Tuesday 1 January 2013

The ‘Stitched-Together Gem’ of Cinema [Ninja Terminator (1985)]


From http://img.movieberry.com/static/photos/33733/poster.jpg
Dir. Godfrey Ho
Canada-Hong Kong-United Kingdom
Film #1 of The ‘Worst’ of Cinema series

From http://imcdb.org/i194292.jpg
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.

From http://static.megashara.com/screenshots/489190__snapshot20090424173920.jpg
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.
From http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l4ftszf5E61qztwngo1_400.png
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.

From http://c.asset.soup.io/asset/3117/2460_5fc0.gif
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.

From http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17fq078m8os00jpg/medium.jpg
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.

From http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/ninja-terminator03.jpg
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.

From http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v218/Glupinickname/Blog%20gluparije/NINJA_Terminator_03.jpg

No comments:

Post a Comment