My Cultural Diet

When construction workers uncover the long-lost burial ground of the Black Ninja clan, the clan will stop at nothing to reclaim their ancestral home, even sending ghost ninjas to haunt the landowner’s family. At the same time, the clan’s after a precious artifact that’s been hidden away by Gordon of the rival Diamond Ninja Clan. Gordon — who’s played by Richard Harrison in all of his mustachioed and eyelined glory — just wants to live a normal life with his lovely wife, but when she’s killed by the Black Ninja clan, he’ll need to summon all of his Diamond Ninja skills to avenge her death. Diamond Ninja Force is as delightfully incoherent as any Godfrey Ho movie. (Leo Lau and Frank Ford are credited with continuity and story development, respectively, which I suspect took them all of five minutes.) In classic Godfrey Ho fashion, Diamond Ninja Force recycles the Golden Ninja Warrior idol and Garfield phone from Ninja Terminator, throws in random scenes of Harrison doing his ninja schtick, and ties it all together with footage cribbed from an entirely different film. In this case, the other film is Feng-Pan Yao’s Ghost Rapist, a cheap Poltergeist knock-off from Taiwan that — as its title suggests — let Ho sneak in a bit more skin than usual. As is often the case with Godfrey Ho’s ninja movies, I wish he’d have made a film that’s just Harrison doing wacky ninja things, but the inclusion of a supernatural/horror element — as well as music from Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark — does make Diamond Ninja Force more interesting than other IFD offerings.

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