I like to consider myself a pretty big martial arts movie guy – Chiba, Shihomi, Van Damme, I’ll watch em all. But I’d never seen anything from this dude Sho Kusugi, who made a bunch of ninja movies in the 70s and 80s. Well, unless you count his bit in the freakin Godfather part 2 as “bystander in hat”. He was also in the godawful thriller Black Eagle alongside Van Damme, but I didn’t “watch” that so much as suffer through it.

So anyway, PRAY FOR DEATH is the story of a family of Japanese immigrants who, through no fault of their own, get caught up in the middle of a twisted criminal organisation’s war with itself. And one of the family is a ninja. Which is the kind of thing you should expect if you’re watching an American movie about Japanese folks from 1985.

The picture kicks off with a three-minute action scene that turns out to be a scene from a movie-within-a-movie called “The Black Ninja” which pretty effectively teaches you what to expect. That being a lot of awkward, medium-close-up style action. Also I can’t help but think a ninja dressed all in black should fight at night, but this Gordon Hessler character who made the movie never thought of that I guess because when we get to see the “real” ninja action that’s almost all in broad daylight too.

“The Black Ninja” is the favourite show of two kids, Takeshi and Tomoya (played by Kosugi’s real sons Shane and Kane (yeah)) who are real into ninja shit generally, so that when their dad Akira (Sho Kosugi) gets home from a hard day at the office(?) they immediately start asking him if there are ninjas in modern times too. Obviously he and his wife Aiko (Donna Kei Benz) have a little laugh at this, and then Akira plays ninja with the kids for a bit. We also find out that they’re moving to America soon. All this family stuff is nice enough, and it left me dreading the actual revenge part of the movie more than a little bit.

Pretty soon though we find that there are ninjas in modern times, and that… (gasp!) Akira is one of them! There’s a bit more awkward action, and then a scene where his ninja master convinces him to take his ninja suit (incl. 1 badass helmet, 1 suit of chain mail, unlimited throwing stars) to America with him. “You cannot escape your shadows, my friend,” he says.

The family buy this run down old bar and within what looks like a couple of days max, have it converted into a Japanese restaurant. Unfortunately their storeroom is being used by the local non-specific organised crime group as a dead drop, so when a valuable bit of stolen jewellery is pocketed by the guy who’s meant to be dead-dropping it, it’s Akira and family who take the blame.

The action in the movie was choreographed by Kosugi, a veteran martial artist, so it would probably be quite good if you could see much of it. Unfortunately the director isn’t really an action guy – half the times a throwing star gets used it takes three shots for it to hit over about a full second. The script was written by James Booth, who also plays the bad guy “Limehouse Willie”, who is one fucked up dude. It’s a fine script, although I wonder if he had himself in mind for the bad guy role when he wrote it. If he did that’s a bit troubling, considering the stuff he gets up to.

Anyway, shit kicks off as shit inevitably does in this type of thing, and we get to see Akira take out literally dozens of guys, mostly without a scratch on him. There are some good moments here, like when he rolls one of those big cable spools at a couple guys at a shipyard with himself clinging on to it so he can surprise attack them.

Overall I liked Pray For Death. I slagged on the action, but the drama compensates enough for me. I cared about these guys, and the simple pleasure of watching Kosugi get up to all that ninja shit made up for a lot of the failings of the direction. One weird aspect is that in the end the movie comes down 100 per cent pro-vigilante justice, like a ninja DEATH WISH movie. The script could have done with a bit more philosophy, more exploration of the shadows of the past shit, but hey. If a movie where a ninja dude personally forges his own sword and then uses it to take bloody vengeance on like seventy people sounds like your thing then go to it.

PRAY FOR DEATH: HESSLER, 1985.

Buy it at: https://101-films-store.myshopify.com/products/pray-for-death-preorder-19th-oct-2015