May 6, 20213 min read

Surf Ninjas Film Review

★★

Directed by: Neal Israel

Written by: Dan Gordon

Starring: Ernie Reyes Jr, Rob Schneider, Ernie Reyes Sr and Nicolas Cowan

Throwback Film Review by: Rachel Pullen

Surf Ninjas (1993) Film Review

So I was with pals the other day, chatting Throwback Thursday and trying to remember some of the worst movies we saw as kids….we all cited the ones I had talked about, Power Rangers, Twister, all that stuff and we started to struggle. We Googled film trailers of terrible flicks, the search seemed hopeless, nothing was terrible enough when my friend turned to me and said: “How about Surf Ninjas?”.

Surf Ninjas? Now you have got my attention.

We gathered around the phone, like people did in the old days with a fire and clicked play on the trailer, it had everything, choppy editing for cool points, bright clothing and lettering being thrown at me until the point of needing sunglasses, kids shouting “radical” and driving down the Californian beachfront in a drop-top Jeep, oh and ninjas kicking them for some reason! It seemed like the perfect match…oh I was about to be so wrong.

Surf Ninjas is the tale of two young boys who are kicking it surf style in California, hitting the waves and chatting up babes, but wait…a bunch of ninjas keep trying to kick em in the balls or something and then this guy with an eye patch is saving them and we have like twenty minutes of this before he is introduced or any of this explained.

He tells them that they are the sons of a king in another country and it’s their destiny to go back to the homeland and run the empire or whatever. The kids are like nah, that is lame we want to surf, but eye patch man blows up their house and renders them homeless so they kind of have to at this point.

What ensues is a journey story, where they fight more ninjas and teach people to surf, get captured by baddies, then get loose again, climb a mountain and eventually get to the homeland and fulfil their destiny - the end.

What I’m trying to say is this film follows a very basic adventure plot, and that’s fine, what else did I expect? But I found this film insanely boring, and it’s not just the repetitive plotline, there is little to no connection with the characters, they all put out some funny one-liners and that’s about it, there is nothing where we really connect, I mean for once Rob Schneider was the saving grace of this film, he seemed to be the only one who had a bit of a story to his character, but everyone else had the spice of a bag of plain flour.

But if you love 90s throwbacks, dungarees and avoiding getting kicked in the nads, Surf Ninjas could be for you, it serves a purpose in regard to entertainment for kids, but maybe anyone over the age of ten would check out…also a kid has a Game Gear in it, which can like predict the future…I only had Mickey’s House of Illusion on mine in the 90s, guess I missed out.

So, what can we take away from Surf Ninjas? What is it that the waves of California will teach us?