If I hadn't known about Godfrey Ho's penchant for cobbling together parts of disparate movies to make new product, the experience of watching "Ninja Champion" would have made me question my sanity. Even with that useful bit of foreknowledge, my critical consciousness could barely withstand the drubbing this move inflicted on it.
Movie number one is an amazingly turgid and incoherent story about a young woman who is raped while on a camping trip and decides to avenge herself by infiltrating the diamond smuggling gang the three rapists work for and killing them one by one. (BTW, one of her attackers is "the boxing champion of all Asia", yet he is brought to his knees when he is whipped with what appears to be...a shoelace.Admittedly, he had just been poisoned.)
Movie number two appears to be about 7 scenes (and a total of maybe 15 minutes) which feature a series of confrontations between a good ninja in white and some bad ninjas in red. These scenes are violently jammed at random into movie number 1, with only a few unconvincing and contrived lines of dialog to link them in any way to the far longer and more involved events of movie number one.
The good news about these scenes is that three of the red ninjas appear to have some pretty good acrobatic and wu-shu skills, so they each put on a nice little exhibition before the white ninja suddenly shows up and attacks them. (We get no explanation about how the white ninja found them.) The bad news is that both the white ninja and the head "red" ninja wear huge headbands that actually say "ninja" on them...you know, the kind of headbands that a 12 year old might buy from a Times Square shop because he thought they were cool.
Movie number one might have actually been watchable if seen in its original language with subtitles. But the translation and voice work here are so wrong-headed and silly that the dialog keeps yanking you out of the picture. I think that variations of the phrase "kill the damn bastards (who) raped me/you" were used almost 100 times. It's as if high school junior plotted the thing and a middle school student who saw "Death Wish" once wrote the dialog. Further reinforcing this feeling is the fact that none of the characters in the screenplay are given last names; so a typical line of dialog goes like this: "I'm glad you killed those bastards. My name is Larry." (Yes, a Chinese importer and underworld figure named "Larry".) You can imagine 9 year boys on a school playground saying stuff like this with no difficulty.
Anyway, the first movie comes to a (tragic) end, and then the 2nd movie tacks on another scene where the head red ninja explains (and explains and explains) to the white ninja how he (the red ninja) was actually responsible for all of it. Then he laughs maniacally. No, really, he does. Then they both teleport (!) to a playground, and they have on their headbands (that say "ninja" on them), and the red ninja jumps up on a jungle gym and the white ninja skewers him. The end.
I find it almost impossible to believe that the people who put this movie together thought that anyone above the age of 10 would be able to watch this thing without getting a splitting headache. (And why would a 10 year old be interested in the plot of the "main" movie?) And yet, they did; not once, but several times. I know this because my "50 Martial Arts Classics" collection has not only this movie by Ho, but also "Ninja the Protector" (which is slightly better) and "Ninja Empire" (which is even goofier.) It's amazing (and distressing) to think that two decades ago you could apparently put out anything with "Ninja" in the title at make at least a little money off it...because these movies are Ur-Cheese.
The only reason "Ninja Champion" gets more than one star is that some of the countryside and urban scenery are quite nice, and there are those nice little circus demonstrations by the three red ninja before they get turned into sushi.
Movie number one is an amazingly turgid and incoherent story about a young woman who is raped while on a camping trip and decides to avenge herself by infiltrating the diamond smuggling gang the three rapists work for and killing them one by one. (BTW, one of her attackers is "the boxing champion of all Asia", yet he is brought to his knees when he is whipped with what appears to be...a shoelace.Admittedly, he had just been poisoned.)
Movie number two appears to be about 7 scenes (and a total of maybe 15 minutes) which feature a series of confrontations between a good ninja in white and some bad ninjas in red. These scenes are violently jammed at random into movie number 1, with only a few unconvincing and contrived lines of dialog to link them in any way to the far longer and more involved events of movie number one.
The good news about these scenes is that three of the red ninjas appear to have some pretty good acrobatic and wu-shu skills, so they each put on a nice little exhibition before the white ninja suddenly shows up and attacks them. (We get no explanation about how the white ninja found them.) The bad news is that both the white ninja and the head "red" ninja wear huge headbands that actually say "ninja" on them...you know, the kind of headbands that a 12 year old might buy from a Times Square shop because he thought they were cool.
Movie number one might have actually been watchable if seen in its original language with subtitles. But the translation and voice work here are so wrong-headed and silly that the dialog keeps yanking you out of the picture. I think that variations of the phrase "kill the damn bastards (who) raped me/you" were used almost 100 times. It's as if high school junior plotted the thing and a middle school student who saw "Death Wish" once wrote the dialog. Further reinforcing this feeling is the fact that none of the characters in the screenplay are given last names; so a typical line of dialog goes like this: "I'm glad you killed those bastards. My name is Larry." (Yes, a Chinese importer and underworld figure named "Larry".) You can imagine 9 year boys on a school playground saying stuff like this with no difficulty.
Anyway, the first movie comes to a (tragic) end, and then the 2nd movie tacks on another scene where the head red ninja explains (and explains and explains) to the white ninja how he (the red ninja) was actually responsible for all of it. Then he laughs maniacally. No, really, he does. Then they both teleport (!) to a playground, and they have on their headbands (that say "ninja" on them), and the red ninja jumps up on a jungle gym and the white ninja skewers him. The end.
I find it almost impossible to believe that the people who put this movie together thought that anyone above the age of 10 would be able to watch this thing without getting a splitting headache. (And why would a 10 year old be interested in the plot of the "main" movie?) And yet, they did; not once, but several times. I know this because my "50 Martial Arts Classics" collection has not only this movie by Ho, but also "Ninja the Protector" (which is slightly better) and "Ninja Empire" (which is even goofier.) It's amazing (and distressing) to think that two decades ago you could apparently put out anything with "Ninja" in the title at make at least a little money off it...because these movies are Ur-Cheese.
The only reason "Ninja Champion" gets more than one star is that some of the countryside and urban scenery are quite nice, and there are those nice little circus demonstrations by the three red ninja before they get turned into sushi.