About a month ago I caught wind of Garagehouse Pictures. This is the new company from Exhumed Films programmer and collector of 16mm & 35mm prints Harry Guerro. The idea behind Garagehouse Pictures is to shed new light on some of the most obscure titles out there. They made their debut Blu-ray release with 1984’s Ninja Busters, which may very well be the most obscure title ever released to the format.

Ninja Busters was filmed in 1984, screened once and then was just left to be forgotten all these years.  The film was stored for 30 years in a warehouse and that’s where Guerro found it. Thankfully the print was in good shape and Garagehouse was able to clean it up and now we have a beautiful Blu-ray release of a lost movie.

Paul Kyriazi, who has built a bit of a cult following with titles like Death Machines and Omega Cop, directed Ninja Busters off a script written by Sid Campbell and William C. Martell. If you’ve seen Death Machines, Omega Cop or any other Kyriazi movie you kind of have an idea of what to expect with Ninja Busters. I think I’d best describe it as Miami Connection but less sincere. And what I mean by that is whereas Miami Connection tries to be a very serious martial arts/action movie that ends up funny in its failure to do so, Ninja Busters is a more straight forward comedy mixed with martial arts.

Chic (writer Campbell) and Bernie (Eric Lee) are a pair of bumbling friends with one goal in life – hook up with the ladies! Their plan to impress the ladies is to portray themselves as skilled martial artists. Very skilled in fact as they claim Bernie was Bruce Lee’s best student and Chic was his teacher. One look at these two and you’re immediately not buying this story. Chic couldn’t look goofier and gives off this Jim Varney vibe and Bernie looks to be this small, scrawny scamp just waiting for his hair to be tussled. Like you would expect, neither is very skilled.

In reality both Campbell and Lee had already built reputations as world renowned martial artists. While I wouldn’t call either one a great actor, they do deserve some credit for doing a nice job of portraying themselves as a couple of idiots unable to stand straight let alone set the world ablaze with some top flight martial arts.

The plot is a little weird, but I suppose that should come as no surprise. Campbell was praised for his martial art skills, not his writing ability. The film opens up with some nefarious characters participating in what appears to be some shady activities. Then we get to Chic and Bernie who briefly work in a warehouse that is the front for the nefarious fellows we previously met. Chic and Bernie quickly lose their jobs then get into a run-in with a couple of bikers. The bikers chase the pair of stooges into a dojo that has a fairly large number of female students. This intrigues Chic and Bernie so they sign up.

The next 45 minutes or so are spent showing the progression of Bernie and Chic at the dojo. At first they start off not taking the training very seriously and spend all their time trying to pick up the female students. By the end of the 45 minutes, however, they are martial arts experts. Hooray! This somehow leads to them running back into the nefarious characters from early in the movie and a showdown to stop them quickly proceeds.

Ninja Busters isn’t a great movie. It has some serious issues, most notably with the acting and the pacing. Across the board the acting is pretty subpar. A lot of the lines are wooden in their delivery and most of the cast doesn’t look to be completely comfortable on camera. This leads to quite a bit of unintentional laughs. The movie also takes too long to get back to our bad guys. I get that our heroes have to go through this training to become our heroes, but I wish we could have spent some more time with the baddies. It would have made the final fight better.

Now that I got my complaints out of the way, let me tell you why this not great movie is great fun! Despite the amateur acting, Campbell and Lee have pretty good chemistry as Chic and Bernie. They’re really funny together and once they get through the training they get to unleash their awesome martial arts moves. Since the movie is supposed to be funny in the buddy cop sort of way there is a lot of intentional humor to go along with the unintentional humor, which basically means you’re getting laughs throughout the whole movie.

The absolute highlight of Ninja Busters comes at just around the halfway point. For no reason whatsoever, other than it being the 80’s, we get a random break dancing scene. It’s pretty glorious and something more movies should incorporate. If your movie is getting a little slow throw it some break dancing and you’ll have the audience hooked!

For their debut release, Garagehouse Pictures did a wonderful job with Ninja Busters. The movie itself looks awesome, which is pretty amazing when you remember this film was basically just left to rot. Garagehouse Pictures didn’t settle with an awesome transfer as they went one step further and loaded the release of with extras.  You get The Tournament which is Kyriazi’s first film, although it’s only 49 minutes. This isn’t a great movie but it’s a nice look at where Kyriazi got his start. In addition to that you get an introduction to the film from Kyriazi and an audio commentary track. And the whole release is tied together in a very nice clear Blu-ray case with some awesome original artwork by the very talented Stephen Romano. If Garagehouse Pictures did one thing wrong, it’s that they may have set the bar too high for future releases.

Ninja Busters is a really fun movie. I for one am glad that Garagehouse Pictures saved it from the wastelands and gave it to us in a beautiful Blu-ray and cannot wait to see what they release next. I definitely recommend everyone pick this up.

Ninja Busters is now available on Blu-ray from Garagehouse Pictures over at DiabolikDVD.