some revenge. With magic-using characters like Randall (Dan Guy) and Eric (PJ Megaw), martial arts cough experts like Kyle (Daniel Ross), Cole (Cory Okuchi), Aaron (Jay Saunders) and psychic Alex (Devon Brookshire) fighting beasts who look like rejects from SyFy’s Face Off, just how much of a movie can be made at a quiet mansion near the woods really depends on just how much of an influence executive producer Eduardo Sanchez (Blair Witch Project) had during the creative process of figuring out what this third movie should be about.
Watching this film is like trying to witness a Live Action Role Playing Game (LARP) for the first time. Some people will get it, and others will not. To include the icons from the Golden Age of Horror (which includes Victor Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman) in ne’er-do-well roles is not necessarily insulting, but they are too goofy to be taken seriously. Take, for example, Dracula where Lukowski is clearly hamming it up in his best stilted slavic accent or Step (Jasmine Guillermo) who delights in being scandalous. Guillermo is the only performer who really shines.
Even the one-liners are bad. Other bits of dialogue are lifted from other movies like Die Hard or Ghostbusters. But is this movie so bad that it’s good? To offer decent fan service is one thing but lifting ideas from other films is another issue not many viewers can take kindly to — even if this movie and its predecessors are meant to be parodies of the monster mash genre. Ninjas vs Monsters hardly feels like it’s made in homage to the classics. Now some fans of ninja movies and proper J-horror may wonder how this movie might look if it was made in Japan by the true visionaries like Yoshihiro Nishimura or Tak Sakaguchi.
But this movie is a western product, made by people whose guerrilla and DIY approach to filmmaking is amusing. More wide-angle shots would have helped give everyone the space to be seen on-screen. Just like Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, this film is best watched with the brain cells turned off. To figure out what it all means will just cause headaches.
