Set against the glass table high-Nagel of 1980s Los Angeles, Ninja III: The Domination is a bold genre collision that defies logical categorisation. It’s not merely an action film, nor a supernatural thriller, nor an aerobics-driven romance – it is all of these, and possibly more.
And beneath its leotarded surface lies a complex engagement with themes of agency, identity, cultural transmission, and the toxic aerobicization of the Western world. It also supposes whether V8 is an aphrodisiac.
Christie (Lucinda Dickey) is introduced as a working-class professional whose physicality and independence place her outside traditional gender expectations of the time. Her sudden possession by the spirit of a vengeful ninja assassin functions as a thematic rupture – a dramatization of how identity, especially female identity, is perpetually vulnerable to external pressure.
Including ghost ninjas and hairy cops with boundary issues.
Today, this is a film that requires, nay, demands reconsideration, and not merely as a cult object. This is a pure cinematic artefact, a perfectly preserved product of its time.
Some critics have called Ninja III incoherent. Others, camp. Both are right, and both are wrong. It is, in fact, a raw document of the psychosexual zeitgeist unwittingly disguised as Cannon fodder. -Pop