Shark Week continues!
Elevator pitch
- ‘Yojimbo’ meets ‘Jaws 3’
Premise
A fishing village is being extorted by an evil gang and hires a bodyguard as nasty as the gangsters. At the same time, any villager who enters the sea is likely to wash up a dismembered corpse.
Trailer
Trailer has spoilers, too many IMHO
I didn’t see the trailer before watching, and I’m glad I didn’t.
Full Movie
Details
Unless otherwise stated, all full movie links I post are for free, no account required, licensed (AFAIK, IANAL) streaming VOD in English (or original language with English subtitles) and work at time of writing in my location, Mexico. Availability and language options may be different in your location. Asterisk by the one I watched.
- Tubi - Ninja vs Shark (2023) (Japanese with English subtitles) *
Legal stream finders
Details
The ‘nobraincellsleft’ link finds legit stream sources from many countries, listed by two-letter code.
The Just Watch link lists legit stream sources only for one country at a time. On the web page, change the country to your location, e.g. change Mexico to Australia.
Neither is perfect. Check your preferred streamers directly, just in case.
- https://nobraincellsleft.github.io/JustWatch-Search/title/tm1303393
- https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/youjuu-kitan-ninja-vs-shark
Info
- IMDb 6.0/10 (Gives info on English-dub voice cast but little on the Japanese cast)
- Plex (Doesn’t offer a stream but better on the Japanese cast)
- Wikipedia in Japanese
Personnel
- Director: Sakamoto Kōichi 坂本 浩
Cast
- Hirano Kōshu
- Nishime Shun
- Nagano Juria
Opinion
The thing you have to understand about ‘Ninja vs Shark’ is that for the first hour it’s a low-budget but good, serious, dramatic samurai movie with betrayal, conflict, family drama, unrequited love, emotionally significant flashbacks, melodramatic villains, geysers of CGI blood, curses, giant sharks, magical ninjas, devil worship, zombies, sorcery, human sacrifice, decapitations, and homoerotic shape-shifting vampiric ninja weresharks… and only then does it get crazy. Absolutely unhinged!
I love this film! My fave of Shark Week so far.
Shark Week Score: its sharkiness is relatively low (until, of course, the very end, when everything is dialled up to eleven, given an overdose of steroids and PCP, and let loose on an unsuspecting audience.) 2 out of 5 sharks.
B Movie Bonanza Score: 5 out of 5 sharks!
Screenshots
Oh man, if you think things in this village are weird in the first five minutes, just you wait till the last five minutes!
Of course, the mayor’s first reaction to news of a villager disappearing is to objectify him.
Trust me, at this point, this movie ain’t even close to jumping the shark.
Overly dramatic villain states overly obvious point.
We’re gonna need a bigger sacrifice.
Always nice to have a ninja etiquette teacher.
I got a couple more completely batshit screenshots but I feel it’s way more fun to watch the movie to experience those scenes.
OK, just one (gory)
And she ain’t even dead yet!
Woah.
Is this like encounters of the spooky kind batshit or basket case 2 batshit?
Ninja Gaiden: The Movie
They had no budget, so the Ghost Fish are just sharks.
Can’t wait to see how deep down the ocean that Izuna drop will go.
Oh yeah, this looked good, I almost watched it to review, but I needed something without subtitles.
There is a dubbed version out there (hence the IMDb credits for voice cast) but I only found the Tubi subbed version.