Ninja Fantasy

Alas, my tape has no box and so, I borrowed this from the ether.

Ninja Fantasy

Hong Kong/Thailand - 198?

Director - Godfrey Ho

Trans World Entertainment, 1988, VHS

Run Time: 1 hour and thirty-five whole minutes

Here we have yet another hodgepodge honky-ninja misadventure from frankenfilm auteur Godfrey Ho. Ninja Fantasy is hands-down the best Weak-Chinned-Euro-Ninja-Drug-Kingpin-in-China film to ever be set in a Thai strip mine. Even though the overall plot, if you can say that the plot is really over “all” of the film, isn’t so clever that it requires serious effort at attention paying, it takes on a whole new energy in this particular patchwork context. So, an Euro-ninja in a brightly colored outfit is running a drug smuggling operation, and another Euro-ninja is the Drug Enforcement Agent sent to take him down; In Thailand the other half of the film would have us believe. Or maybe not. Thanks to local signage in several scenes, it was obviously Thailand, but I don’t remember anybody actually saying “Thailand.” It hardly matters where when you’re buying cheap foreign films in bulk for repurposing. It’s all going to be chopped to bits and dubbed over with some occidental-ninjas in a cheerful palate of identical outfits anyway.

However easily disparaged his work may be, one has to give Mr. Ho some credit for highly creative ninja antics on a half-shoestring-budget. Not since Robert Tai’s 1986 water-spider riding ninja masterpiece Ninja the Final Duel have ninjas performed so many chuckle-inducingly miraculous feats of mid-attack lunacy as we are blessed with in Ninja Fantasy. (And that was a whole film.) Of course, these are all too brief, and once the temporary surge of endorphins wears off the weary viewer, one is left speculating that lest he run out, Mr. Ho only allotted himself a single clever idea per film.

The longstanding rivalry between our two main characters comes to a head when the sidekick Agent is mercilessly kidnapped by the sidekick Smuggler ninjas. In the interim some conflict over mining-rights, inheritance and related profits comes to a head in the remaining scenes. The plodding, mind-numbing progress of the plot, and incomprehensible implied connection between the two constituent films notwithstanding, Ninja Fantasy is among Godfrey’s finest barely-watchable cinematic abortions. As much as one attempts to enjoy watching -and the joy is in the attempting, not the watching- these films would be far better served as a series of action packed ninja-shorts. Just leave out the “second unit” footage culled from abroad and reassemble the white guys into a half hour action-ninja-episode, say two or three to a volume. Should any poor bastard with the inclination to deconstruct these patchwork films read this poorly written essay, and decide to pursue just such an ill-advised business plan, get in touch- I’d be willing to invest.

 A full box from, you guessed it, Rare Kung Fu Movies.com

Ninja Operation: Licensed to Terminate

Ninja Operation: Licensed to Terminate

Hong Kong - 1987

Director - Joseph Lai/Godfrey Ho

Imperial Entertainment Corp., 1989, VHS

Run Time - 1 hour, 29 minutes

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.

Full Metal Ninja

Full Metal Ninja
Hong Kong – 1988
Godfrey Ho(as Charles Lee)
Imperial Entertainment Corp., 1989, VHS

Preceded by its own trailer, Full Metal Ninja wastes no time in attempting to inflate its own appearance beyond reasonable expectations by including the few good parts of the film in this misleading preview. If we've learned anything about Godfrey Ho at this point, this film is going to be a long uphill battle.
Leon, a honky ninja sporting a fabulous pink outfit, engages two black clad ninjas identified as henchmen working for Boris the evil yellow ninja. Leon kills one of them with the terrifying destructive might of a flintlock pistol and sends the other to tell Boris his time has come. Boris weaves a heartwrenching tale of intrigue and betrayal between ninjas to his sidekick (red ninja, Luther), to explain the bad blood between he and Leon.

In the Asian portion of the film a fighter named Eagle nearly duplicates the Leon-Boris epic as he winds his way through an absurd confused costume drama while looking for an evil General, who's holding his wife hostage and making sweet love to her. Despite a promising start this mismatched period piece rapidly degrades to wacky Flintstones outfits and clown makeup.

Nevertheless Eagle makes a point of punishing most of these over-the-top villains for having flashier costumes than his own. The fights involve much wacky jumping and samurai-like single sword-strikes, and even though there is almost no other weapon-on-body contact, Eagle inflicts enough body party detatchment and blood squirts to impress Leon who asks him for some sword lessons while standing in front of a blue sheet on some distant cheap set. Eagle grumbles and offers him a raincheck so he can continue his own blood-soaked campaign of terror against cloying couture. Unfortunately when Red Ninja Luther and lackeys attack, Leon goes all "full metal", blasting away wildly with his flintlock and killing most of them. This guy has yellow fever so bad you'd think that he would want to surround himself with as many ninjas as possible to give himself some credibility, but he can't restrain from firing off his saucy hardware. Lucky for Luther, the flintlock Leon has pointed at his chest is empty because bullets are "expensive and hard to come by", so Leon sends him back to Boris with yet another warning, wishing I'm sure that he hadn't blown his full metal wad on the small fry and had someone else to play ninja with.

Left with little screen time, and desperate to some smidgen of credibility before Eagle finishes his part of the movie, Leon enlists a Buddhist monk to quickly mutter over the remainder of the proceedings and convince Eagle that he is in the same movie and will join Leon to defeat evil. The only catch is that to make the prayer work, they each have to speak aloud the others name as often as possible even if the other is not present in the same shot. It takes the monk saving Eagle's grits from the General, and inviting Leon over to ply the gritty, restrained Eagle with drinks before he will join up with the effusive Leon (or rather, play along with the whole name uttering scheme).Eagle, perplexingly, restrains himself from dispatching the gaudily clad Leon, and finally teaches him some sword skills - skills Leon promptly ignores, preferring his tried and true tactic of bashing his fellow ninjas to death with his sword as if he were hammering nails.

Ninja: Silent Assassin

Ninja: Silent Assassin

1984 – Hong Kong

Director – Godfrey Ho

Imperial Entertainment Corp., 1988, VHS

There’s been a lot of the Godfrey Ho movies recently and for that I apologize, mostly to myself, but business is business and it has to get done. This one I picked up because of the promise of Richard “Dick” Harrison, and sure enough there he is in full ninja getup in the credit sequence.
Some multiracial goons hash out a drug deal with some bread that goes sour before being broken up by a gymnastic flipping black narcotics agent Alvin. One of the goons, Lenny is captured and after smoking over the problem agrees to turn in his boss Rudolph for the promise of cash and immunity.

On the other end of the line however is Rudolph an angry and ugly Australian ninja who quickly orders Alvin and Lenny executed ninja style when he catches wind of the deal.
Alvin returns home to suck face with his underage wife on their anniversary, but the ninjas show up and Alvin isn’t able to switch into his ninja outfit quick enough to save her. Dying in his arms choking on her own blood she exhorts him over the course of a long conversation not to seek revenge. When he is taken off the case at work he returns home gets drunk and hallucinates his wife. That’s enough to drive him insane and he packs his ninja gear for HK.

Rudolph is already there meeting with his ugly business partner who’s running the streets with his coarse menacing asian flunky Tiger across an invisible editing vortex.
Dick finally shows up again, a hard nosed cop on the HK vice-squad assigned to catch the Rudolph Mafia. Dangerously rupturing the fabric of time and space, Dicks boss actually holds up a photograph of one of the Asian characters in the film and a stuccato of random fighting pours from the breach.
In a progression of confusing unmaskings it’s hard to keep track of who is who, and who is who’s proxy Asian fighting against who’s proxy Asian in a fluttering morass of ugly white men in sparkly ninja outfits and Asian people dancing in goofy 80’s fashion.

Dick is dismissed from the Rudolph case by his smug tool of a boss, and he and Alvin; restless angry ninja with matching yellow outfits, finally team up to fight their way through Rudolphs henchmen. It takes the destruction of Rudolphs entire drug shipment, this time concealed in watermelons before he agrees over the phone to meet Dick and Alvin at the reservoir in full ninja regalia for some loud, face-to-face grappling.

Actually, this might be one of Godfrey Ho’s more watchable ninja-frankenfilms, Ninja: Silent Assassin manages to skim the fetid cream off the top off of some very spoiled milk.

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.

Ninja Hunt

Ninja Hunt
1983 – Hong Kong
Director – Joseph Lai
AEE, 1992, VHS

No doubt this is going to be a shit fest, Joseph Lai is as far as I’m concerned essentially a pseudonym/alter ego for the notorious Godfrey Ho, thief-master frankenfilmmaker extraordinaire. In any case the name Joseph Lai certainly carries it’s own stigma of shit.

Some ninja, knowing the lasting virulence of the magnetic tape format, steal a secret formula recorded on video tape, which it is rumored can give soldiers a morale boost/bloodlust. They bring it to their goofily yellow clad boss, White Man #1.

Richard Harrison, in the trying role of White Man #2 is called in to investigate the disappearance of the formula cassette. In lieu of appearing in the remainder of the film, White Man #2 calls on his Asian assistant, Aaron who will never appear in the same frame as WM2, to do the legwork and dangerous investigation part of the dangerous legworky investigation. Clearly, this indicates that this is a strictly Asian film with nuggets of white meat haphazardly deep-fried in it for overseas marketability.

Aaron quickly befriends a pint-sized hustlin’ street kid who’s down with all the top Asian gangsta’s in Hong Kong, including Campbell, who’s sleeping with Billys mother. Aaron is repeatedly mugged by Campbells goons, and then there is a dance-club scene with stolen Michael Jackson music.

Suddenly WM1 and his white-man ninjas appear again in silly costumes, muttering administrative business and plotting against WM2. WM2 appears at Billys moms home and confesses to fathering the runt, followed by an inter WM ninja fight.

There is a rock/paper/scissors match at a dance club which devolves into a slapfight and crap, crap, unintelligible crap.As WM2 and his imperialist ninja administration team plan the colonial crackdown on the other Asian four fifths of this film, Billy suffers the culmination of emotional trauma at the hands of his mother who has insisted his whole life that he refer to her as “Auntie” and wear hideous plaid sportscoats.

Finally, heaving themselves bodily from behind their fiercely monolithic mass produced oaken administrative desks, the WM scuffle heartily over the videotape and eventually the winner gets a soft-on.

This means there were at least 20,136 other tapes belonging to the club:

A slightly less crappy poster version of the cover image: