Ninjas vs Vampires

Introduction

Earlier this month I reviewed the first film to be released in the UK by Left Films, a low budget film called Cowboys And Zombies. It was released to cash in on Cowboys Vs Aliens and was pretty well done overall, or at least enjoyable. Now here comes the second…

Ninjas vs Vampires is actually a sequel film. Justin Timpane and his crew have already had a minor indie hit with the low budget Ninjas vs Zombies, selling around 4,000 copies of said film, and are back to have another crack at it, but this time replacing the stumbling ravenous undead with the blood-sucking undead.

Aaron (Jay Saunders) is a wannabe filmmaker who is out in the car late at night with his camera and best friend Alex (Devon Marie Burt). Aaron decides its time to see if he can move his friendship on to something a little bit more substantial and confesses his feelings to her, but rather than Alex falling into his arms, she gets decidedly tetchy. This leads to a bit of an argument but before things get out of hand, they get out of hand as a gang of Vampires decide its teatime - and the two are first course and dessert.

But then a mysterious quartet swoop in and rescue them, but not before Aaron is face down in the mud unconscious. Waking up sometime later, Aaron runs to Alex's house to make sure she is ok, only to find that she can't remember anything about what happened. In fact, it turns out that any mention of vampires is automatically wiped from her mind. How mysterious…

A friend of Aaron's called Reefer (wonder why…) points Aaron in the direction of the local comic store owner Cole (Cory Okouchi), and armed with his trusty camera, Aaron tracks him to a house that appears to be inhabited by a number of people wearing black. Aaron is captured and it is soon revealed that his captors are in fact Ninjas with secret powers. Cole and Kyle (Daniel Ross) just kick ass, but Ann (Melissa McConnell) is a witch and Lily (Carla Okouchi) is also a vampire, albeit one that doesn't drink human blood.

The Ninjas are a force for good that wage a nightly war against whatever evil forces get in their way, currently it's the Vampires led by evil head honcho Seth (Kurt Skarstedt). Seth has a plan to dominate the world, and Aaron finds that in order to save Alex he must join the Ninjas and defeat Seth, or at least die trying…

Visual

It's a low budget film so there are a few things that could be improved upon. Some of the lighting needs looking at as while the lighting is acceptable overall, it's not as good as it could be.

Some of the shots/scenes are a little longer than they need to be, lingering beyond acceptable limits, so a bit more timely editing required.

Still, not bad overall really…

Extras

Apparently there are six hours (yes, six…) of extras on the retail version of this release. I only got preview discs and nowhere near that. That's awful lot of extras, maybe more than anything out there already bar the LOTR or Star Wars releases, I'm not sure and don't really care. It's a lot and the viewing of said extras will determine whether they were worth it or not…

Overall

If I'm totally honest, I really wasn't expecting much from this. I'd never heard of the prequel and just saw it as a low budget mashup of genres, which I guess it is. What I hadn't taken into account is that it's really quite funny, not taking itself that seriously at all, despite all the fighting and a fair amount of blood spillage.

Jay Saunders and Daniel Ross are superb in their respective roles, Saunders kind of reminds me of amateur YouTube filmmaker Freddie W but then his specialty is action genre stuff. Anyway, the two leads are both funny and semi-serious and their acting is pretty good. Devon Marie Burt does a good job of acting confused and screams a lot, but rarely has much more to do. The rest of the acting ranges from slightly stilted to pretty wooden and the less said about the madman in the catwoman outfit the better…

The script is definitely the saving grace of the film, peppered as it is with pop culture references and funny one liners, mainly delivered superbly by Daniel Ross. The other side of this though is that the script also made the opposing vampires rather dull and flat in comparison. The sfx for a low budget film were pretty impressive, I can't say I didn't really object to anything although it was clear they were not industry standard CGI that you would expect from one of the big fx houses. They did the job more than adequately and weren't distracting, certainly not as distracting as the catwoman outfit on a bloke.

Some of the plot was clearly without any kind of resolution, such as both catwoman bloke and Seth deciding to kill loads of their own people. Other rather neat and funny stuff like the daylight home invasion consisting of a team of vampires holding blankets over the group were then wasted in the inevitable botched escape. These are just minor gripes again though as overall I really enjoyed this and could probably stand to watch it again. And its set up for a sequel that may well be called Ninjas vs Monsters, can't wait…