The Ultimate Ninja (1986)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: Godfrey Ho and AAV Creative Unit

Cast: Stuart Smith; Bruce Baron; Sorapong Chatree; Anne Aswatep; Pedro Massobrio; Timothy Nugent; Rick Jenkins; Naiyana Shewanan

Canon Fodder

 

Be a good ninja...

I am back on Planet Godfrey Ho, and there is a fondness already to witnessing a man in a store bought ninja costume, a scratch which needed to be itched again. This film however feels different from others, to the point it surprises that its release date is 1986, around the same time as the truly infamous cut-and-paste ninja films like Ninja Terminator (1985) made by Ho and producer Joseph Lai at the time. This feels like a very early title from them, rather from that time period, before they figured out the presentation of these films, infamous in capitalising on the popularity of ninjas in the eighties by taking pre-existing films, some even unfinished, and splicing in an additional plot with new footage involving ninja. Usually leading to white men (likely bystanders floating around Hong Kong) in said costumes with obvious stunt doubles, this template created an infamous series of films, which this is still connected to if more tentatively. The Ultimate Ninja still has the Golden Ninja Warrior of Ninja Terminator, which can provide "supreme ninja power", but this feels older than the mid-eighties, not just from the film used, but in tone. Richard Harrison is also not here, the American actor synonymous with these films, and the absence is felt.

The film is a case where the ninja footage really does feel incongruous to the original film used, even if this also includes another ninja figure you could win for four hundred tickets at a seaside arcade prize counter. This still exemplifies the absurdity of the spliced-in ninja footage, before Ho got to his most compellingly weird content in this field, but the threading of the footage was more frequent in other well known films. Here, barring wondering what the "supreme ninja power" actually is, you still get some of the idiosyncrasies there. Especially with the evil ninja leader, the English dubbing for these films, in their unique inflections and ejaculations of words, is unmistakably of these movies, but this feels its primordial form. Even if this was actually made after Ninja Terminator, and those more well known films, it feels befitting this strange world of accidentally going backwards in logic, like a project which never got as much attention, for a lack of a better phrase, than those which were stranger then this.

It is a shame the ninja footage is unnecessary. With ninjas hiding under piles of leaves, and that they have an unlimited number of shurikens that can be used to swat stray ninja away like wasps at a picnic, and this has the sense of unintentional humour of the other films. It does however feel like, onscreen within itself, The Ultimate Ninja was still figuring out how to use ninja, before getting a named actor and abusing the footage you got, of trying to figure out how to make them interesting. With the good ninja indicated by having "ninja" on their headbands, skulls on those for the villains, or practicing on picnic benches, this does have a charming homemade quality yet combined by the fact that most of The Ultimate Ninja is the pre-existing film. As a result, the ninja footage becomes arbitrary, despite the production hired doubles who could do back flips and some homemade creativity, like editing around throwing swords at each other, feeling like padding.

It is perfunctory, even in mind these Godfrey Ho films are an acquired taste. This is before the likes of a Garfield novelty phone provided easier ways to intercut a ninja plot to the original film, and more use of splicing the two stories in general with these productions, with the only time they are linked properly being a single scene, with close-ups of faces from two different sources in indiscriminate tree covered grassland. The film that this originally way, also all told in just a new dubbed narrative, is a traditional martial arts film and is surprisingly complicated by itself, in which the leader of the village was killed, leaving his two sons and daughter to be rescued by the uncle, and then split off separately. One son becomes Jimmy is trained to get revenge. The daughter Sarah is with the uncle, named Eagle, who was left stuck training the men of the boss who had his brother killed, whilst Sarah fights behind his back to protect the village from their protection racket. The last son, John, is the klutz working at the noodle shop who wants to learn kung fu.

There is some fun with the source film where you prove you are the evil boss by perfecting your throwing axe technique, or that Jimmy's training for martial arts power involving the excessive breaking of mirrors with a staff, hoping to compromise for many seven years of bad luck by developing martial arts prowess. Truthfully though, with The Ultimate Ninja's source having a lot of characters and plot, a long winded plot at that, means that nothing, even if material was cut out, really required more than Godfrey Ho to have dubbed the film. Even if this was an unfinished film he worked on and completed, it felt enough for itself unless there was a mandate for a running time. Even the source material has aspects which feel underutilised too, if you just wanted a silly martial arts film, such as a bald fighter in a pink tank top who keeps tapping his head and looks like a beat 'em up character, one that could have been included in more prominently than he was. There are arguably, in fact, too many characters, as Jimmy is pointless, especially as a far more obvious plot is how Sarah, with her uncle Eagle forced to work for the enemy, should be the protagonist, capable of fighting to protect the village without anyone else blundering as a protagonist. Godfrey Ho films are messy affairs in narratives anyway, but this definitely was a mess among them improvised on. My love of the Godfrey Ho films does redeem what, even for a director who is an acquired taste, a film I once considered a slog, and should not be the film you dare try to introduce these films to someone for even for ironic viewing. It is still sluggish nowadays despite my fun with the movie. It is, for those curious about these artefacts, the fun oddity among them as a result.