User Reviews

So apparently this movie is about this good looking (in a Marlboro Man way) blond guy in a camouflage ninja costume and his fight with a chubby businessman (in a red ninja costume) and with the red ninja guy's minions to break up a counterfeiting ring. No, wait, it's about a cop working undercover as a men's fashion model (uh-huh) and his relationship with his brother (a "playboy and troublemaker") and his girlfriend and the price he pays to perform his assigned duty (which seems to involve a lot of soft core porn and soap opera dialog).Wait, it's both those things...and a lot less!

I enjoy bottom of the barrel cinema more than I probably should, but this particular genre - in which Richard Harrison apparently was edited into an unrelated and obscure action move by director Ho - was new to me. Lucky me, I got to experience confusion and cheese overload in one compact movie!

I counted about six extremely silly ninja battles (which is fair enough for a movie called "Ninja The Protector") as the blond guy dispatched the chubby businessman's -er, "Ninja Grandmaster's" - little helpers in a series of increasingly desultory battles involving teleportation, exotic weapons, instant costume changes, tons of eye liner, and finally...jousting on motorcycles(!) Meanwhile, the director and editor tried to pretend that all this was connected to the other plot about the fashion model with some linking dialog. The end result was...weird and disorienting, as if I'd swallowed a handful of No-Doze and washed it down with cough syrup. I kept expecting the movie to make sense and follow through with something...for the laws of cause and effect to kick in...for characters to do things that made sense...and the screenplay kept bouncing from scene to scene without ever being coherent.

Upsides to the movie: The blond guy (Richard Harrison?) was at least good looking. The battles were sloppy and silly but it looked like someone at least tried to pump some adrenaline into the proceedings by including a variety of weapons and stunts. Also, the undercover cop's brother was fun to watch - he was like the "Energizer Bunny" of sidekicks, always bouncing back from getting slammed around and managing to win most of his fights with sheer elastic energy.(The second plot should have been about him). And the English dubbing was better than usual for a quickie exploitation product like this; the overdubbed line deliveries at least didn't grate, and the sound wasn't mixed in such a way as to make your ears bleed the way some Hong Kong sausage product is.

The best I can say for it is that a bunch of kids and ninja fans probably watched it while drunk (or stoned) and cheered a lot. But this is an insult to anyone who expects his movies to, um, make sense.

By day, Ninja Master Gordon Anderson - which is actually his credit (Harrison, of course) - runs an Interpol division of agents who chase down and arrest forgers. He even wears a slick white jacket while doing so. By later in the day, Gordon puts on his camouflage ninja outfit and takes down the forgers the classic ninja way. The team thinks they're doing a great job, little realizing that the ninja cleansing the town of forgers is really their boss. In the spliced-in subplot, a guy named Warren is pursuing a modeling career, but his affair with the head of the modeling agency is destroying his relationship with a woman named Judy. There's a chance a woman named Susan is involved in the forgery ring and posing as a higher-up in the modeling agency. But we're not entirely sure, because here's where things really start to get confusing: the main villain of the piece appears to be a bearded White guy in a red ninja suit named Lead Villain Bruce (Bowles), and how he fits into all this is unclear. Then the jumble begins. Naturally the only thing that can set things straight is a good old fashioned ninja battle. Is there anything a good old fashioned ninja battle can't solve? Find out today...

Ninja Protector, or Ninja THE Protector, or THE Ninja Protector, or Project Ninja Daredevils, or whatever ninja-based title happens to be slapped on, is certainly the shortest Godfrey Ho outing we've seen to date, clocking in at a mere 68 minutes. Perhaps due to the constant chopping and slicing throughout his career, sometimes a shorter piece is left over, kind of like how sometimes after a pizza is divided with a pizza cutter, there's a really skinny sliver of a slice left. That being said, Ninja Protector feels longer than its stated running time. Everything gets started on an up note however, with a jaunty instrumental theme song that sounds like it belongs on an early-80's game show. At any moment during the credits, you think a voice will suddenly say, "and now your host, Peter Tomarken!!" Sadly, Tomarken is nowhere to be seen (though an abrasively-overdubbed Tomarken doing ninja moves and swordfights would be mind-bogglingly awesome) but in his place we do have the legendary Richard Harrison. He probably shot about two films' worth of footage for Mr. Ho, but has appeared in like ninety. From whatever source it may have come from, we do get (only) one rather extended scene of a shirtless Harrison flexing while holding a sword. And this is towards the end of the movie when his ninja credentials have been firmly established. It's just so gratuitous it's really funny. He also illustrates that in order to be a true ninja, you never walk when you can cartwheel. Just to cover a very short distance in a field that any of us non-ninjas would have walked a few steps, Ninja Master Gordon Anderson flips like a short order cook's burgers. Seems like a waste of energy, but we're not Ninja Master Gordon Anderson.

Here's another important lesson we learned from NMGA: No guyliner = normal everyday dude. Guyliner = ninja master. Why guyliner is an integral part of the ninja transformation we do not yet know. But maybe it plays in to the fact that NMGA has to keep not just his secret identity under wraps, but the entire concept of ninjas as well. After a ninja tells a not-too-bright and pudgy man named Andy (Chworowsky) the classic line "only a ninja can defeat a ninja", Andy's response is "what's a ninja?" - and after continually asking what ninjas are, NMGA has to convince him that they're nothing more than the stuff of legend, presumably to maintain his job security.

In the end, Ninja Protector is incoherent ninja nonsense of the type that only Mr. Ho can provide. Either his wacky style appeals to you or it doesn't. Regardless, if you're thinking about watching one of his movies for the first time, don't start here. Try Clash of the Ninjas (1986) instead.

This is the greatest movie in the world because it has Ninjas, and was the first and only movie ever made to star both Jackie Chan and Jackie Chan. The result is twice the action and twice the fun.

Jackie Chan stars as a rickshaw runner with a dream and a past. When Chung Fun (Jackie Chan) steals the sacred scroll from the forbidden city, Jackie Chan must rise up and become Ninja the Protector of the Sacred Scroll. At his side is Cao Pi, the wisecracking yet lovable sidekick ("Daaaamn, bro. You cut that fool up."). However, Chung Fun ups the ante by kidnapping the Princess (Yvette Chang, in what should have been an Oscar-winning role). It's twists like this that keep you on your toes and keeps Ninja the Protector a top-notch movie. Richard Harrison also makes a brilliant cameo as the man who taught Jackie Chan everything he knows as well as actually writing the scroll.

This movie was slapped with restrictive ratings in every country it was released, but that does not mean it deserves it. Bring the family.

So come on. Ninja the Protector. Can it get any cooler than that?