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Dir. Godfrey Ho
Canada-Hong Kong-United Kingdom
Film #1 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema
series
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It seems a shame, although I hope
there will be more films that I view this way throughout the season, that Ninja Terminator has to be reviewed under a season that has the
title The ‘Worst’ of Cinema. I liked
the film before this review, and I love it even more without any shame; the
point of the season however was to review films as well that, even if I
disagree wholeheartedly with them, are dismissed as bad by other people. The
film has a 4.4 rating on the Internet
Movie Database as I post this on my blog – January 1st 2012 -
but usually Godfrey Ho films are
around 2.0 on their scale. While I fell in love with Ninja Terminator on this second viewing, and think it’s a good film
in its accidental way, I can understand the low rankings it gets from other film
viewers.
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Three ninjas (including actor 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. Yes
it has its weaknesses, such as the fact one’s legs could still be lopped off
from under you regardless by a sword, but it’s a powerful artefact nonetheless
and the Ninja Empire is on the hunt for the individuals responsible for its
theft. When one of the ninja thieves is killed, it divides the remaining
conspirators, 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. 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. 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 it can be viewed as a questionable
practice as well as ramshackle to the extreme.
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I view Ninja Terminator as an immensely enjoyable film though, but what
makes it and a few other of Ho’s
ninja films even better is that the attempt to combine two completely different
sets of material into one single movie, through editing, inadvertently stumbles
into the ‘Montage of Attractions’
theory that Sergei E. Eisenstein, the
legendary director of Battleship
Potemkin (1925), had developed. Like his fellow Soviet filmmakers who
practiced experiments with editing and the concept of the montage, 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. – not just 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) – they ended up practicing the same
methods Soviet filmmakers perfected to make numerous films over the eighties
and early nineties. Some film studies students reading this may want to
throttle me for comparing Ho to one
of the most important directors in cinema’s history, or may be dismayed that
someone used these techniques so that we can have Harrison communicating with the lead of the original film through a
Garfield the cat telephone. The resulting creation turns out to be something
special however.
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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 what one expects in this sort of filmmaking, and would become bored
by, making it almost avant-garde in its idiosyncratic savant mindset. Any
moment it seems to slog through the minutes is undermined by the fact that
something interesting, mindboggling or amusing is going to happen. 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 never become poor, slapdash sequences found
in martial arts films outside of Asia.
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Since this is a review on this
site, this cannot end without briefly talking about the music. Some of it is
dated but appropriate for the material. Some of it however is legitimately
great; it’s not up to the quality of the famous cut-and-paste film Shogun Assassin (1980), whose score is
combined with the images to add to its ghostly, phantasmagorical tone, but Ninja Terminator’s music choices adds
to it immensely. Researching, it appears that Ho had no issues with “borrowing”
music from other sources and there is a possibility that some of the music in
the film is by Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream. It’s an exceptionally dubious
practice to take for a film that may have made money only for Ho and Lai, but decades later it is actually inspired and effective. 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 adores cut-and-paste ninja films. We will never
know.
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There films of Godfrey Ho – not taking into account his
self directed films, the ones he made with Cynthia
Rothrock, or those made by other directors he merely put his name on and
claimed for himself – can be hit-and-miss, as to be expected from a technique
that can work immensely but also creates many unusable results even for artists
who are using it for more than commerce. When they do succeed like Ninja Terminator, they do so greatly
and its disappointing to merely dismiss them as guilty pleasures as, while it
will be difficult to defend it to friends and loved ones, its Frankenstein form
and tone is inspired and avoids the pitfalls of completely original material
that falls into generic tropes. 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.
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The following three have a connective tissue to each other. An infamous director and two producers from Hong Kong that have all contributed to taking old films, adding ninjas to them and selling them to Western viewers. The first film is such a work, from Godfrey Ho, who has been covered on this blog before. Here one can find out what happens when a melodrama is mixed with an improvised action film. The next is miscredited to Ho, but can be fully confirmed to have the influence of producer Tomas Tang somewhere within it, who would work with Joseph Lai and Ho at times or at least share a credit on their work. Robocop (1987) as envisioned as the Tin Man fighting hopping vampires used by a drug cartel's guard dogs. As you'd usually expect from cinema. The final review is for what Lai's been doing long past the cut-and-paste ninja films; whether its based on true mythology or not I cannot tell, but its an excursion in the obscurest areas of animation that you can find produced. All together they are a testament to how unpredictable films can be regardless if they were made merely as product.
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