User Reviews

Another mash-up film from Hong Kong filmakers Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho. The ninja part concerned the ninja Gordon (played by the ubiquitous Richard Harrison of course) taking revenge on another ninja called Stuart (or Stewart) who treacherously had killed the master of the Silver Ninja Empire and Gordon also killed a few other ninjas on the way to the usual abrupt finale in a Lai and Ho film. The other part which is footage taken from 'Ma! Bu yao si zai wo bei shang!' from 1981 is a grim drama of family dysfunction and personal tragedy with disfigurement, rejection and suicide. The ninja part was silly fun but the drama part was bleak and disturbing. The parts never gelled together, even more so than was usual in a Lai/Ho film.

According to Taiwan Black Movies in Variety, this genre of films was "Known at the time by the polite description "social-realist crime films," the genre was a broad church, combining over-the-top sexual and physical violence with stories involving either political or economic gangsterism."

I'm telling you this because IFD Films usually involved filmmakers like Godfrey Ho taking multiple ninja movies and surgically fusing them together into one never all that conhesive narrative. This one claims to be directed by Joseph La with Ho as story developer, yet nearly the entire movie come from the Taiwan black movie Ma! Don't Die On My Back!

The Ninja Master (Louis Roth) of the Silver Ninja Empire tells his students that Rodney and Janet - the characters from Ma! Don't Die On My Back! - have broken the first law of being a ninja: no premarital sex. They have been exiled and oh yeah, Gordon (Richard Harrison), needs to go get the Sword of Valour.

Rodney (Chun Hsiung Ko) and Janet (Elsa Yeung) aren't having a good time of things after being ninjas. He's gambling all over their money, she works scrubbing floors despite being pregnant. When he wins a big game of dice, a gang sets him up and he goes to prison, leaving Janet as a single mother and to make things worse, an accident burns her face.

As their son Danny grows up, she's too ashamed to tell him that she's his mother and says that she's just his maid. It takes him growing up and searching for his birth parents to realize that he's always known his mother. She's now dying and he puts her on his back to run to find his father, who has hung himself under a bridge. Yeah, this movie gets dark and you thought you were getting brightly colored ninjas.

Well, they're still here. As the master sent away Gordon, he has denied Stuart (Dave Wheeler) from being his successor. Stuart responds by killing him but somehow, he keeps breaking into the movie to tell us the ninja commandments, living up to this film's title. And then Gordon uses a ninja umbrella and defeats every other ninja and we're just supposed to forget that we watched all these ruined lives.

Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most oddly perfect mixes of two movies that don't belong together.

Basically, if you're a ninja, get married before you make love.

The film Ninja Commandments is one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen. It is what I like to call a 'Frankenstein film", as the actual movie is really two movies that have nothing at all to do with one another cut together to form one unholy experience. The bulk of the film looks like stock footage.. Most likely a Chinese drama made in the late 1970's which was acquired for an extremely affordable sum by the financial backers of Ninja Commandments. The rest of the film, which includes the incredibly poor fighting sequences featuring Richard Harrison as the celebrated Ninja Master Gordon, was filmed in 1987. This is without question one of the absolute worst films I have ever seen. Case in point: The cover, which features a red-clad Nin – Ja with sword and shield, and another yellow clad Caucasian Ninja above him. The background portrays three men on motorcycles surrounding another man in a white shirt. Behind them is some sort of futuristic sky-scraper monolith. Nothing on the cover is representative of any thing that actually happened in the movie, besides the existence of the yellow clad ninja.. There is nary a motorcycle in the whole of the film. The film opens with some sort of Ninja tribunal talking about excommunicating one of their ninjas for having premarital sex. The film now switches over to its poorly attached stock footage section about some average drunken fellow, who is obviously not a ninja, though he is supposed to be the Ninja who was exiled for engaging in premarital sex. In one sequence his girlfriend is harassed at a bar by a gaggle of drunken locals. The disgraced Ninja quickly engages the bar folk with an odd running head-butt attack, which has little affect. He is promptly beat down by the gaggle and humiliated. This section of the movie is long and slow, and completely and utterly unrelated to ninjas in any way. It drags on and on about the banished 'ninja' and his troubles at home.. The details are too numerous and agonizing to review but I do seem to remember that most of the issues plaguing him are resolved by some sort of suicide. The film takes sparse focus on the actual Ninja story, where the heroic ninja master Gordon battles a treacherous peer who has assassinated the leader of the Ninja sect. These sequences are fraught with unbelievably bad costumes and equally poor fight choreography. It all looks as if it was filmed in a local park; apparently these ninjas require no structures whatsoever. There is never any attempt made to reconcile the two different movie plots, other then the exiled for premarital sex edict. Ninja master Gordon vanquished the bad ninja in the end, and the other 2/3rds of the film are left without correlation or explanation. I would highly recommend this movie to anyone, until one has sat through this they could not possibly fathom exactly how poor a film can be.

Well here truly is a rarity……a 'cut and paste' ninja movie in which BOTH the original Asian film into which the newer and completely non related ninja segments are inserted, AND the ninja segments themselves, are actually rather good! – and yes, I'm actually being serious!

The Asian movie is a very poignant and heartfelt tale of a struggling single mother who is tragically, horrifically disfigured in a fire whilst attempting to rescue her baby son. The plot unfolds that due to her resulting appearance she decides to conceal her true identity from the son as he grows up, instead telling him that she is his nanny/maid.

Only at the end of the film does the son finally realise that she really is his mother and in a rather brutally sad climax, he attempts to reunite her with his father, but is just a little bit too late…..

The attempt by the film makers to link the ninja segments into the above original movie are simply pathetically illogical! According to Joseph Lai's spliced encompassing version of events, the mother and father in the original film were actually ninja who due to pre-marital sex were expelled from their ninja clan and had their ninjitsu powers taken from them (!!!!!)

But of course, the real reason fans (or am I the only one?) actually sit down to watch these movies is solely for the energetic ninja action they usually contain and in this respect, this film delivers the goods. We have quite a few well choreographed fight scenes on display here (one involving a female ninja)

However, there is an extra dimension to this movie…..a factor which really raises the enjoyment level far higher than many of the other Joseph Lai/Godfrey Ho ninja outings……and that is the voice over work for the main ninja villain.

I defy anyone watching this film to not burst out laughing at the way he utters his lines.

The voice over artist here must have been either a) Deliberately over playing the character as some sort of protest/joke at having to lend his voice to such a film in the first place or b) Was severely intoxicated in some manner at the time.

It's not just the characters hilarious voice over in fact - the actual actor playing him (Dave Wheeler) is blatantly having a whale of a time overacting to glory even beneath the dub anyway! Just watch the scene where he kills his master who was vowing to hand over the leadership of the clan to Richard Harrison's character….the dialogue and overacting sets new standards in sheer badness!

I recommend this movie wholeheartedly……it's an absolute (unintentional) laugh riot!