Ninja Terminator (1985)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: AAV Creative Unit, Godfrey Ho and Warren See

Cast: Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Harry; Jang-Lee Hwang as Tiger; Jack Lam as Jaguar Wong

An Abstract List Candidate

 

Yes, that's my ninja star.

I once binged on Godfrey Ho like a mad man once, acquiring a large quantity of his films on second hand DVD, even the "straight" martial arts films his name was put onto let alone the films he was notorious for. A Hong Kong born director, those notorious films, including Ninja Terminator, were his "cut-and-paste" ninja films. They are not the only part of his filmography - he directed martial arts films and even worked with Cynthia Rothrock - but they are his most infamous work with Ninja Terminator one of the most well known. When I first reviewed this film on a blog - back in January 1^st 2012 - the film had a 4.4 rating on the Internet Movie Database, and as I blog this time the score has climbed to 4.6 as of the 12th March 2021. Ho's legacy is marked with this notoriety, and internet cult status, for said films.

Ho's career with the ninja films are tied to producer Joseph Lai, and his video production company called IFD, these films now are a cultural artefact which are fascinating to look back onto, especially when they managed to be successful with said films . Ninjas became popular, with the Israeli cousins and film moguls Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus began a string of films on ninjas like Enter the Ninja (1981), and a fictionalised form of the Japanese mercenary came to be of note. Lai and Ho acquired martial arts films, even unfinished ones, from around Asian and spliced in new footage with Western actors like Richard Harrison (even non-actors) in costume store ninja costumes and churned them out. Like its own perplexing web of narrative, the ninja films due to how many were made, where Richard Harrison only shot footage for a few only to end up in far more, and that they have reoccurring themes have a perverse Borgian lunacy to them if anyone was mad enough to watch them all.

In this one, three ninjas (including Richard Harrison) steal from their ‘Ninja Empire’ the pieces of the Golden Ninja Warrior, an artefact that can turn your body and arms into living shields able to deflect even sword blades, crafted from a prop which looks like a nifty gift store present. Yes, there is a weakness to this artefact I am not surprised is never brought up in the film, that one’s legs could still be lopped off from under you regardless by a sword, but such a powerful McGuffin kickstarts the ball rolling. The Ninja Empire is on the hunt for the individuals responsible for its theft and one of the three ninja thieves is killed, leaving Harrison’s Ninja Master Harry fighting for good, while his conspirator within the two years that have past is leading a crime syndicate and wants to claim the remaining pieces. From here, the new footage is spliced with a film acquired to cut into this one, through scenes of characters calling others from an entirely different source by phone, including Harry with his infamous Garfield telephone which closes its eyes when the receiver is put down.

Through his second in command - who dresses in a white suit and a lovely blonde curled wig - and his own set of minions, the syndicate goes after the surviving sister of the murdered ninja to claim her piece of the Golden Ninja Warrior. To protect her, Harry sends in his own man Jaguar Wong (Jack Lam), a suave and skilled fighter who intends to help her and generally undermine the actions of the syndicate with his fist. It is fascinating to watch Ho and Lai's work nowadays again as experiments in trying to create new material with mostly old work, an experiment which even becomes nearly meta as, in another infamous aspect, the Ninja Empire send toy robots to give characters warnings, including video tapes which use footage from pre-existing films shown on television screens. Godfrey Ho, alongside his producer Joseph Lai, is infamous for this run of ninja films which take pre-existing films and re-edit them, intercutting new scenes of ninja combat and Richard Harrison, to weave together  new narratives using the English dubbing script and some blatant editing techniques. It was done mainly to capitalise on the bludgeoning obsession with ninjas in American culture in the 1980s, so you can view this as a questionable practice as well as ramshackle to the extreme. Nowadays however, this cinema is now an artefact of an old era, as even the time when these films managed to get on DVD, and shipped in the United States and Britain, is now the past alone in the eighties when they were first commissioned.

Time now allows you to learn the film spliced in is Uninvited Guest (1984), a South Korean production, and that the film gets away with a lot of borrow music, not least a Japanese band Logic System. Even if something I am amazed never got them into trouble, especially when they were pinching from Pink Floyd too for this film, the soundtracks in hindsight were always awesome from these films when they worked. How these films have not occurred the wrath of the original musicians, especially since they have been released on DVD unlike rip-off films that have borrowed music too, I have no idea. No one care, no one knows about their existence, or Roger Waters really adored cut-and-paste ninja films. We will never know.

They are accidently, if blundering through the experiments, demonstrations of the ‘Montage of Attractions’ theory that Sergei E. Eisenstein, the legendary director of Battleship Potemkin (1925), had developed. Eisenstein believed that by juxtaposing two single images together in a specific way would have a certain effect on the viewer, and that it could be used in different ways to have significant power to them. This is seen at it best with Lev Kuleshov’s experiment known as the Kuleshov Effect, where the same image of Tsarist actor Ivan Mosjoukine was spliced together alternately with an image of a plate of soup, a person in a coffin, and a young girl playing, each version having a drastic change in effect on the viewer in each combination. By utter accident, in an attempt by Ho and Joseph Lai to take unfinished and obscure films from South Korea, Taiwan etc. they ended up practicing the same methods Soviet filmmakers perfected to make numerous films over the eighties and early nineties even if for financial reasons. It does not completely work, as much because the pleasures fans of these films have is also the seams being visible, but the illusion is a curious experiment, especially as they did not just use martial arts films, but at least one softcore soap opera set in the fashion industry as well that was remade into Ninja The Protector (1986).

Admittedly, Ninja Terminator does have one huge flaw, even in context of this series of films, that the source film is not as energetic as it could have been. Clearly a film focused more on a conventional crime genre, where a villainous minion has to cut off his finger or that this film has to weave in a drug deal Jaguar Wong hijacks, the ninja material for the most part of the more memorable content for good reason. There is so absurdity, like a female lead being threatened with a ticking clock out of a cartoon, or a final fight with the blonde wigged villain on the beach, where sand proves a weapon in immobilising a person, but this is one of the films Lai and Ho used which is less distinct than the ninja footage. With a plot that, because of two different sets of footage being spliced together, doesn’t really make sense, the film ends up being an abstracted version of these sorts of c-level movies. The tiers of each side face other but do not interact with members of their own side in other tiers, outside the moments when they are connected together by editing of course, and fights break out about almost every five minutes. Nothing is seen as ill-advised production decisions either. No one raised an issue about toy motorised robots being the messengers of death for the Ninja Empire, walking into rooms under the veil of ominous smoke or getting stuck on the raised doorway, but its charming and hilarious to see especially when the robots boom with the voices foreboding doom on those who trespassed against them.

Everything that transpires in the film either undermines conventions of plotting, such as having a henchman of the villains get his own prolonged sex scene, or all the tangents of the life of Master Ninja Harry and his wife being witnessed, such as her trying to cook crabs or her career in the fashion industry, making up for the fact most viewers would find this a nightmare to sit through. Any moment it seems to slog through the minutes is undermined by the fact that something interesting is going to happen, as much now because the world here of Hong Kong is now a lost one. Ho would retire from cinema in the late nineties, and whilst not really connected to the fact Hong Kong would go back to China after 1997, there is something more profound now in seeing the city in this film, even if there is one scene where a post card or an image was clearly used to establish locations.

Godfrey Ho and Joseph Lai, while they could be taken to task for their idea of generating as many films they could sell from existing materials, at least, when their creations succeeded, made movies that are entertaining, and used pre-existing materials that had something inherently watchable about them for any viewer even if they were trash. Even the ninja sequences, with stunt actors clearly doing the fighting in the cheap ninja suits for the likes of Richard Harrison, are competent and have skilled performers involved so that, despite most ninja fights in Ho’s films consisting of flips and repeated sword clash sounds, they have something of worth even over some martial arts films made out of Asia, where non-martial artists are hired and have to be covered over in editing.

The real disappointment, if any, is not the final product, as these films were an acquired taste even when they developed an ironic enjoyment or even had legitimate fans. The issue is that, particularly with Ninja Terminator, it does not have the same impact as for my younger self that it once had. It does feel like a Frankenstein stitch job, and suffers from a result, able to see the original source film awkwardly fit the new frame. It is neither particularly abstract either, but I feel as much of this is from the choice of source film as I suspect, one day, one of these cut-and-paste ninja films I will reintroduce myself to or learn of will be legitimately weird to see. Instead, this one was even quaint to see, something charming in its wonky nature even in terms of the English dubbing, where Asian characters all have English names like Victor, all if most rarely threatening, and a comical and excessive use of swearing used. With this film, generic tropes are cut to shred like an unfortunate watermelon Richard Harrison practices on with his katana and is repeated again later in the film to compensate for the lack of a second training montage, and in terms of a climax, one involving the trademark of these films of coloured smoke bombs and back flips between three ninjas definitely makes up for the failings, even if I am fully aware of this film's many setbacks.

Abstract Spectrum: Erratic/Weird

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None