Ninja Academy

As other witnesses have written, the early 1990s were quite an adventure for prepubescent boys without much contact with Western pop culture. We enthusiastically got together with a classmate whose family had a living room equipped with a VHS player, that portal into the world of juvenile fantasies. It was a blissful time when it occurred to us that making a comedy flick with ninjas was a fantastic idea (maybe if we had known the words, we would have said it was “cool” or perhaps even “progressively meta-genre”). But it was also a time when we thought that Czech magazines Trnky brnky and Ruda Pivrnec were the apex of humour. Compared to those low-brow publications, however, Ninja Academy was nothing special, beyond the fact that there were ninjas. At that time, together with other ’80s relics, ninjas got a second wind thanks to the floodgates opening into the former Eastern bloc and the kids there, which also led to the resuscitation of the Police Academy model, typically a flick set behind the defunct Iron Curtain. Nico Mastorakis was one of those who vehemently milked this new wave of silliness for ignorant fledgling viewers. From today’s perspective, Ninja Academy shows itself to be a hopeless relic of its time. The strongly mechanical script is composed predominantly of random scenes based on the premise that a group of walking clichés and superficial allusions to genre icons will enrol in, well, a ninja academy. In the 1990s, we had our eyes glued to it, because fights, shootouts and breasts were fortunately enough for us (regardless of the fact that all these attributes are represented only very modestly in the film and not very well at that). We also learned an important lesson, as we knew what nunchucks were and some of us got the reference to Rambo (I didn't; I wouldn’t see Rambo until it later appeared on television, but I was aware of Police Academy). Today, one sees these points of desperation show up in drawn-out forums far in advance and nod off in the excessive vacuum that fills the runtime between that surprisingly small handful of embarrassing gags and improvised fight scenes. Not even the few scenes with the mime, whose inclusion is the most imaginative idea in the whole screenplay, can turn this generic VHS dreck into something that would still stand up after taking off the nostalgia glasses. Ninja Academy remains a terrifying example of the futility that we enthusiastically devoured during that wonderful time when our window to the wide world of cinema was the generic selection of a video rental shop operated in the former bicycle storage room in communist-era concrete apartment building. (28/01/2021)