Ninja the Protector (1986)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: AAV Creative Unit and Godfrey Ho

Cast: Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Gordon Anderson; David Bowles as Bruce

An Abstract Candidate

 

Only a ninja can defeat a ninja.

What's a ninja?

Continuing with Godfrey Ho and producer Joseph Lai's infamous cut-and-paste ninja films, this even among the more traditional ones I know of (i.e. the ones with American actor Richard Harrison within them) has the more curious aspects as a production among them. It has the traditional set-up - Richard Harris versus an evil ninja leader in red, a costume like an onesie with a beard and a hangdog look from the black mascara. Queen Elizabeth II's picture in the back of one shot with Richard Harris does however remind you even these films have a historical connection, films made in Hong Kong who would go from a British colony to the 1997 handover to mainland China. This is purely a tangent before we get to the meat of this review, but it provides the added strangeness you can see Queen Elizabeth II, whose coronation was filmed as a documentary in A Queen is Crowned (1953) can go from fifties Hollywood to this to 2020s Marvel comic book films.

Never mind that ninjas, even in this inaccurate form, are Japanese by origin but in a Hong Kong film like this are taken as is, the Japanese art of ninjutsu continually breaking out among picnic benches, as with the other Godfrey Ho films of this type. This tries a lot to connect its source film to the ninja footage it is spliced with, with photo recognition for the evil ninja lair establishing a connecting tissue, through stills, of the characters from the source film who are the baddies.

What is weirder here even next to the other Ho ninja films however is the source film, reinterpreting it as being a ninja clan involved with counterfeiting, Richard Harris effectively playing ninja cop against them, shruikening and handcuffing criminals, effectively playing the same character regardless of name or job as with the other films. With the source film, it becomes one of the oddest experiments to get a British DVD release from these set of films, because it is drama about a male model that is pulled into a downward spiral. Starting with being seduced by his young female boss, it begins with a softcore one-upping of From Here to Eternity (1953) and its famous beach romantic scene, only to get into betraying his girlfriend with more than one woman, a sleazy male business man and his younger wife, and murder, a soap opera with a lot of nudity now turned into a counterfeit action film with ninjas.

The source film even has fight scenes choreographed like low budget martial art fights, especially in the punching and kicking sound effects that sound like a potato being fired out of a homemade cannon, and this even for a Ho cut-and-paste ninja film now is weird. Warren the model, dubbed a spy for Harris' Interpol team, is clearly within a drama of a man sleeping his way up in modelling, his girlfriend Judy and brother David becoming suspicious, all in a world where even older women are eyeing him up with the chance he can be seduced for money. It is strange, as this is reconceptualised to suit Ho and producer Joseph Lai's goal, seeing conversations altered to mention a member named Tiger being killed, but in context of a scene where two people in an office are having a casual work conversation. Knowing this is meant to tie to Richard Harris the ninja cop stopping people, not even killing them, in black ninja costumes and secretly leaving them for his bumbling assistants to find handcuffed in broad daylight, tipping them off, is peculiar.

Ninja in Hong Kong is, yes, a curious thing no one bats an eye about, neither that throughout his films, Harris rocked a camouflage ninja costume in an urban centre. Nor that here, ninjas are not meant to exist, as he keeps telling his assistants before they get suspicious, only to let them in on the truth matter-of-factly when, challenged to a ninja duel, it is frankly impossible to hide the fact. It feels more cognisant, however, than when Ninja the Protector's source material, in comparison to its light hearted action tone, becomes suddenly bleaker. Ho, even as a huge fan of his, never has had a deft touch in tone, and the source film turns on a hairpin to aspects that should be warned about for some viewers, feeling itself tonally lopsided even when the attempt to turn it into a ninja film itself makes no sense. With a trigger warning, this will have moments such as Judy trying to commit suicide, lurid even in the source film without any new additions, with a nasty blood splatter cut to shooting onto a wall from off-screen.  The paradox of a film that already an erotic melodrama, where a lot of the female cast, even really minor ones, have a prolonged nude scene with awkward faked sex, and also these bleaker aspects does make this different from other titles in this run of cute-and-paste ninja films. The idiosyncratic aspects of Godfrey Ho's film are amplified by a grubbier drama as its internal organs, good and bad. It is a genre, erotic drama, which is not commonly imported out of Hong Kong cinema for cult audiences, even in mind to their Category 3 films of this era. Whilst it is not as extreme as some of those films, its ideas, such as just deciding to end with a murder, brutally committed, which is meant to implicate someone falsely makes this feel like a soap opera if allowed to get filthier than merely implied.

Again, the warning is of concern, as this does lead unfortunately to a tonal dissonance, even as someone who liked this. It is a film which can be difficult unintentionally such as a woman being brutalised with a belt for sleeping with other men, which for obvious reasons will be off-putting for some viewers. Thankfully most of this film is contrary to this, cheesier and ultimately one of the more idiosyncratic of these wave of Ho-Lai films in hindsight because of what it is, a mash-up of melodrama with an at-odds genre combination, leading to the requisite ninja battle finale. This particular one feels even more ridiculous to other ninja battle endings for this duo, as this starts with ninjas jousting with chained blades on motorbikes. Moments like that, in contrast to the bad taste here that does come up in other Godfrey Ho films, and cannot be denied, is why I came to his films, messy productions but with scenes and moments you never seen anywhere else.

Abstract Spectrum: Atonal/Eccentric/Lurid/Weird

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

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.

Ninja Dragon (1986)

 

Director: Godfrey Ho

Screenplay: AAV Creative Unit and Godfrey Ho

Cast: Richard Harrison as Ninja Master Gordon; Paulo Tocha as Paul; Pierre Tremblay as Pierre; Chung Tien Shih; Jean Tang; Tien Miao; Hsieh Wang

Canon Fodder

 

Benjamin-chan, that sort of thing went out with the ark.

Whilst Ninja Terminator is a more infamous film, and has the more compellingly weird content, there was a time I liked Ninja Dragon more even if surprisingly drier in comparison, owned back in the days when not only these films were second DVDs which got their own martial arts section in second hand stores, but that two sided DVDs were commonplace. The reason, to immediately get to the point, is that when Godfrey Ho and his producer at a time Joseph Lai started buying up pre-existing and even unfinished Asian films, and cutting them together with newly filmed footage for the eighties ninja craze,  Ninja Dragon's source material would have been fascinating to see as it was originally.

They used some odd choices, not just martial arts films but a variety of genres for stranger results, but Hei juan tao (1982), the source film, would be interesting for me to see as it was intended. Immediately, as a Taiwanese production, this is from the final years of the Taiwanese black cinema movement, genre films from the country which could vary between films with legitimate political themes and/or pure exploitation, Hei juan tao showing this with the nude scenes it has. In fact, with the knowledge of the movement, and seeing the down-to-earth film here being used, the ninja footage does feel exemplary in its bright and gaudy nature. It does even add charm due to this odd juxtaposition of tones now as a result, from seeing it crammed in, set up from a truly international poker game where ninja master where Ninja Master Gordon (Richard Harrison) will have to deal with

In fact, the ninja footage really does feel exemplary adding to the charm of seeing it crammed in, set up from a truly international poker game where Ninja Master Gordon (Richard Harrison) will have to deal with gang leader Paul (Paulo Tocha) attempting to take over in power and wealth among their peers, cutting to the original source film. The leader of a gang called the Black Tigers, Ronald, is murdered on Paul's orders by his group and his henchman Mr. Fox, with his oldest daughter Phoenix taking over with a figure called Dragon the aloft man at her side. With the other group attempting to bump them off, from trying to kill Dragon with his door booby trapped with a rifle or kidnapping Phoenix's younger sister Fanny, Dragon will have to help from moles and turncoats in their own group too wishing to help Mr. Fox and Paul. As with all Ho ninja films, the two worlds are disconnected, even if they cut to close ups to Harrison's face and splice them in to footage talking to the main actor of the original film, or have Paulo Tocha spliced in shooting the heads off flowers for target practice with his own minions.

Ninja Dragon is a drier viewing experience but it has its charm, even in something that is inherently part of these films in their contraction, such as the dubbing and writing of new dialogue to make this all have "sense", characters in these films with quasi-English accents from the then-British commonwealth Hong Kong having their own weird charm, and English language names and a tendency for calling people "bastards" to go along with this. The one major difference here with this film is that Hei juan tao was not even a martial arts picture, instead a crime narrative where conflicts were resolved with guns and shooting people, meaning that the ninjas involved and all being (mostly) Western white men is surreal to consider as a juxtaposition. In fact this film even takes this aspect of these films, which were churned out by Lai and Ho at the time each year, to an added subjective tone in that the Ninja Masters live in their own heightened world of politics and high tier intrigue, only pushing pawns outside their own worlds with phone calls.

Enough is to be found in the source material itself that does have some unintentional humour, such as the fact (when it happens twice) that people will bash their own skulls in on rock (or gravestones) to kill themselves rather than be taken prisoner, but this is one of the most straightforward and sombre narratives to latch ninjas upon. It does change how to view the film as, even with some of its broader moments, it is much more grounded then some of the stranger films. It even has more subplots and narrative complexity then others, which adds a great deal, such as Paul's gang having a mole kindly helping the Black Tigers or the figure of Benny, at first the comedic foil trying to woo Phoenix, even in something misguided as hiring goons to pretend to threaten her for a fake rescue, only to become a creepy whose involvement in the narrative adds an unexpected turn. That this is a Taiwanese film, from a crop of genre films that were made before the Taiwan government cracked down on them and the Taiwanese New Wave of art films came to be, now adds a greater weight as, for all the ones which were just pulp, this has their grounded and gritty tone even in its action, the matter-of-factness of the confrontations and ploys by the gangs standing out now for me.

Even the great music choices "borrowed" from other sources are deep cuts, as the main theme for this film, at least the ninja training sequences with Richard Harrison, is from the anime film called The Dagger of Kamui (1985), a sadly obscure theatrical anime by the veteran director Rintaro which was befittingly a period ninja epic.  This film Ninja Dragon, surprisingly, even has an unexpected twist which shows the source film used was a bit more creative, a wedding reception leading to a tragedy and a bleak ending even if Ho includes a ninja battle to leave the film patrons happy. That even that ninja fight has its own charm, set among urban Hong Kong and still having talented martial artists in the ridiculous ninja costumes fight, shows that this is one of the times Ho's weird logic with Joseph Lai to make these films, whilst still an awkward creation, almost makes sense when it works as here. This is definitely a film you visit later into your obsession with Godfrey Ho, as you do not get as much as the absurd lunacy that made these cut-and-paste ninja films notorious. It was one of the first I ever saw, and did leave a good impression, but I will admit that, if you were to even to attempt to argue for these films, this was one of the many he and Joseph Lai churned out should be one of the later ones to visit. It is, however, one of the ones which I can argue is legitimately entertaining though too, and I am only arguing for seeing later as, whilst more accessible, you need to understand the weird world of these films by jumping on a Ninja Terminator, then seeing how these films could have almost seemed a sane concept when one like this actually works.

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