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.
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