Unseen American Ninja 4 Footage

PUBLISHED: 6 JUNE 2025

35 Years Later: Unearthed Outtakes

American Ninja 4: The Annihilation is the high-octane, martial arts-packed romp that brought together two iconic action stars, Michael Dudikoff and David Bradley, for one final, explosive mission. Now, over three decades since its release, the film has yielded a long-buried treasure: never-before-seen footage from the shoot, offering a rare look behind the scenes of the saga.

Director Cedric Sundstrom, who helmed both American Ninja 3 and 4, recently surprised fans by sharing this archival material with the Hollywood Ninja Movie Group on YouTube. Clocking in at just over 10 minutes, the raw footage provides new insight into one of the film’s most pivotal sequences—the capture of a Delta Force unit by a legion of red ninja.

What the Footage Reveals

In the final cut of the film, the sequence is brief—a shaky video transmission of captured soldiers, sent by the terrorists to taunt the American authorities and trigger a rescue mission. But the unseen outtakes show how much more was originally filmed:

• Multiple takes of the ninja force parading prisoners before a camera.

• Hostages bound to wooden stakes.

• Enemy soldiers running combat drills and training with rifles.

The footage offers a glimpse of how the ninja action was captured on film. 

The Story

Released in 1990, American Ninja 4 pushed the franchise into more overt political territory. Dudikoff’s Joe Armstrong and Bradley’s Sean Davidson face off against Colonel Scarf Mulgrew, a deranged former British policeman turned anti-American mercenary, and his ally, the militant Shiekh Ali Maksood, who plans to smuggle a nuclear device into New York.

Though the plot borders on the fantastical, the use of ninja imagery to portray paramilitary forces taps into real-world fears of terrorism and rogue actors. The unseen footage depicts gritty imagery with American troops humiliated, captured, and at the mercy of disciplined, anonymous warriors.

Legacy and Relevance

While American Ninja 4 may not have received critical acclaim in its day, it remains an important piece of ninja film history. It marked the end of an era—the last film in the series to feature Dudikoff, and one of the last American martial arts films to prominently feature shinobi elements before the genre shifted to more modern, mixed martial arts styles in the 2000s.

This newly surfaced footage is more than just a curiosity—it’s a nostalgic bridge to a time when martial arts movies were made with grit, sweat, and stunt work rather than pixels and wirework.