Shameless Pile Keeps on Growing: Shinobi

Today's quick find deserves its own post. When I visited a charity shop I found some regular DVD:s and then this box of awesomeness:

The box had only words Shinobi Heart Under Blade written in Latin alphabets. After checking what was inside I decided to take a risk although there was no mention about English subtitles. After all the price was only 3.50€ and Shinobi means ninja so it was an instabuy.

The movie was "Shinobi: Heart Under Blade" (2005) and it got quite good reviews. It seems that the movie is more in the vein of Hong Kong wuxia dramas, and less Sho Kosugi or Michael Dudikoff. Somewhere it was described as Romeo & Juliet with ninjas.

There are four DVDs:
1. The movie and trailers for other films (the movie has English subtitles. However the menus are in Japanese so navigating the menus takes a bit of trial and error.)
2. Iga Clan Bonus Disc containing making of featurette, premiere featurette (without subtitles), cast interviews and deleted scene.
3. Kouga Clan Bonus Disc containing featurette about effects, another premiere featurette, storyboard comparison, featurette about ninja weapons, another featurette about special effects, location featurette, TV spots and trailers.
4. Heaven music video by Ayumi Hamasaki.

The DVD holder was also pretty:

There was a lot of stuff in the box, a book, flyers and a smaller box full of cool stuff:

The book had pictures of the characters, locations and background information (in Japanese of course):

The box contained cards with pictures of cool ninjas, pretty ninja-girls and some mysterious characters:

Then there was a ninja-pouch with some mysterious ninja-powder and rubber-shuriken with suction cups:

There was also Iga Ninja Clan lapel pin

T-shirt and Kouga Ninja lapel pin are missing but I can't really complain considering that the full Shinobi Limited Premium Edition costs over 100€ in teh internets. All in all a nice and surprising find.

After digging up some information about the film I found out that it is based on Futaro Yamada's novel "The Kouga Ninja Scrolls." It has nothing to do with Ninja Scroll anime or series but it is closely related to anime-series "Basilisk" as both of them are based on the same book. I have "Basilisk" on DVD also but I haven't watched it: