Ninja Girl   Starring: Rina Takeda, Mitsuki Koga and Masanori Mimoto MVM RRP: £15.99 MLA2014 Certificate: 18 Available 10 October 2011

16th Century Japan and women are being kidnapped to become pleasure slaves, in the endless fight between the Iga and Kouga ninja clans. When the Iga clan’s Shimotsuki and Hyotsuki kidnap Kisaragi (Rina Takeda), they quickly realise that she is no blushing maiden, but a tough female ninja. When she is freed by a mysterious stranger, Kisaragi sets about getting her revenge...

Ninja Girl (2011 - 1 hr, 04 min, 38 sec) is another in a string of Ninja based historical dramas from Seji Chiba and like his previous films this is a strictly low budget affair which is not helped by some of the dodgiest hand held filming that I’ve seen in a long time.

I have seen a couple of Chiba’s other films and to be honest, I’ve yet to be overly impressed by his work. The themes tend to appear to be female empowering, whilst at the same time showing the women as powerless sex toys. Neither the framing, pacing or general direction has much in the way of an impressive look and feel.

Some of the fight sequences are well done, but this does not go very far in redeeming a pedestrian script or a story length, which is just a bit longer than a television episode.

The disc gets a 1.78:1 anamorphic transfer which does what it can with the digital film. The audio is a clear English dub or the original Japanese DD 2.0 track, with English subtitles, although, in truth, no matter what I did I could not get the disc to play the promised English track. The only extra on the disc is the Theatrical Trailer (1 min, 30 sec).

I guess if you’re a fan of either Ninja’s or Chiba’s work then this might be a disc worth checking out.

5

Charles Packer