Ninja Thunderbolt

Though viewers are rarely able to find their bearings in the narratives of Godfrey Ho’s films, they never get bored. There are a few legitimate film productions in Ho’s filmography, such as the excellent Ultra Force 3, but they are rather anomalies. Actually, Ho became one of the key dreck kings of video-rental shops through his association with the mafia hustler Joseph Lai and his company IFD Films & Arts Ltd. Their modus operandi consisted in buying up the international rights to several Korean and Taiwanese action C-movies, editing them and often even combining them, adding approximately 10%-20% of newly filmed shots, and slapping the whole thing together with a new soundtrack with English dubbing. In this way, they created many dozens of films, which they then proffered to western video-distribution companies. This practice led many to accuse Ho and Lai of plagiarism, parasitism and mangling of films. But their calculating nature was matched by their ingenious assessment of the requirements of the video market, or rather one of its essential target groups. Children, particularly pre-pubescent boys, enthusiastically devoured action movies and didn’t care if they were watching an ambitious, perfectly crafted blockbuster or a third-rate clusterfuck, as long as the movies provided the desired attractions. And in that respect, Ho and Lai’s joint creation is an absolutely perfect product that contains the maximum amount of attractions and the absolute minimum of everything else. Ninja Thunderbolt was a major milestone in Ho’s filmography, as it was his firm film in which ninjas were prominently featured. Lai allegedly saw the strong demand for Cannon Films’ Enter the Ninja at the Marché du Film in Cannes and decided to latch onto the ninja fad. Ho then rearranged the Taiwanese action-crime flick To Catch a Thief into a hotchpotch in which the dubbing and additional scenes with Richard Harrison provide an insanely naïve and campily entertaining storyline about ninjas. The rest of the film also manages to pull its own weight. Thanks to its frantic editing, the film jumps from one wild sequence to another and serves up exaggerated action scenes and chases, bedroom scenes, synchronised swimming, skiing, a spectacular fight involving dried peas and ninjas on roller skates. What the movie – both the Taiwanese source work and Ho’s fan-edit – lacks in terms of budget and filmmaking competence, it makes up for with manic editing that has no regard for continuity, unity of place or the internal logic of the sequences. Which, again, may outrage the adult smartasses, but for the ten-year-old boys in the age of video-rental shops and today’s lovers of trash flicks, it is an awesome spectacle. (22.08.2022)