American Ninja 5 is a movie from 1992 starring David Bradley, Anne Dupont, Lee Reyes (from the renowned Reyes martial arts family), and James Lew. Pat Morita (from The Karate Kid) is billed as a lead, but he is really only in the movie for less than 10 minutes, a couple of minutes in the beginning, a few minutes in the middle, and a couple of minutes in the end.
The plot of the movie is a mess. It is kind of a combination of the plots from the other American Ninja movies mashed together with a bit of Karate Kid (the mentoring aspect, not because of anything Pat Morita does) mixed in. The basics are a rich bad guy in Venezuela played by Clement von Franckenstein is forcing a scientist played by Aharon Ipale, to build a bio-weapon and using an army of (really pathetic) ninjas led by James Lew's character, the Viper as enforcers.
The movie is about as bad as you would suspect, especially if you have seen the other movies in the franchise. Ultimately, this movie is not really a part of the franchise since it has no ties to the other movies. David Bradley is brought back, but he plays a completely different character than he did in American Ninja 3 and 4. Tadashi Yamashita, who played the lead evil ninja in American Ninja 1 does appear as himself at the very beginning of the movie, but there is not even a reference to Michael Dudikoff or Steve James' characters from the other movies. So, this movie is basically a total reset of the franchise that was not in any way needed. The acting and writing are horrible, but the martial arts action is good, for the most part. The movie is very cheesy and campy. There are horrible sound effects throughout the movie, and the lead evil ninja never wears a ninja uniform. Instead, he alternates between a trenchcoat and a cape from scene to scene, and he has a pompadour and a ponytail.
The DVD just has the movie itself, which starts playing as soon as the disc loads. There are no extras or bonus material, and there are no captions. Ultimately, you know what you are getting with the movie. A D-level action movie. It was one of the last ninja movies that was made after the genre started to putter out in the late 1980s. It is longer than most of the other movies in the genre (clocking in at 1 hour and 40 minutes) and definitely seems to drag on. If you accept it for what it is, it is an okay action movie. If you expect anything more than that, you will be disappointed.
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