You have to admire the sheer gumption to make a movie that fuses the worlds of ninjitsu and softcore, a world that Adrian Lyne could not have envisioned when he put some honey on the table and put “You Can Leave Your Hat On” on the boombox.

Directed by Aaron Barsky — perhaps the only man who could be an assistant director on such wildly disparate movies as When Harry Met Sally, Atlas Shrugged, Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan and Amityville II: The Possession — and written by Bill Counse and Don Pequignot  (who teamed up for American Cyborg: Steel Warrior) as well as John Morrissey, this movie has about two or three scenes that seem to come from 9 1/2 Weeks and then they kind of just say, “Well, that’s enough” and go off and make a different movie.

Land developer Gruber (Robert Fieldsteel, who somehow was in both John Cassavetes’ Love Streams and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time) — yes, he looks just like Hans — is kicking Lisa Thorne (Andee Gray, who appeared in the movies Texas Godfather, Dead Men Don’t Die and Vascetomy: A Delicate Matter) out of her apartment. That real estate renegade is also throwing out Joe Vogue (Michael Phenicie, Evil Obsession, Lambada, Carnival of Souls) and sending ninjas his way. But Joe is also a ninja and he’s using the teachings of his mother Gladys (Magda Harout) to instruct his new love interest Lisa — yes, of course they hit it off — in the art of the ninja.

You know how Airplane!, Top Secret and The Naked Gun movies work but the movies made by other directors and writers using the same actors never do? Imagine if they didn’t have those actors.

For some reason, there’s a subplot here where Lisa starts overeating and keeps gorging herself on food. I guess fat people are always funny, as are people addicted to eating because it gives them some limited control over an uncontrollable life. Maybe I shouldn’t look so deeply into a movie that brings together eroticism and silent killers, you know?

The most creative thing about this movie is its tagline: Twenty men couldn’t knock him out. But one woman might.

Oh yeah — Tiny Lister Jr. and Rance Howard — as a ninja negotiator, I admit that the idea of that screen credit is also pretty funny — as well as Kane Hodder and Gerald Okamura all show up. I think if you made a martial arts movie in the 80s or 90s, you had to hire Okamura or actual ninjas would kill your family.