Ninja Champion

1985 "ninja" movie

Rating: 3/20 (Bad Movie Rating: 3/5)

Plot: Hell hath no fury like a Godfrey Ho movie. A raped woman gets her revenge on as she hunts down her rapists. Meanwhile, a red ninja fights circus performers, characters who might be related to the other characters in this nonsense.

I've seen a pair of Godfrey Ho movies--this one and that one--with Bad Movie Club. Undefeatable was fairly straightforward, another revenge fantasy heavy on the kung-fu. Robo Vampire was far wackier, mixing in supernatural elements with the martial arts and not really making a lick of sense. Ho, at least during this stage of his career, was known for taking existing films and splicing them together to create his own, so this is closer to Robo Vampire territories. The red ninja vs. white ninja stuff clashes dramatically with the stuff regarding the main character and her quest for revenge. It makes for an odd experience anyway, but you add in the mistranslated dialogue (I hope, anyway), Asian thug characters with names like Robert and Larry and Donald, and general weirdness, and it seems almost otherworldly.

I'll start with the ninjas. First, they red ninja is a white guy. He's skilled enough for a movie like this, but the producers must have had their doubts that he could pull off "ninja" convincingly enough because wardrobe gave him this accessory:

That's right--a headband that says "NINJA" on it. The red ninja scenes just kind of interrupt the actual narrative, a narrative that might make sense on its own. You don't know who this guy is, who the white-clad ninjas are he is fighting, or why the hell they're fighting. The red ninja always shows up when the white ninja guys are practicing their plate spinning or ring tricks, and their ninja outfits just kind of materialize. The film climaxes with a red vs. white ninja fight at a playground that really is something else.

The revenge story involves the rape victim, who later has a twin sister (that might be a spoiler, but I can't be sure), hunting down the guys who raped her. She poisons the first one before whipping him with a licorice whip. That scene contained the best dialogue ever:

Guy Who Just Realized He's Been Poisoned: "The wine! There must have been something in it! Oh, God!"
Woman: "Not the wine. My nipples, you jerk."

The second guy might get it worse because he doesn't even get to see her nipples. He's beaten by a handcuffed Rose as he's high-heeled in the head, gets his hand smashed in a car door, is stabbed in the back several times by his own knife, has his groin kicked, and is eventually run over by his own car.

I'm actually getting a headache just thinking about this movie, so I'm going to stop writing about it.