Pray For Death

Pray For Death
United States - 1985
Director - Gordon Hessler
USA Home Video, 1986, VHS
Run Time - 1 hour, 33 minutes.

Just look at that huge box, now that is a thing of beauty designed by "The Art Department" no less. It's a cheap take on the 80's color splash design style but at least it mirrors the pattern from the front on the back. Nice continuity. The patriotic colors are great too considering the distributor and the story line which features Kosugi as a Japanese expatriate trying to find peace in the USA. If they'd called it American Ninja they would've made bank.
After witnessing the brutal glory that is Sam Firstenberg's Revenge of the Ninja I was sold on Sho Kosugi so I picked up a couple more of his movies including the prequel Enter the Ninja starring Franco Nero. Pray for Death had some of the highest reccomendations of all of Kosugi's films so I was very excited to find it, especially in one of these giant "please just try and steal me" boxes.
Though this tape claims a run time one minute longer than that listed at IMDB, it is still somehow possible it was edited. Unfortunately that doesn't change the fact that it was boring.




This here is a trailer for the movie "Die 1000 Augen der Ninja", alternate West German name of Pray For Death from Spannick's YouTube channel. In Germany Ninja have one thousand eyes but the trailers are still better than the movies they advertise. Now that I've posted this I suppose I'll have to rewatch it in the hopes that my memory is wrong.