Ninja Terminator

If anybody has sat down to watch a decent Jackie Chan or Bruce Lee film and thought to themselves 'Hold on, you know what would make this better? Really bad ninja fighting that has little to do with the actual story, a story that makes absolutely no sense, and some of the most random quirkiness ever witnessed on screen, that'd make a GREAT film!' Then Ninja Terminator may be the film for them.

However, if they added to that 'Also, I'd like to see a love scene set to Pink Floyd's Echoes, twice, and perhaps a guy in a blonde wig for no reason at all'. Then 1) Ninja Terminator IS for them and 2) They have uncanny and ultra-specific pre-cognitive powers.

Ninja Terminator takes the whole 'so bad it's good' movie ethos to stratospheric levels, even beyond movies like Troll 2. What works here is the movie that Godfrey Ho is tacking his usual ninja battles onto is just about as crazy as the ninja battles themselves. I swear, there must be a kung fu fight every five minutes or so, each of them getting increasingly stranger until the penultimate fight on the beach (followed only, of course, by the bizarre ninja showdown).

Without going into specifics and spoiling things, I'll make a vague-ish list of what's nuts about this film: 1) Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream on the soundtrack. 2)Split second ninja costume changes 3) Weird use of children's toys 4) Crabs 5) Pawning jackets 6) Random jacket changes 7) Feet that dig sand 8) Dramatic wig removal 9) etc etc...

I've watched a few of these ninja films so far, and it's by far the greatest one I've seen.

By the way, if you like actual good films, just reverse everything I've said and take it as a warning.

An unbelievably daft effort from Godfrey Ho, the king of crap ninja movies, Ninja Terminator sees Ho's regular star Richard Harrison once again donning his natty camouflage suit to fight a variety of similarly garbed bad guys, all the while performing totally unnecessary cartwheels and back-flips.

This time, Harrison plays Harry, one of a trio of good ninjas who steal a precious, magical golden statue from their evil boss. When one of the trio is killed and part of the statue is taken back, Harry enlists the help of his friend Jaguar Wong (who is a cool-as-ice, high-kicking bad-ass) to protect his dead friend's sister and try and retrieve the missing piece.

Despite the story making little or no sense for most of the running time (which is what you get when you splice together footage from two different films, as is apparently the case here), Ninja Terminator is still well worth watching thanks to countless completely insane moments guaranteed to make you howl with laughter: watch in awe as Harry proves that no melon is a match for his ninja sword skills; be puzzled as a breakfast of live crabs suddenly turns nasty; wonder why the hell Hwang Jang Lee is wearing a bad blonde wig for most of the film; giggle uncontrollably as a toy robot menacingly delivers video tapes; and then check ebay to see if you too can get a cool Garfield phone like the one Harry uses.

Amongst all this unexplainable, but very entertaining silliness, there are also plenty of pretty good martial arts fights (Jack Lam, as Jaguar Wong, is excellent and displays loads of decent moves before his inevitable battle against super-kicker Lee). Throw in a couple of gratuitous sex scenes, and some awful dialogue, and what you have is one hell of a fun film.

A cheap looking idol that splits into three parts grants the bearer immunity to rubber swords of all kinds. But only if he holds all three parts! Actually, it works with just the one bit as demonstrated by one of the mustachioed ninjas midway through the movie which, at a stroke as lethal as any ninjas blade, completely kills the meager plot logic the film has managed to piece together by this point. At first it looks as though the entire film is just going to be people beating each other up in a mall garden but the plot does start to develop towards something like a story later on.

Meanwhile, Jaguar Wong wanders around getting involved with kidnappings and his scheming former lover. Everywhere he goes groups of three or four men attack him feebly providing intermittent filler for the already vague plot.

All this sounds quite reasonable and par for the course but there are some decidedly strange additions. The ninja master uses a cheerful garfield phone for example, the mid-level henchman wears a woman's wig without explanation and the bad guy delivers his messages via cheap kids robot toys that someone must have had to walk right up to the door and place, rendering them less in the ninja style of stealth than say slipping the note under the door.

I got a few laughs out of this movie, it's bad but in a good way. My favourite bit was the way the ninja master was able to completely hide his ninja double wife from his wife whose biggest worry in life is the crabs she's steaming for dinner escaping. Even stopping one escaping by hurling a shuriken across the room doesn't seem to arouse her suspicions!

jaguar wong is the baddest dude ever. He's got more style than Cary Grant and Wes Anderson. Here, Jaguar Wong destroys the entire syndicate that consists of a Chinese guy in a blonde bob wig with his half assed fighting crew. Worst thing to ever do is rip another guys suit. Richard Harris also wears mascara and a camo ninja suit. The film begins with the most strange ritual that is run by a fat guy (also with mascara) wearing a red ninja suit laughing out of control while his students hit his arm with their ninja swords. He's protected by the Golden Ninja Warrior.

COMEDY

Goofy, fast-paced and frequently senseless action, probably partly padded out from pieces of the director's umpteen other films, as was his custom. The plot is so random I never really understood what the significance was of the golden thingie everybody was chasing after-this is just one of those movies where you accept that "the guys in red will fight the guys in blue who'll fight the guys in yellow," quickly forgetting to even wonder WHY anyone is fighting anybody. It's silly in a good way, energetic and slick on a B-grade level. At times it achieves a kind of inspired giddy absurdity that is close to trash heaven.