227. Spirits of Bruce Lee

227. Spirits of Bruce Lee aka Meng jiao di she long nu (1973)
Director: Ling Shang
Writer: Ling Shang
From: Cult Cinema

A man goes to Thailand to find his missing brother only to find that he’s been murdered.

The other Brucesploitation movie. This time with no pretense of featuring or being about Bruce Lee! That element’s a little curious, in fact. I mean, the movie’s not even set in Hong Kong. The movie is about as far away as you can get from Bruce Lee.

Anyway, the movie opens with a jade trader walking into the woods at night. He’s jumped by a group of bandits and killed. One of the bandits steals an amulet that he’s wearing.

Later, the man’s brother Chan arrives looking for his brother. He meets Yu, a cop trying to take down the local crime boss and the two of them beat up some thugs. Yu pops up periodically throughout the movie, but he’s not really part of it. In fact, I shouldn’t have mentioned him. You see how long my posts usually are, though, right? I need some padding for this one because nothing really happens. I’ll demonstrate.

Chan meets a shop owner who’s also from China and is sort of adopted by him. The man is trying to set Chan up with his daughter. Bit by bit, Chan learns that his brother is dead and starts following the path through all the members of the gang until he finds the leader and kills him. Specifically, he manages to kill the leader because the leader gives all this thugs the day off and Chan finds out. After killing the leader, Chan is about to be killed by the gang, but the cops, led by Yu, arrive and arrest everyone. Chan and the girl leave. THE END.

The movie’s boring. Skip it.

226. The Real Bruce Lee

226. The Real Bruce Lee (1973)
Director: Jim Markovic
Writers: Larry Dolgin, Serafim Karalexis, and Dick Randall
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A compilation of excerpts from Bruce Lee’s early films and then examples of two Brucesploitation films.

In honor of Bruce Lee’s birthday (November 27, 1940), I’m pulling out two Brucesploitation films that I haven’t watched yet. The first, The Real Bruce Lee isn’t much more than the brief description I offer above.

The movie is an exploitation piece in the sense that it’s trying to cash in as quickly as possible following Lee’s death. The movie starts with a brief biography, notes that Lee’s father was an actor, and then has some clips of early films Lee worked in. The movies, from what can be seen, are general melodramas and comedies. I can’t tell from these poorly-dubbed nth-generation bootlegs if Lee is any good, but they’re presented here as curiosities. Then the movie notes his death and starts talking about his impact on cinema.

Which is where the movie becomes an interesting object. The movie is at once describing the phenomenon of Bruceploitation films while being a Brucesploitation film. First it offers a clip of a Bruce Li movie saying Li is regarded by some as the heir to Lee’s crown. They also note that there’s a difference in how Li does his martial arts. Li is a little more clumsy, a little more comic, but he’s also striking real people as opposed to dummies so his action sequences are a little more tactile and immediate. I hadn’t expected that kind of analysis and it’s something that’s going to change the way I look at the remaining martial arts movies in these sets.

Then the piece moves into full exploitation when it introduces “the next great sensation” Dragon Lee. The producers are trying to set up their own inheritor to the Bruce Lee fandom and they do it by tacking on a severely edited Dragon Lee movie. The flick is fine—typical martial arts thing. Villain comes to town, trashes school, Lee beats villain and redeems school’s honor. Then another villain, related to the first, comes and challenges Lee. Kills Lee’s master, kidnaps his girl, then Lee defeats him. Since it’s edited, the movie runs through those beats about as quickly as I’ve written them.

There’s nothing special about The Real Bruce Lee as a piece of entertainment. The movie is the filmic equivalent of a People Magazine special memorial issue—appealing only to fans while offering them nothing new. What’s interesting is thinking of it as a product, thinking in terms of how it was experienced. This was released before the Internet, before home viewing. This movie toured theaters where people didn’t know what it was and I imagine a lot of them were really disappointed. They showed up for a movie about the recently-dead legend and what they got was a 7th-grade-level biography of his life and an extended advertisement for another actor entirely. I wonder how many people stuck it out, hoping it would get better, and still left disappointed.

I was initially neutral about this movie. Sure, the flick’s a quick cash-in, but there seemed to be nothing inherently offensive about it. Writing it up, though, has made me really aware of just how exploitative it is and how gross the central concept is. I wasn’t going to recommend it anyway because it’s just not that interesting, but now I’m saying avoid it because it’s fundamentally offensive.

That said, it is in the public domain. archive.org has a nice widescreen copy of it here. Since it’s all archival footage anyway, plunder, cut, and remix to your heart’s content.

225. Ninja Empire

225. Ninja Empire aka Ninja Phantom Heroes(1987)
Director: Godfrey Ho
Writers: Godfrey Ho and Sally Nichols
From: Cult Cinema

Violence breaks out in Hong Kong as three crime lords start betraying each other over an arms deal.

Another Godfrey Ho movie to wrap up Ninaj-vember (next week is something special). Like Ninja Champion, this movie is two movies: the original Hong Kong action flick and a second movie about white ninjas fighting in a playground. Everything’s cut together and dubbed to make it seem like the ninjas are the masterminds of the plot in the real movie, even though they’re obviously playing pretend in a playground. This time, though, the ninja plot takes up a lot more time than it did in Ninja Champion.

The ninja plot, briefly: 715 is imprisoned at a labor camp for smuggling weapons to the Viet Cong. Turns out the former partner in that enterprise is using a group of ninja to smuggle weapons into the Middle East so the CIA is busting 715 out to stop him. They ninja-fight each other a few times, 715’s meddling ruins a few of the deals, then they have their final showdown in a playground. Villain isn’t killed and 715 and his friends literally just run away. THE END

Of that movie. Within that movie is the real movie. Alan is the adopted son of Godfather Wong. Alan’s birth father was part of the criminal gang that included Wong, Chan, and the city’s third Godfather. The three have a general truce and are working together to deliver a large weapons shipment to various groups in the Middle East. Chan, though, harbors some old resentments against Wong over things that happened back when they were starting out.

Alan is courting the daughter of the third Godfather, much to the consternation of the Godfather’s son Albert. Albert thinks Alan is just trying to weasel his way in to steal their money and power. Alan also has a friend, Baldy, who’s a low-level pimp that wants to be one of the big boys and have a job with Mr. Wong. Alan dissuades him because Alan himself isn’t happy being a criminal.

Chan betrays the other two Godfathers by engineering the deal all for himself. Wong tries to undermine things by having Alan kidnap the pointman in the arms deal. However, that was a setup and Chan makes the deal anyway. Then he threatens Wong with a tape recording of a junkie that Alan hired as part of the kidnapping admitting to Wong’s involvement. Alan kills the junkie before he can be taken to the police, though.

Alan marries the third Godfather’s daughter, but a drive-by shooting happens at the wedding killing the third Godfather. Albert goes to talk to Wong about the killing and kills Wong. He goes to Chan and it’s revealed that the two of them planned the whole thing so they could be the only two heads in Hong Kong. Wong, though, with his dying breath, tells Alan about Albert.

Alan goes to Chan’s compound where Chan lets him kill Albert and then sics all his goons on him. However, Baldy, from the beginning, shows up with his two friends and the four of them—Alan, Baldy, and his gang—manage to fight off most of Chan’s crew. However, both of Baldy’s friends die.

Cut to a junkyard being watched by the police. Alan, his wife, and Baldy are walking through when a car pops out and runs Alan down, killing him. Cops burst out, stop the car, and arrest Chan and his men. THE END

The ninja plot isn’t worth discussing because it’s not part of the movie. While it adds the delicious Godfrey Ho touches—ninja in garishly bright costumes, literally jumping up and vanishing, training montages on playground equipment—it’s not part of the movie and, frankly, grew kind of annoying. The opening sequence of 715 takes a while and promises a cheesy 80’s action flick that we then don’t get. Every time we return to that plot, we’re not seeing the other movie and so have to have that cut down further and make even less sense. The process worked in Ninja Champion because the ninja cutaways were so brief and the pretense that they were related to the core movie only happened at the beginning and end. Here, we keep cutting to the ninja story to have everything happening in the real movie explained as part of the ninja story, a decision that makes the central movie even less comprehensible.

For instance, we see the wedding drive-by on footage viewed by the CIA discussing 715’s actions in the field. So he’s somehow responsible for what happened there. However, because we’re seeing it through the CIA’s footage, we don’t get the details of what happened and thus have to learn later that the third Godfather was killed. If we’d just stuck with that movie, we’d know from seeing the assassination itself.

The movie also has a tonal problem, and who would have thought I’d be criticizing the tone of a Godfrey Ho movie? That’s like going to Taco Bell and reflecting on the ambiance. However, if you look at what I described as Alan’s story, it reads as a mafia movie: he’s the adopted son of a crime family that’s ambivalent about his criminal responsibilities and wants out. While there’s violence, there aren’t really action sequences because that’s not what the movie’s about. Ultimately, the movie is a tragedy about how Alan couldn’t get away from the mafia. Tragedy, though, doesn't marry well with absurd ninja action.

This movie never grabbed me. The ninja stuff is nice because it has the tone of great 80’s action cheese run through a translation filter, but it’s all added after the fact. It’s so tacked-on that it doesn’t even have its own ending. The ninja portion just closes with people running away like a parent showed up to shoo them from the playground. As for the main plot, it may have been interesting on its own, but was cut down too much to make room for the ninja stuff. I like collage, I like weirdo cinema, but this felt like constantly switching channels between two movies. For that reason, it wasn’t particularly fun. Plus, since there’s no shortage of Godfrey Ho films (neither of the ones I watched had the Garfield phone!), there’s no reason to suggest looking for this one instead of one of his others. Give it a pass.

224. Ninja Champion

224. Ninja Champion (1986)
Director: Godfrey Ho
Writer: Godfrey Ho
From: Cult Cinema

A woman infiltrates a diamond smuggling outfit to get revenge on the men who raped her.

Ah, you can always count on Godfrey Ho to save Ninja-vember. Ho, for those who aren’t familiar, imported a lot of martial arts movies to the US by extensively re-editing them and cutting in new footage of “ninjas” in garishly bright outfits facing off in a playground. Also, he shamelessly ripped off other larger movies for their music and aesthetics. This movie opens with a direct rip-off of the Columbia logo and features music from Pink Floyd during the climax.

God, I’m loving every minute of this.

So a couple in a tent is attacked by a gang in ICP make-up. The assault is intercut with the woman, Rose, in an operating room. She’s sexually assaulted and gives birth without anesthetic, then loses the baby.

Cut to Rose visiting a crime boss. She takes her top off which fogs the entire screen. She’s smuggling diamonds on her breasts and the light coming off them is blinding the camera! The boss invites her to a party celebrating his brother winning the Asian boxing title. She goes back to the brother’s hotel room and murders the brother by applying poison to her nipples that he licks off. She kills him because he was one of the rapists.

Before we get to the revenge killing, though, we cut to a couple of white guys talking about something. This happens periodically throughout the movie so I’ll just sum it all up here: the diamond smuggling operation is being overseen by some white crimelord who organized the sexual assault of Rose because he knew it’d lead her and her twin sister on a revenge rampage that would clean out the organization and leave no connections to him. The government agents that the other white guy works for took care of wiping out the big heavies. These two white guy ninjas then fight, villain dies, and this is not actually part of the movie. Seriously. Ho just cut this storyline in for his own reasons and cuts to it periodically throughout the movie. These scenes are not part of the movie about Rose.

Back to the real movie, which I’ll run through as quickly as I can because I don’t actually understand it at all.

George, Rose’s former fiancé, meets up with her and asks to help kill the other rapists since he has a license to kill. She pledges to kill him once her revenge is finished because he abandoned her after the attack. She faces off against a few more toughs and rapists and George can no longer make love to his wife because he’s obsessed with Rose.

Rose gets captured by one of her targets and is seemingly killed, her body sealed in a wooden tube. Then the crime boss meets the key contact for the diamond smuggling and it’s Rose! But it’s not Rose, just someone who looks like her. They fight, boss is taken hostage, and his henchmen come back and murder him.

Meanwhile, George visits his father-in-law and accuses him of being part of the diamond smuggling. Father-in-law says he’ll kill George if he hurts his daughter. George says he’s getting a divorce anyway.

At the crime lair, the villain’s gang is captured by what turns out to be Rose’s twin sister Cherry. She learns that George’s father-in-law organized the rape to get George away from Rose and set him up with his daughter. Then the father-in-law pops up and grabs Cherry. Just as he’s about to kill her, George shows up and stops her murder. She turns around and kills the father-in-law. George, Cherry, and Cherry’s assistant all face off against the gang, kill them all, then flee from the cops. They go to Rose’s coffin where George pays his final respects and we cut back to the white ninjas I mentioned earlier. THE END

That folks, was me being brief. This movie is such a delicious clusterfuck. Bad editing, terrible dubbing, and a convoluted plot made even more confusing by the additional material that’s tacked on. I loved it. I was constantly cackling, “What’s going on?” while I was watching this and will certainly return to watch it again. Do what you can to find this movie because it is so much fun.

223. Ninja Heat

223. Ninja Heat aka Ninja Blacklist aka Hei ming dan (1972)
Director: Mar Lo
Writers: Mar Lo, Lan Shu, and Yu-Kun Teng
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A man falsely accused of robbery joins with his brother to get revenge on those who betrayed him.

Our lead is released from several years in prison for robbing a jewelry store and is met by his brother who has uncovered the details of the people who were actually involved in the heist and pinned it on the lead. They set out to confront each robber and make them confess to the crime.

Which is basically what happens. I was expecting some kind of twist to emerge in the movie, especially considering how certain characters react to each other, but that never happened. The brother tells the lead that their mother is dead, murdered by the mastermind of the plot and the lead’s girlfriend. When the girlfriend tries to meet with the lead to explain herself or present him with their son, the brother chases her off. I read those scenes as the brother being part of the plot and trying to chase off anyone who’d prevent the lead from bumping off the brother’s enemies.

My sense of the brother being duplicitous was heightened by the first fight scene. The brothers find their first target, beat him up, drive him into the country, and he reveals the details: the boss wanted to pin everything on the lead because he wanted to steal the lead’s girlfriend. The lead lets him go, but as he’s walking across a field, the brother shoots him in the back. Of course I thought the brother was hiding something at that point!

As the first target dies, his death scene is intercut with shots of the woman he was supposed to marry the next day. This adds to the soap opera aesthetic. When each target dies, there’s a montage of the victim with their lover. The movie’s making a strange choice, trying to make you consider the price of violence in a revenge flick, and it doesn’t really work.

So the second target gets into a fight with the brothers on top of a (slow) moving truck. He falls off and gets hit by another car. The third target kidnaps the lead, offers him money to restart his life, then decides to frame the lead for murder when the lead turns him down. They end up fighting, the lead lets him go say goodbye to his wife and children, but he dies from his injuries in the doorway.

Finally the big bad returns. The girlfriend tells the lead the truth about what happened, that she was pregnant with his child when he was sent to prison and the villain attacked her at the lead’s mother’s house. The villain killed the mother and told the girlfriend the only way he’d let her and the child live would be if she married him.

Meanwhile, the brother has gone to fight the villain by himself. He dies just as the lead shows up and the lead and villain fight. The lead finally wins just as the police arrive and both he and the villain are arrested. Then there’s a voice-over from the villain of all people, and that’s THE END

I… hmm… yeah. I don’t have anything to say about this movie. While it makes interesting narrative choices—seeing snapshots of the lives the villains are losing, avoiding having the lead kill anyone in the name of revenge—the choices don’t work. The movie feels a bit like a Spanish soap opera mixed with a martial arts film, but without the heightened energy or absurdity of either. The movie is oddly subdued in many way and that’s not what I want from an exploitation flick.

While the movie’s not terrible, it’s not great either and not something I’d recommend outside of riffing, editing, or re-dubbing. Fortunately, if those are your goals, it appears the movie is in the public domain and I’ve uploaded a copy to archive.org here.

222. Nine Deaths of the Ninja

222. Nine Deaths of the Ninja (1985)
Director: Emmett Alston
Writer: Emmett Alston
From: Cult Cinema

A special anti-terror taskforce is sent to rescue a busload of hostages taken by an ex-Nazi drug-running terrorist cult leader.

I feel like I could just describe this movie by saying, “1985,” and be done with it. Spike Shinobi, Steve Gordon, and Jennifer Barnes are DART, an elite anti-terror squad that works for someone… somewhere? I’ll admit to being fuzzy on that element since the opening is Spike and Steve infiltrating what is either a Mujahideen camp or a foreign US Army base. To be fair, in 1985, the two are synonymous. Spike and Steve manage to bomb the hell out of the place and then some general shows up, calls a halt to it, and praises the DART team for showing what they can do. So are they mercenaries?

Who cares? Because a terrorist leader has been arrested and is being held in the Philippines. The drug cartel run by Alby the Cruel and his second, Honey Hump and her all-female warrior brigade, plan to break him out of jail by taking a busload of tourists hostage. Alby, of course, is a former Nazi. Also, he’s a wheelchair-user and has a pet monkey in a diaper. Because why not add more?!

My notes at this point read, “A TERRORIST PLOT TO BREAK EVIL LEADER OUT BY HOLDING A BUSLOAD OF TOURISTS HOSTAGE ON AN ACTIVE VOLCANO! THIS IS HOW THE 80’S SAY FUCK YEAH!”

Unfortunately the energy drops pretty quickly after that point. The volcano never even comes up again.

The movie has some good craziness: the hostages are taken by the terrorists disguising themselves as a wedding party, and the actor playing Alby (the father of Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers) camps it up delightfully. The problem is the movie never holds its very few elements together. We have DART, the terrorists, and the hostages. Only the hostages disappear from the movie relatively early only to, surprise, still be part of this movie at the end. Also, DART is pretty terrible at their job. They spend most of the movie investigating the terrorists, but the leads go nowhere and it’s really only by chance that they find the villains’ base at the end.

I could put in a good word for Shô Kosugi here, although I don’t need to (because he’s Shô Kosugi). He plays Spike, the only active member of DART in contrast to smirking incompetent white guy and literally-reading-the-script white girl. Kosugi has nearly all the action sequences and, since he choreographed them, they do all right. It’s just that none of them matter to the story. When he eventually faces off with the big terrorist who they let out of jail, the terrorist literally stops a bullet with his bare hands.

If you’re movie’s a cartoon, nothing has any consequence.

Anyway, the terrorist is released because DART can’t do their job. They try to follow him, lose him, and then eventually learn where the villains’ base is. They go in, Kosugi fights some ninjas (who’ve been absent from the film since a flashback early on), save the hostages, and don’t get the villains.

Yeah, they don’t get the bad guys in the final climatic fight. Instead, the villains come to the place where DART is hanging out to try to get revenge, but it’s a trap. The villains are caught without a fight and Alby gets trampled by horses in a polo match when he tries to escape. THE END.

I feel like I’m enjoying this movie more writing about it than I did watching it. My notes include the lines, “We Rented a Helicopter: The Movie,” and, “Maimi Connection meets Rambo fight sequences,” which sounds like a formula for a good-bad movie. However, Nine Deaths of the Ninja is mostly boring.

The movie feels either like a pilot for a tv-action series or a movie cut together from several episodes of said series. The events never wholly follow one to the other. Plus, tonally it’s all over the place. For a taste, just watch the opening credits. 80’s torch song over interpretive dance and sword practice in a smoke-filled void. The movie purports to be a ninja-action flick.

So, despite the occasional moments of exuberant madness, I have to recommend giving this movie a pass. It starts strong and then gets real boring real quick. If I can clarify how badly the movie misses its mark, it stars Shô Kosugi but tries to make the white people matter. You have Shô Kosugi. I don’t care about anyone else. Also, I would never care about Tad and Muffy or whatever the hell their names are. “Steve Gordon and Jennifer Barnes”? My fake white names are less white.

Fist of the B-List did a write-up of this movie for their Ninja-vember as well, and, as always, describe it with style and erudition. Furthermore, they hit on several points I didn’t mention due to space. I recommend reading their review more than I recommend watching the movie itself.

221. Shadow Ninja

221. Shadow Ninja Killer Wears White Bo za (1980)
Director: Tung Cho “Joe” Cheung
Writers: Tung Cho “Joe” Cheung, Yun-Sheng Pan, Hung Wai Tan, Wei-Hung Teng, and Wei Tung
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

A hotheaded new recruit and a bitter detective team up to try to take down the local crime boss.

The movie opens with the title card for a good 20-30 seconds while the audio runs underneath. We hear people talking about the detective and how he’s been demoted to cemetery duty for offending Master Mang. When we finally cut to the movie, the same men are talking to the detective. He’s just captured someone stealing gold from corpses teeth and is hoping to regain the chief’s favor by turning him in. Naturally, the men talking to him try to help the criminal escape, but he comes back because he’s never seen what a jail is like and wants to experience it for himself.

Thus the first question of the movie: is this a comedy? Everything that plays out here—the detective, the new partner, their walking the beat—is constantly played for laughs until an hour into the movie when the tone suddenly shifts and it’s a serious piece about taking down this crime lord.

The detective returns home to his young wife who has a gambling problem and has put them back into debt. Meanwhile, the hothead has just arrived in town and is getting dinner at a gambling den. The detective shows up, pretends to shake down a man who’s secretly his informant, but the hothead gets involved and actually chases the informant down. The next day, the detective learns that the hothead is the chief’s nephew and that the detective will have to train him.

Then the next hour is spent with the hothead getting involved in fights, largely off-screen, because he doesn’t know how to work with the corruption of the town the way the detective does. The turn comes when the hothead decides to take down Master Mang, the big bad, and a killer dressed all in white starts murdering Mang’s associates.

Hothead keeps walking into situations where he’s blamed for the killing and the detective hides him while they keep trying to find out who the real killer is. This is where things get complicated and it’s introduced with less than half-an-hour left in the movie.

The White Hunter is a brilliant cop who’s been on the hunt for the Fox, a devious criminal who’s a master of disguise. The Hunter has tracked the Fox’s trail to the town where the movie is happening and will be arriving the next morning by train. Fox is actually Mang who’s been disguising himself as the White Hunter to kill underlings that have failed him and to lure hothead into a showdown with the real White Hunter so that the two will kill each other.

So. Mang shows up at the detective’s house while the detective is learning all this and attacks the wife. Hothead chases him and the wife tells the detective, with her dying breath, what just happened. Hothead chases Mang to the spot where the White Hunter has arrived and hothead and the Hunter fight. The Hunter uses a handcuff-based weapon and entangles hothead, but falls and knocks himself out. Which is when Mang murders him. Mang and hothead fight for a bit, but the detective arrives and gets killed instead. Hothead degloves himself to get out of the Hutner’s weapon and fights Mang, eventually getting the upper hand through an accidental nut shot, and then cuts Mang to ribbons with a sword. FREEZE FRAME. THE END.

I have to make note of one thing before I begin: no ninjas! A definite fail for Ninja-vember and a disappointment considering the title. In fact, a distressing number of the movies I’m watching for Ninja-vember, despite having “Ninja” in the title, do not, in fact, have ninjas. Shameful.

I don’t know what to make of this movie. The plot eluded me most of the time and I’m not sure what the tone was supposed to be. This was either supposed to be a semi-serious story about a jaded and crooked cop turning his life around because of his new partner or goofy send-up of these cop dramas where everything was supposed to be played broadly and for maximum yuks.

For example, there’s a scene where a guy is robbing a bank while a man on the street starts threatening people with a knife. Our cops arrive when the knife-wielding guy gets locked in the bank with the robber. Hothead goes in alone, we hear all sorts of noises, and see the detective reacting as though he’s gone too far in bullying his new partner. Then the hothead walks out unscathed with both criminals tied up, tossing in a clever quip for good measure.

Is this a turning point? A gag? A character moment showing how capable hothead is? It’s not clear and it doesn’t come up again. Plus, if you’re thinking about this as a martial arts movie, why don’t we see that fight? Most of the fights happen off-screen or are played up as gags emphasizing what we’re not seeing. Then we close with a massive battle sequence where three people die. What was the movie aiming for?

The movie appears to be in the public domain and I’ve uploaded a copy to archive.org here. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from watching it, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend it either. As with so many of these movies, its moments of unintentional comedy work well, but the intentional comedy falls flat. If you want to goof with some friends, it’s a passable flick, but it’s also something you can easily allow to pass by.

220. City Ninja

220. City Ninja aka Tou qing ke (1985)
Directors: Yeong-cheol Choi and Chun Bang Yang
Writer: Chun Bang Yang
From: Cult Cinema
Watch: archive.org

Various gangs manipulate two fighters into hunting down a necklace that had been lost decades before.

Welcome to the first entry of Ninjavember! It’s all-ninja, all month long, except when it’s not. Which means it’s like every other month and every other promise you’ve ever given or received. That’s right, this is yet another opportunity to reflect on how you’ve failed not only yourself, but so many others. What are the holidays for if not that?

That and trash films! With that in mind, here’s the odd duck City Ninja!

We start in 1940 Hong Kong. Some white guy is being harried by ninjas who do the full Godfrey Ho teleporting in and out of shots. Enjoy it while you can because the ninjas don’t return for a while and they don’t teleport anymore. He holds his own well enough, but still enlists the help of a passerby. White guy gives passerby a necklace that he says he’ll come back for. Then passerby has to fight off the ninjas until they, apparently, decide to leave.

Cut to 45 years later and general cinematic confusion. I don’t think the movie accidentally has two directors, I think this was two related but independent productions that got stitched together. The movie does have two distinct story lines that only come together at the end, and, no, it’s not like Magnolia. To simplify things, I’m going to talk about one story then the other.

In Hong Kong, Rocky has just won the boxing championship and has dreams of opening his own gym. His boss is the son of the passerby that was given the necklace 45 years before. Turns out the necklace has a special code on it that corresponds to a Swiss bank account and the Italian mafia want it back. Only the boss doesn’t have it. The necklace was stolen by Korean gangsters years before. The mob is putting pressure on him to get it back.

Meanwhile, Rocky is having an affair with the boss’ mistress. The boss starts putting pressure on Rocky to go to Korea to find Jimmy and get the necklace back, but Rocky isn’t willing to kill anyone. The boss’ mistress ends up pregnant with Rocky’s kid and he decided to take his fiancée (oh yeah, he’s got his own main girl) and leave town. The mistress confronts him, pulls a gun, and in the struggle she gets shot and killed. The boss’ thugs witness it and promise to make the problem go away if Rocky goes to Korea. He has no choice but to leave and find the other movie.

In which Jimmy is an up-and-coming fighter with dreams of opening his own gym. Seeing parallels? He gets recruited to do a job stealing a necklace, and then his recruiter/mentor gets killed. Jimmy takes the job and retrieves the necklace as revenge, but then refuses to hand it over. He falls in love with the mob boss’ girl and offers the necklace in exchange for enough money for the two of them to leave together. The boss refuses and sends wave after wave of goons to get their asses handed to them by Jimmy.

Rocky arrives in Korea, meets Jimmy, and offers him 1/10 of the price Jimmy’s asking for. Jimmy turns him down and leaves.

Eventually an assistant to the mob boss who we haven’t seen before enlists the help of a group of ninjas (finally!) and they kidnap Jimmy’s girlfriend. Jimmy defeats all of them, but not before yet another group arrives and kidnaps the girl from the kidnappers. That group then murders the mob boss. Turns out they’re working for Rocky who tells Jimmy the girl will be waiting in a warehouse, bring the necklace.

Big climatic battle, but not between Jimmy and Rocky. Jimmy finds the girl and is eventually defeated. It’s not clear if she’s dead or if he’s killed at the end, but they’re out of the movie and Rocky’s goons get the necklace. He calls his boss to read off the numbers. The boss relates the info to the mafia and then is killed by his own assistant who’d been scheming behind his back the whole time. Rocky returns to Hong Kong where he’s arrested at the airport for the murder of his boss and mistress. THE END.

The movie takes a bit of a grim turn at the end and I won’t say it wasn’t unexpected. I was wondering who we were supposed to be rooting for as we approached that point. Jimmy’s pretty clearly coded as the scrappy, rebellious hero—maybe a little crooked, but ultimately only screwing over the overt villains—but it’s hard to see Rocky as the junior mob boss that he’s forced to become at the end. Yes, he’s cheating on his girl, but apart from that he refuses to get involved in anything criminal and specifically refuses to kill. It’s only when he’s forced to at the end that he agrees to do the boss’ work for him.

The value of the MacGuffin was always in question as well. Jimmy has it, but doesn’t know what it’s worth, and it’s not clear that the two Korean gangs fighting over possession of it know why it’s worth having either. I’m still not clear that it does carry the secret code for a Swiss bank account. Maybe that makes it the uber-MacGuffin, so inscrutable in its overt purpose that it can only serve as a narrative device.

This is close to peak exploitation as well. While it doesn’t get gory, it does have a lot, and I mean a lot, of gratuitous nudity. Women rubbing themselves in showers… and that’s it. That’s the entirety of the scene. Rocky and the mistress have an extended sex scene where they have sex on every piece of gym equipment available, which was at least inventive as far as gratuitous content goes. Then that’s followed almost immediately by an extended sex scene between Jimmy and his girlfriend.

Much of the movie is laughable. There is no attempt to get the dubbing to line up with what people’s mouths are doing and the constant cutting back and forth between Hong Kong and Korea only serve to destroy any sense of continuity or coherence.

That said, the fight scenes in Korea are really good. They’re inventive, visually interesting, and sometimes downright funny. There’s one sequence where Jimmy fights some goons with his girlfriend—not alongside, but literally using her to attack and defeat the goons.

The movie would have been much stronger had it just been Jimmy’s story and we didn’t keep cutting back to Hong Kong. However, it was fun enough. A couple places online list this as being public domain and I didn’t see any copyright information on my print. The problem with a lot of these martial arts movies is that the copyright status is unclear, primarily due to GATT. Since my copy doesn’t have a copyright logo, I’m operating under the assumption that it is PD and so have uploaded it to archive.org here. I’d recommend it. When it’s silly, it’s silly in the right way, and when the action kicks off, it’s fun to watch. Check it out with some friends and have a good time.