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.
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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.
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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.)
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.
Ah yes, Richard Harrison and Godfrey Ho. You could say the have some history!
Veteran genre actor Richard Harrison has been outspoken of how he believes Ho ruined his career. He allegedly signed up for a couple of ninja films and had his footage spliced into at least twenty (all of which had him credited as the star).
Thanks, the article you link is a fascinating introduction to Godfrey Ho and his technique:
Ho would splice together limited footage he shot himself (mostly just dudes in ninja suits hitting each other) with completely unrelated films of questionable origin. He’d record an English language dub track for the combined film that would attempt to thread a new plot over these multiple old ones. Some of the same footage was reused many times over in completely different stories. The bizarre results of these experiments have both enchanted and enraged cult film fans for decades. The ways Ho tried to mash unrelated films into one were astonishing and often very funny. For example, he’d use period footage as ‘back story’ or claim that unrelated characters were the same person, younger and older, again with flashbacks. He’d chop scenes together that had similar backdrops and have characters from two films appear to ‘talk’ to one another across the scene. They’d sometimes read newspapers with carefully cut-in headline shots that harked back to scenes from the other movie. Characters from one film would watch characters from another on a TV screen disguised as ‘surveillance footage’ or blackmail videos.
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As the American-made Cannon ninja flicks with Sho Kosugi hit the big-time, IFD hatched their plan to ride the wave. Ho would splice his quickly-shot ninja footage into the incomplete films IFD had kicking around their archive. Lai would take the finished product to festivals and sell them under amazingly blunt names like Ninja Terminator, Ninja Thunderbolt, Ninja Destroyer, Ninja Dragon, Ninja In The Killing Fields (spoiler: there are no fields in this movie), or Ultimate Ninja. The important thing was that the footage they featured Westerners because this was what made it sell overseas.
Beyond the cast, Ho and Lai tried their best to appeal to English-speaking tastes. All their characters would be given comically over-anglicized old-fashioned names like Harry, Gordon, Bruce or Alan. American pop culture imagery littered the background of their films including, most famously, Richard Harrison – as “Ninja Master Harry” – having life-or-death conversations on an absurd Garfield phone (apparently Ho heard that Garfield was popular in America and figured this would be a cool thing for an American ninja master to own).
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/ninjas-all-the-way-down-the-mysterious-world-of-godfrey-ho/
Unironically it sounds like Godfrey Ho was a genius.
A pastiche ninja movie made by the Ed Wood of Hong Kong, Godfrey Ho.
