Well damn, it looks like Wednesday has come again. I’ve got a pile of Eizouken and Chihayafuru articles coming down the pipeline, but today we’ll once again be discussing this week’s non-anime attractions, which all seemed to follow a certain theme. In general, the films I tend to watch end up falling in two broad categories: critically acclaimed films and classics I get to in Me Time, and somewhat more crowd-pleasing fare I convince my housemates to watch. This week didn’t really feature anything from column A, but column B was full of fun attractions, as we explored the wild spectrum of martial arts films!

First, on the high camp end of the martial arts spectrum, Netflix was happy to introduce us to Five Elements Ninjas. Five Elements Ninjas is a film that’s essentially constructed around a series of boss fights, which the good guys first fail in spectacular fashion, and then come back, having developed countermeasures for each of the bosses’ signature attacks. The film takes its Five Elements gimmick pretty seriously – there’s the earth ninjas (who hide in the ground and stab swords upwards at your crotch, true assholes), tree ninjas (I’m not sure tree is an element, but they hide in trees, so), water ninjas, fire ninjas, and so on.

The film’s first thirty minutes are basically a continuous streak of hapless martial artists getting utterly obliterated by these crafty ninjas, and then its second half sees the heroes returning with pro strats, as they develop specific anti-water ninja nets and anti-earth ninja stilts and all sorts of fun, improbable contrivances. The costuming looks like something out of the original Star Trek, and the plot is no more than an excuse for continuous ninja battles, but it’s a very fun and perpetually inventive time, culminating in a four-on-one battle where you kinda want the clearly superior villain to win.

Among more recent martial arts films, we also checked out The Night Comes For Us, a brutally violent Indonesian film written and directed by Timo Tjahjanto, and starring The Raid’s Iko Uwais and Joe Taslim. Indonesia has been producing a lot of the very best action/martial arts films of recent years, with The Raid standing high among them, and The Night Comes For Us counts as perhaps the bloodiest martial arts film I’ve ever seen.

The combat is fast, desperate, and brutal – fights rarely look like a “dance” in the way old-fashioned martial arts often tend to, and it’s always clear that every combatant is looking to disable and destroy their opponent in the most efficient and permanent ways possible. It’s certainly not a film for the squeamish, but Uwais and Taslim are both phenomenal martial artists with a tremendous on-screen presence, and The Night Comes For Us’ choreography is as thrilling and beautiful as it is utterly unforgiving. If you think more martial arts films should come down to two men absolutely annihilating each other with box cutters, The Night Comes For Us is the kind of film for you.

And returning to more traditional martial arts fare, we finished off the week with the fantastic Return to the 36th Chamber. Neither I nor my housemates knew this was actually a sequel to the original 36 Chambers when we picked it – to be perfectly honest, my housemate only demanded we watch this one because of the Wu-Tang Clan connection. But I’m very happy we did – Return to the 36th Chamber is a charming, inventive, and wonderfully choreographed experience, starring a fraudulent monk who aspires to become the real deal.

The first act of 36th Chamber centers on a playful scheme, as a group of oppressed mill workers rally around their fake monk accomplice, and gamely send themselves flying away from his every kick and punch, hoping to intimidate the mill owner into raising their wages. When his ruse is discovered, the fake monk vows to make good on his deception and heads off the titular 36 Chambers, a temple of kung fu practice where he is forced to erect scaffolding for over a year. Having finished his trials, he discovers he has essentially mastered “scaffolding kung fu” – a system of martial arts relying on the fast footwork, comfort with bamboo poles, and efficiency of knot-tying he developed during his roofing stint. 36th Chamber’s final act is an absurdly inventive faceoff between the protagonist’s scaffolding powers and an entire base of bad guys, culminating in a confrontation with another fighting style so unexpected and dazzling that I won’t spoil it here. Return to the 36th Chamber is a just-plain-excellent kung fu film in all regards, and if you like martial arts films or shonen manga, I’d definitely check it out.