Ninja Turf: Throwback FOB Attack

I want to introduce any unknowing readers to a gem of a movie titled Ninja Turf. (Disclaimer: it has nothing to do with ninjas whatsoever). Originally titled Los Angeles Street Fighters, the movie was made in 1984 by a young Phillip Rhee (who later went on to star in the Best of the Best) series, his fellow taekwondo director Jun Chong, some enterprising young USC film students, and director Richard Park (who later went on to make five more movies about street fighters in Los Angeles).

The movie is, at first glance, terrible, and appears to be a waste of celluloid. Or DVD discs, or betamax, depending on which format you are watching it on. But despite the dreadful writing, directing, pacing, acting, cinematography and production values, this movie has something special. It really has heart.

The story concerns Young (Chong), an immigrant from Korea who is the leader of a benevolent high school gang. When a rival gang, lead by Chan (the omnipresent martial arts actor James Lew) bullies new student in school Tony (Rhee), Chong takes him under his wing. The two become fast friends who live together, fight together, and ultimately die together.

The acting is atrocious. Jun Chong, who sports a mustache and looks to be in his mid to late 30s, is supposed to play a high school student, and speaks stilted lines such as "My parents, they are divorce, but... I don't want to talk about it" and "You are lucky, you have good parents. As far as I'm concerned man, I have big problem." Yet the ending is incredibly gripping and poignant. For some reason I find myself getting goosebumps every time I watch it. Young, who has just fought through a legion of assassins hired by a drug pusher, stops in an alleyway to call his mother. There he is ambushed and stabbed by Chan. He is able to fight through a few of Chan's men before he becomes too weak from the loss of blood. Just then, Tony shows up, and is horrified by the sight of his best friend bleeding to death on the ground. He has an intense fight with Chan, where he is badly injured but seemingly kills him. Young's mother arrives to see the bleeding Tony and Young dying on the ground. The final shot is a closeup of Tony's Korean passport (which he recently obtained to go back to his homeland) lying on the street, just barely out of his grasp. I feel like the filmmakers, in a clumsy way, were trying to really make a statement with this about how they felt as immigrants: sometimes out of place and left behind in the so-called "melting pot."

The fight choreography is also quite gripping. Rhee and Chong are real taekwondo masters, and also accomplished in boxing and hapkido. The fights are choreographed as hard hitting street fighting, with not too much acrobatics or unreasonable flashiness. They surprisingly mesh perfectly with the cheesy 80s synthesizer soundtrack (which, according to the credits, somehow took three people to produce).

If you want Oscar quality acting, well, you probably shouldn't even be watching the movies reviewed in this blog in the first place. If you want merely passable quality anything, well you shouldn't see this movie. But if you are looking for entertaining fight scenes and a gripping and somewhat haunting tale of young people who fall victim to gangs, drugs and parental neglect, this is in that concern, a very honest movie.