My Cultural Diet

First things first: Ninja Knight Thunder Fox is an awesome title for a movie, and nothing you say can change my mind. Sadly, it has precious little ninja action compared to other Godfrey Ho movies. (That said, I do love the fact that the ninjas wear headbands emblazoned with the word “Ninja,” just to clear up any possible confusion.) Also known as Ninja Empire, Ninja Knight Thunder Fox is a prime example of Ho’s infamous cut-and-paste filmmaking. Cribbing scenes from a completely different film (Wen-Hsing Lai’s Fierce Lady) and mixing in his own footage, Ho uses slapdash editing and hilariously awful dubbing to create a new film about a modeling school terrorized by gangsters. Not surprisingly, the seams are painfully obvious. Case in point, our protagonists are two detectives named Brad (Marko Ritchie) and Bonnie (Hsu Ying-Chu) who own their own detective agency, and yet they never share a single scene together. Instead, they only ever talk on the phone, with the camera zooming in on Bonnie’s photo to sell the effect. Ho’s chutzpah is actually kind of endearing, if not entirely legal, and Hsu’s Bonnie puts some spirit into the film’s fight scenes even more so than the ninjas. And speaking of not entirely legal, the film blatantly uses sounds and music from Tangerine Dream, Re-Flex, Cocteau Twins, and Nightmare on Elm Street, though somehow I doubt Ho bothered to properly license any of it.

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