"COWABUNGA!"

Some of my oldest friends know that I've always been a sucker (no fetish per se) for ninjas. Although I practised karate and Krav Maga for a while, my present agility would hardly allow a hard-core, all-out ninjutsu workout. Ah well. You can always dream, and maybe buy your own nunchaku. (Feel free to whack yourself in the head with it at breakfast.)

Any-whoo. I'm happy to see Hollywood taking again some bad-ass ninja action presently. Tinseltown is resurrecting those sympatico "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (yup, the pic above is from the upcoming CGI movie). Hopefully it'll help to remove the stale taste that "Elektra" left in my mouth a few years back.

It's "Cowabunga Time" once again for the Merry Turtle Men Quartet of Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo and Raphael. Or "TMNT", for short. We'll see in a few months' time, if CGI (Computer Graphics Imagery) will help to make those fervent fellas a little more agile and speedy.

My lifetime interest in ninjas really began with American bestselling author Eric Van Lustbader's "The Ninja"; one helluva violent and erotic novel written in the early Eighties. I could not believe that somebody could write martial arts sequences like the ones described in the novel, let alone shoot them. EVL always writes in a very evocative style; as an aspiring screenwriter I owe an artistic debt to his narrative.

The producer duo Richard Zanuck and David Brown tried to tackle EVL's "The Ninja" shortly after the novel was published. They even hired John Carpenter ("Halloween", "The Thing") to direct the adaptation. In those times, Carpenter would have admittedly been a kick-ass choice. But alas, the project was promptly shelved - put into development hell, as they say in Hollywood - as the film market was flooded with endless really bad and miserable ninja flicks from Hong Kong.

Shô Kosugi (the Japanese martial artist) who starred in many of them was über-cool, but he was no Nicholas Linnear, the protagonist of "The Ninja". Not the guy I imagined to play my favorite hero in EVL's classic thriller.

I'm glad to able to report that there's once again an adaptation of "The Ninja" in the works, by 20th Century Fox. The author tells me that he can't divulge the director or the writer, but that it'll be worth the wait. It would be so cool to see "The Ninja" finally done right on the big screen, in that intrinsic and hyper-dynamic fashion Eric Van Lustbader originally envisioned it. I actually had the honor to meet the author in NYC in the early Nineties (when the WTC towers were still standing...). That trip was one of the highlights in my career as a film journalist. I couldn't have met a nicer or more generous guy. EVL wears his fame very elegantly, more kudos to him! He's a true mensch, as they say in Hollywood.