THE YOUNG NINJA MUST REVEAL HIS POWER TO SURVIVE!

The fate of the Ninja Empire is at stake as the supreme master and his disciple confront Ivan the Red, a power-hungry ninja. When the police fail to help, the young disciple must reveal his amazing fighting ability to avenge his mother’s murder and save his sister. The master must face Ivan in a final duel to determine the fate of the Empire.

TRAILER

IMDb.com || letterboxd.com

  • Sergio@slrpnk.net
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    9 days ago

    Watched this last night on tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/698707/the-ninja-squad. It was on background while gaming so it was pretty confusing. Then I was trying to figure out where it was filmed and discovered:

    the Ho shot footage only comprises about 10ish minutes of The Ninja Squad, so Harrison really isn’t in this movie a whole lot. Most of this consists of scenes from the 1984 Filipino crime drama Hatulan Si… Totoy Angustia, a movie about a guy named Billy who gets into some trouble with a gangster.

    It is the standard Godfrey Ho method at work…bad dubbing, use of some obscure movie’s footage, with Ninja action interludes. The plot revolves around our favorite ninja, Gordon, training a young disciple named Billy. The training sequence takes place during the starting credits, then the movie moves on ten years later to footage from a Filipino movie that has nothing to do with ninjas, then we return to ninja action …

    https://letterboxd.com/film/the-ninja-squad/

    So it’s basically a Burroughs-level cut-up. Both movies are bad but in different ways. The ninja scenes are B-movie-bad but the Filipino crime drama are bad in the ways resulting from a limited budget. In fact I think the Filipino crime drama is the more interesting of the two movies; I wouldn’t have minded seeing only that movie for its depictions of 1980s working-class Phillipines (as seen through an over-the-top gun-toting crime drama, of course.)

    • LaurenceWolse@feddit.nlOP
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      9 days ago

      Yup, the bulk of Ho’s cinematic output consists of cut-and-paste jobs like this. These movies are kind of an obsession of mine (😉). The man has also made regular genre movies and they’re solid to almost great. Kind of surprising, considering how bad most of his cut-up ones are.

      If you’re interested in Filipino movies of the '80s, check out Elwood Perez’ Silip/Daughters of Eve. Be warned though, that one is super rough to watch.