HO NO: Diamond Ninja Force (1988)

Diamond Ninja Force (1988)
Director: Godfrey Ho
Starring: Richard Harrison, Melvin Pitcher, Andy Chworowsky
Format: Stream

Plot: This is a Godfrey Ho movie... you expect plot?

Also known as Ghost Ninja, this is one of the many 80s mash-ups that Godfrey Ho "directed", starring washed-up former sword-and-sandals star Richard Harrison (GIANTS OF ROME). As is usually the case, Ho takes an established movie, adds some newly-shot ninja scenes and voila, ninja mash-up goodness. But unusually he chose a Taiwanese horror movie to chop up, which actually works in this movie's favour.

Whereas the non-ninja portions of many of the Ho movies I've seen thus far tend to be a bit boring, that's not the case here. The Taiwanese horror bits are goofy as hell and a whole lot of fun. A family - including mum Fanny and son Bobo (dig those names man!) - finds their home haunted by a ghost, or ghosts (it's hard to tell) and all manner of campy low-rent Amityville Horror stuff happens to them. Some of it is quite adult in nature, so we get a strew of sex scenes and nudity. That does get a bit tedious, but it's saved by the variety of supernatural "special effects" which are downright hilarious.

Meanwhile, the bad guy who summoned the "ghost ninja" to haunt the family and drive them off their land, accidentally(?) kills the girlfriend of badass ninja dude Harrison, a member of the titular Diamond Ninja Force. Naturally he vows revenge on the bad guys, leading to a series of "fights" interspersed between the haunting storyline - in each, Harrison shows up and kills a bad guy easily and without any blood (despite using swords and throwing stars). More haunting stuff, another fight, more haunting, another fight... rinse and repeat until the final showdown between Harrison and the main baddie.

Naturally this is a bad movie. The name Godfrey Ho essentially demands that. It has the usual awful dubbing and incoherent plotline (although more coherent than most Ho flicks), and everything else that lovers of bad cinema will revel in. And adding to its appeal is the fact the non-ninja portions are just as fun, not something that is common for Ho's masterpieces. Given that, I think this might be my favourite Godfrey Ho flick so far. I found it on a streaming website called Creepster.tv, but it's also available on Youtube.

SUMMER OF 87 #1: American Ninja 2

 The cover of my VHS copy of American Ninja 2

 

10am, Day 1:

American Ninja 2: The Confrontation
Director: Sam Firstenberg
Starring: Michael Dudikoff, Steve James, Larry Poindexter, Gary Conway, Jeff Celentano
Format: VHS (RCA Columbia)

Plot: On a remote Caribbean island, Army Rangers Joe Armstrong (Dudikoff) and Curtis Jackson (James) investigate the disappearance of several marines, which leads him to The Lion (Conway), a super-criminal who has kidnapped a local scientist and mass-produced an army of mutant Ninja warriors.

- Opening disclosure: I haven't seen this movie. I have seen the first American Ninja, but not in about 20 years. I remember enjoying it though.
- A bar brawl and our first shot of ninjas inside the first two minutes. Nice!
- "Move to the City" by Guns n Roses! Great soundtrack so far.
- Apparently this was filmed in South Africa. Interesting that Apartheid-era South Africa would double for a Carribean island.
- WTF? They just had some other guy standing in for Dudikoff in a scene of Armstrong walking out of an office, and they showed his face clearly. The guy doesn't even look anything like Dudikoff! Whoops!
- Classic moment as Joe and Curtis leap off a huge cliff and land in a boat like they had only jumped a few feet.
- One thing you can always count on from an 80s action flick: At least one of the thugs will have a great mullet.
- They've done a pretty good job hiding the fact this was filmed in South Africa... until that barmaid spoke in a heavy Afrikaaners accent.
- The main bad guy, The Lion, is played by Gary Conway, who starred in the late-60s TV series Land of the Giants.
- Great scene with a ninja being dragged behind a truck, then climbing onto it, ending in a nice big explosion.
- An ending with ninja fights _and_ gun fights. Making me double happy!

Overall thoughts: What can I say? American Ninja 2 was the perfect way to get this movie marathon started. It's just a fun ninja flick, with everything a discerning action fan could ask for.
The meat in the sandwich is of course the ninja fights, and there's plenty of them (the bodycount must be over 50, maybe closer to 100), but there's also plenty of humour, a simple-but-entertaining plot involving mad science, a little love interest, lots of interesting minor characters, and towards the end some explosions and gunfights are even thrown into the mix.
About the only thing I would add is that while watching American Ninja 2 I kept wondering if it would have been better with Steve James in the lead role. He's a better fighter and a better actor than Dudikoff. Not saying that Dudikoff is bad - he does a good enough job and has the all-American looks that sell a film like this - but James is the best thing about this movie. But regardless, American Ninja 2 rocks!

November 7 - Silver Dragon Ninja (1986)

The cover of my VHS copy of Silver Dragon Ninja

Silver Dragon Ninja (1986)
Director: Don Kong
Starring: Harry Caine, Sam Yosida, Jim Gross
Format: VHS (IPD)

After watching 31 horror movies in the month of October, I've had a real hankering for some cheesy action. Don't get me wrong, I love horror movies, but I'm all horrored out for a while and need a change of pace. What better way to do that than with a Hong Kong ninja flick?

Like a lot of these cheap ninja efforts, this one is actually two movies spliced into one. The ninja portion has Silver Dragon Ninja (an uncredited Paulo Tocha, BLOODSPORT, PREDATOR 2) trying to rid Hong Kong of the evil Black Ninjas. The other, longer portion is a crime yarn about two cops trying to bring down a gang of baddies, which is clearly influenced by Scarface and other gangster films. There's also a female cop who goes undercover inside the gang.

I could go into more detail about the plot but a) So much of it is nonsensical that it'd be futile to try to summarise it, and b) who the hell watches these movies for the plot anyway? It's all about the action baby, and Silver Dragon Ninja delivers with an abundance of ninja fights and gun battles.

The martial arts fights are badly-choreographed but fast-paced and never boring. They feature an array of cheesy effects - ninjas disappear or reappear in a puff of smoke and all kicks, punches and weapon attacks are accompanied by cartoonish sound effects.

Most of the police action is fairly conventional (lots of shootouts between baddies and cops, and baddies and baddies), but there is one scene where a kid is blown up by a bomb strapped to a remote control car(!), another involving a dirtbike and molotov cocktails, and one baddie dies after being stabbed between the legs with a large piece of glass. Ouch!

The dialogue and voice dubbing are hilariously bad. Some of the voices are so hokey they sound like they were provided by Monty Python Silly Voices Preservation Society. One Hong Kong cop even speaks with an Australian accent, which is funny but a bit distracting. The prize for worst acting goes to Silver Dragon Ninja's apprentice, who appears in only two short scenes. His delivery is monotone to the extreme - we're talking porn-level bad.

As an aside, I recognised one piece of the music as an instrumental portion of Tonight by Genesis (used with permission? Yeah right!).

Final verdict? Silver Dragon Ninja is lots of fun and a must watch for any fan of low budget, spliced-together flicks like Ninja USA, Born a Ninja and any of Godfrey Ho's countless ninja films (I have my suspicions director Don Kong is Ho under a pseudonym).

VHS collection - Action, martial arts, b movies

June 28 - Born a Ninja (1987)

The cover of my VHS copy of Born a Ninja

Born a Ninja (1987)
Director: Lo Gio
Format: VHS (City Lites)

Talk about a hard movie to research. I looked up the name on IMDB and was taken to a Godfrey Ho movie from 1989, but the plot outline didn't gel at all. Then I looked up the director and actors... nothing. A google search turned up a few random snippets of information, but they left me even more confused than when I started.

What I do know from watching this Hong Kong movie is that it's a Godfrey Ho-type cut and paste job. The main plot is about a guy named Tanaka who is trying to get hold of a formula, while some bad guys are also after it. This part would seem to come from a TV series or movie called Born Invincible, which might be a sequel to something called both Risky Commando and American Commando Ninja. The reason I'm not sure if it's a movie or TV series is the camerawork, lighting and film stock all point to TV rather than a movie.

The other part has a camoflaged ninja fighting a white ninja. The origin of this material I'm not sure. Given his cut and paste job it is entirely possible that "Lo Gio" is Godfrey Ho (who is renowned for c&ping bits of movies into incoherent messes - see my review of Instant Rage). The on-screen credits list Joseph Lai as a producer and Steven Soul as the writer, and they both worked a lot with Ho, so I'm going with that theory, although there is a noticable absence of Richard Harrison, Ho's go-to guy for dozens of flicks in the late 80s.

But let's put all of that aside, along with our brains, because Born a Ninja is one fantastically-crazy mess of a movie. Forget about trying to figure out what the hell is going on with the plot and just enjoy what's happening on screen, and there's a whole heapin' helpin' of fun to be had here.

There's lots of 80s fashions (bright fluoro clothing, bad hair and makeup) to giggle at, the music almost never fits what is happening on screen and there are more over-dramatic extreme close-ups than in your average Mexican soap opera.

Here are just some of the other highlights:
- One of the ninjas can not only disappear in a puff of smoke, but he can also disappear and replace himself instantly by a straw dummy!
- Lots and lots of slow motion and wacky sound effects!
- A dude breathing fire (not like a firebreather performer, like a dragon!)
- Some kind of hand-off goes down between two guys sitting in bumper boats!
- A guy catches the blade of a sword in his mouth, then deep-throats it without any effect!
- One of the girls looks like an Asian Valley girl, but her dubbed-in voice is uber-posh English!
- "Hey Larry, great job, two chicks at the same time" (a similar one-liner to one in Instant Rage, again convincing me this is a Godfrey Ho flick).
- Two ninjas fighting in front of a waterfall (another similarity with Instant Rage).

I really have to reiterate that those are just some of the highlights. There's so much happening on screen of the WTF variety that by the time the movie ends (without credits) you're left slack-jawed wondering what on earth just happened.

I'm not sure how easy this one is to find (I doubt it's on DVD), but it's a must for any fan of bizarre, nonsensical ninja flicks.

May 20 - Instant Rage

my VHS cover for Instant Rage

Instant Rage (1989)
Director: Godfrey Ho
Format: VHS (Filmpac)

After enjoying Ninja USA so much yesterday, I decided to throw another ninja flick into the old VCR. Instant Rage seemed a good bet for more cheesy, unintentionally-funny good times. I mean, look at that cover - it has the pre-requisite ninja, plus an exploding helicopter, trucks smashing cars out of the way, a girl having her face ripped with some kind of hook... how could it not be all sorts of awesomeness?

Let me tell you how.

The main culprit is the plot. If you read my Ninja USA review, in it I asked "who needs plot to get in the way of action and laughs?". Well, it turns out, I do. At least a semi-coherent one anyway. Instant Rage's plot is a mess, but doing a bit of research on director Godfrey Ho (billed as Philip Fraser), it's easy to see why.

Apparently Ho loved him a ninja flick. According to IMDB he has directed 118 movies - 51 with word Ninja in title (including the awesomely-named Full Metal Ninja and Zombie vs Ninja the same year as Instant Rage). And apparently this king of the Hong Kong z-movies was known for taking two or three sources (usually including unfinished Philipino and Thai efforts) and mixing them together to make his end products.

So in Instant Rage there's scenes involving a guy with super-human strength, who joins with a woman and her uncle to try to bring down a mafia family. I think. Then there's totally unrelated scenes involving two caucasian ninjas, who... uh, well... they have some sort of rivalry going on. I think there's also some sort of love triangle - two chicks fight over one of the guys, to which a cop says "Boy if I had two ladies fighting over me I wouldn't be able to control myself!"

The aimless plot wouldn't matter if the action was non-stop, but there are way too many boring sections that get in the way of the butt-kicking. They're not even cheesy enough to keep it interesting.

There are a few laughs to be had - see a guy get killed when he can't escape from an incredibly-slow moving bulldozer and the ninja fights have the usual cheesy magic (disappearing into thin air, throwing explosions) - but the best thing about Instant Rage is its music. It's all shamelessly stolen from other, bigger-budget movies, making for a score that sounds far too classy for a movie of this quality. I recognised a piece from Nightmare on Elm St, and even 10 seconds of the keyboard opening of Bon Jovi's Let it Rock.

My last criticism of Instant Rage is that it suffers from falsecoveritis. Where is the exploding helicopter? The truck smashing through cars? The chick taking a hook to the face? There is a ninja, but even that is false advertising to a certain degree. This is 90% a mafia flick and 10% a ninja movie, with gunplay far outweighing martial arts.

Wow, I've written alot about a movie I didn't enjoy very much. I will say I'm happy to own the VHS of this movie because it seems it's quite rare. As far as I can tell it has never been released on DVD. In fact, the internet has very little info on it. IMDB.com doesn't have a listing for its actors, and the actors named on the back of the video box are generically named (Elton Gibbs? The love child of Elton John and the Bee Gees maybe?) and don't correspond to anything on IMDB.

In closing... Instant Rage isn't even bad enough to be good. There's very little here to enjoy. Go find Ninja USA instead.

May 19 - Ninja USA!

the cover of my VHS of Ninja USA

Ninja USA (1985)
Director: Kuo Ren-Wu
Format: VHS (Pace)

I'll be the first to admit I generally missed out on the ninja movie craze of the 1980s. And if Ninja USA (also known as Ninja in the USA) is a good indication of this type of movie... I've been deprived all this time!

1978 Taiwan taekwondo champion Alexander Lou (THE SUPER NINJA and umpteen other ninja movies) plays Jerry Wong, who along with his brother Ronnie (Alex Yip) was saved as a child during the Vietnam War by GI Tyger McPherson (George Nicholas, SAKURA KILLERS). Now grown up. Jerry must choose between his loyalty to Tyger, a major drug dealer who has trained an army of evil ninjas, and his brother, a cop.

When Jerry's girl is kidnapped by Tyger's men, it's up to him to rescue her, while kicking butt on several dozen ninjas in the process, of course. But only after getting the required training in the art of Ninja 2 (don't ask) by a sensei in white (no albino eyebrows and beard sadly), which includes learning how to cause "spontaneous explosions" as he leaps through the air. There's not much more to the plot than that, but then who needs plot to get in the way of action and laughs?

The action: Multiple fight scenes involving ninjas, dirt bikes, speed boats, gymnastics apparatuses, a swing bridge all sped up. And a final fight scene that has to be seen to be believed for its magically appearing and disappearing ninja costumes smoke explosions and other cheesy goodness.

The laughs: The sped-up fight scenes, the dodgy sound effects, the bad music and the hilarious dubbing. The voice-over work had me in stitches, especially that of African-American bad guy Eugene Thomas (who did 7 movies with Lou in the 80s). His dubbed lines are like a cross between any blaxploitation pimp and cartoon character Wally Gator.

The Trailer on my VHS is for Ninja American Warrior, which looks just as fun as Ninja USA. I gotta find more of this stuff!