Ninja Terminator

Ninja Terminator is considered the best ninja film by the extremely prolific production company IFD Films. Though it's hard to say whether it deserves that designation, given that IFD produced over 100 ninja films during the 1980s alone (the height of ninja mania), and I doubt there's anyone who's seen them all, let alone someone who can get a good handle on them. They all have plots and titles (a mandatory combination of the word “ninja” with another, randomly chosen word) so similar that it's virtually impossible to tell them apart. Most of them are the work of the “Ed Wood of Hong Kong cinema” Godfrey Ho, an extremely hyper-productive director who managed to spawn up to 30 ninja films a year. How did he do that? Quite easily. Just buy a few Hong Kong, Thai and Filipino films that nobody knows. Then put them together, mix them up a little differently each time, and re-edit them so that the characters in each film say something a little different. Then shamelessly steal music from various well-known films. And to make it sell well in the west, spin in a few shots with western B-movie actors that nobody cares about. The most famous of these was Richard Harrison, who made world cinema history by reportedly turning down the lead role in the spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars, making Clint Eastwood a star. Harrison reportedly only made one ninja film for IFD, and only later learned that his filmography had grown to include dozens of ninja films recycling the same footage of him over and over again, which did little for his career. Harrison has the ability to play out all of his scenes with a single, stony-faced expression, and his ninjutsu skills consist of being able to change from civilian clothes to a camouflage ninja suit (which he wears without being outdoors) in a split second using a stop trick. He is then taken over by the doubles, who in turn can use the stop trick to teleport from place to place during fights. Considering that all of IFD's ninja films were made using the aforementioned cut-and-paste method, it's not surprising that they didn't have the most coherent plots. What makes Ninja Terminator stand out is that, for a small moment, you even understand what's going on in it. The film starts out very lucidly. The good black ninjas steal a golden ninja statue from the evil red ninjas who want it back. This is followed by an incomprehensible time jump “two years later” and from that point on it stops making any sense – trying to decipher who is who and what is going on will make your brain spin. They serve us two films in one. In the second one, instead of Harrison, we watch an Asian hero who does nothing but fight or have sex. Ironically, this character has the most space. Probably because the actor who portrays him really masters martial arts (he literally beats all his opponents with his hands in his pockets), unlike the Western actors who can only manage funny poses. Another challenge for the audience is the fact that a lot of the important action takes place off-screen, thanks to the fact that on the DVD the actors are often cropped in front of the camera (due to sloppy transcription or incompetent camerawork, who knows). Sometimes only partially, resulting in very unusual compositions. Sometimes completely, so that there are moments when two speaking characters sit opposite each other and all we see in the frame is the table between them. In this case, it is sometimes hard to tell who is actually talking to whom, as many of the characters are dubbed with the same voice. But that's the fun of it. If you see the film with more than one person, you can then spend the next hour and a half after it's over passionately discussing with them what actually happened and why it happened (e.g. why do all the ninjas have eye shadow, and why does one of the villains wear a lady's wig on his head that he only takes off before fights?) This is a universal commentary applicable to any IFD film. (02/08/2017) (less) (more)