Well, I thought I'd seen it all. I've been forced to sit through some very bad movies in my time, most of them originating from the Philippines or some place like that. Never before have I witnessed a movie as plain bad as this. To start off with, the film was a typical low budget Hong Kong martial arts thriller with a piece of fluff as a plot (newcomer has his taxi stolen by a gang of thugs, goes after them while the police chase a crime lord at the same time). It goes without saying that the dubbing of such a film is atrocious, with heavy British accents stemming from the mouths of the Chinese people on screen. Even worse, there's an annoying streetwise little kid who figures predominantly, and even the martial arts scenes are pretty unimpressive. The film quality is of the same level as a home movie and I've seen better acting from a street artist pretending to be a robot.
Heck, it doesn't even look like there was a director attached to the project, instead the camera man just pointed his camera and shot all sorts of rubbish which was then strung together as a whole. It doesn't help that a hideous pan-and-scan job was performed on the video release that I was subjected to. The music is inappropriate and overwhelmingly out of place at times. The supposedly "threatening" crime lord spends 90% of screen time lying in bed with a girl! The only possible good thing you could say about the movie is that the fight sequences relieve some of the boredom of the humdrum plot.
If all this wasn't bad enough, "director" (I use the term very loosely indeed) Joseph Lai woke up one morning and had a bright idea. He decided that he could sell the film in western territories by adding on some scenes with western actors in order to make it more appealing. Not ideal, but it's been done occasionally. I think Fred Olen Ray did it with a movie called THE EVIL SPAWN. So far so good, right? Wrong. Lai decided to make this movie a "ninja" movie, despite the rather large problem that this chop-socky obscurity has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with ninjas. So Lai added on some extra scenes with guys dressed up as ninjas and fighting. In order to tie the plots of the two films together, sometimes he had characters on separate sets supposedly talking to each other even though they never actually meet. Who cares? It's all dubbed anyway so nobody can tell what they're REALLY saying.
My heart breaks to say that the leading actor in these added scenes is none other than Richard Harrison, a former peplum actor who starred in the likes of MEDUSA VS. THE SON OF HERCULES back in the '60s. Harrison kept his tough-guy persona up and running until well into the '80s, where unfortunately he found himself caught up in really bad films such as this. To rub salt into the wound, Harrison is forced (possibly at gunpoint) to wear a silly ninja costume which looks like a pair of pyjamas, and dance around like a prat. The ninja fight scenes are very silly with characters appearing and disappearing at will.
The dialogue isn't even any better here, either; "You! You CIA dog, you!" is a prime sample of the kind of words we here come out of the screen. The end result is one huge, headache-inducing disjointed mess which will undoubtedly fail to make an ounce of sense even on repeat viewing. A really bad film with no redeeming factors at all, I can only warn all prospective viewers to stay away. The final nail in the coffin is that at least a dozen or so films were made in this way, all with the same star and director. Oh, why, Richard? Why!?
2 out of 2 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
