NINJA VS. SHARK (2023) **

The Crimson Devil Clan attacks a small fishing village and demands their stockpile of pearls.  Making matters worse is the fact that lately, the town’s pearl divers have been getting eaten by a giant shark that lurks in the sea.  The mayor has no choice but to hire a mercenary to protect the village from the evil clan.  The hired swordsman soon learns the clan is the one controlling the shark through the use of black magic.  Little does the village realize their new savior is also on the run from the clan, which complicates matters. 

Ninja vs. Shark suffers from some bad CGI blood effects during the sword fights.  The shark effects are pretty chintzy too, and not exactly in a fun way.  It also doesn’t help that our hero spends most of the movie dressed more like a samurai than a Ninja as he walks around in a robe and not the black pajamas you’d normally associate with Ninjas. 

There are some amusing things here.  For instance, when the villain eats the pearls, it makes him young again, but the side effect is that it turns him into a silly looking CGI shark man.   For the most part though, you have to wade through some serious lulls in the action before you get to the good stuff, and even then, the good stuff isn’t all that memorable.  There’s a zombie chick, a decent decapitated head gag, and lame Mortal Kombat style fights.  The finale where the Ninja squares up against the shark is pretty anticlimactic too. 

I’ve seen lots of movies with the words “Ninja vs.” in the title.  I’ve also seen lots of flicks featuring the words “vs. Shark”.  As such, Ninja vs. Shark is far from the worst of these kinds of films.  I mean, it’s not terrible or anything.  I guess it just boils down to what you want to see from a movie called Ninja vs. Shark.  For me, it had way too much of the former and not enough of the latter.  Fortunately, it’s only seventy-six minutes.  That doesn’t mean it’s well paced, as it feels longer than that, but at least the filmmakers knew that an hour and fifteen minutes was about the expiration date for something like this.