Super Dragon's Dynamo

Super Dragon’s Dynamo
1974 – Hong Kong
Director – Joseph Chung
Alpha Video Distributors, Inc., 1991, VHS

Because this was released by IFD Films, the name Joseph Lai is featured fairly large on the box art (which looks like the poster), and I’ve learned that an inordinate amount of his films are directed by Godfrey Ho, assuming they’re not the same person.

In this case, a sinister black-gloved hand performs several murders, then later, the same hand leafs through a file of dossiers, crossing out and throwing several away. Some Asian guys gamble around a table to far too exciting, loud 80’s synth music, upping the stakes until one of them, named Champ, calls with a good hand. His Chinese mafia opponent cheats to win the game costing Champ a great deal of his business tycoon father’s money. His father dismisses him from the firm for gambling too much and incurring the wrath of the Syndicate. In his place, his father unknowingly appoints an undercover member of The Syndicate.


In another bar, some other Asians play pool and smoke a lot to a blaring, droning uber-disco beat while some guys beat each other up. In between all these smoky beatings a connection is made between The Syndicate, and the reluctant assassin Black Gloves whom The Syndicate blackmailing into killing their opponents. Gloves girlfriend is Champs pre-teen sister, the innocent female character around which this tragedy of indistinguishable proportions is about to unfold. It’s hard to tell through the cigarette haze of nameless chain-smoking Asian toughs and the kung-fu giallo plot, but this may actually all be the same movie. Spooky.


Champ does not want to wait for it, and wastes no time walking directly from muddily dubbed conspiratorial mutterings into a smoky casino, smashing it up and getting arrested and sent to prison. With Champ out of the way his fathers business empire is fair game and the Syndicate moves in, with guilt wracked Black-Gloves performing the necessary personnel cutbacks right on up to Daddy CEO.

When Champ emerges from the clink years later the mafia follows him to his sister and Black Gloves who are now living underground in domestic bliss. When Champ discovers the shitstorm his gambling problem brought this movie to, he takes it out on the most logical victims, his only surviving family. His sister, now pregnant with Black Gloves child, is his first victim, browbeaten into aborting her fetus. During the verbal assault, her husband gets home and Champ beats him silly driving the point home by inducing his sisters miscarriage on the spot before dropping a car on his brother in law’s chest.
So that's fun, right?


If you can find any information on this film, anywhere, please let me know. At this time as far as I know the video cassette in my possession is totally unique.

Bionic Ninja

Bionic Ninja

1974 – Hong Kong

Director – Tim Ashby (Godfrey Ho)

Alpha Video Distributors, Inc., 1996, VHS

Purchased on the name alone, I found this title while looking for a cheap copy of Robo-Ninja, an as yet unfulfilled search. Produced by notorious Thomas Tang whoever the hell that happens to be at the moment, it was directed once again by Godfrey Ho and that, along with the inclusion of the word “ninja” in the title virtually guarantees racially segregated cut-and-paste nonsensical garbage.

Sure enough some white guys in crappy ninja outfits scramble around goofily alongside some Asian guys who never appear in the same shots. Thank god for all those convenient telephone conversations that make it so much easier to pass crucial plot threads between completely unacquainted overdubbed actors.

The asian guys have a fight on the road and some of them steal a “top technical secret film” from a lone overwhelmed courier. At this, the white guys send their top CIA agent Tommy to Hong Kong to recover the film from the thugs. But, on top of this the ninjas not only want, but don’t have the film, and they also hate the CIA.

Sorry Tommy, the ninjas hate you.

So in the course of this triangular duel are a series of disconnected fight and intimidation scenes with Asian cops, heavies and street punks, with the ninja rearing up once in a while to remind what this film is half called. The gangly courier though seems to be the primary suspect of all involved and is repeatedly harassed by the various parties.

CIA too, due to his natural enmity with all things clandestine, hence ninjas, is also harassed on his morning whistling-practice/stroll. After fighting them off, an Asian cop standing nearby(!) jumps in with the information that the ninja are KGB drones controlled by a master ninja.

More disconnected and ridiculous fighting and fist shaking menace occur with every other shot seeming to introduce new characters, it doesn’t help that they all have generic Anglo names and dress so similarly dumb. Nonetheless the stolen music is actually pretty cool but again so odd that it’s impossible to pretend I can really follow along with this.

CIA visits his own ninja master and is given an ancient montage training manual which he puts to use while the cops and heavies hack away at eachother with knives and hatchets and blunt dialogue until finally worn down, their section of the movie concludes.
That leaves only a little ninja fight to put those montage skills to the test and recover the top-technical-secret-film, which appears to be as close as we’re going to get to anything “bionic”.

Looks like French to me.