Ninja Champion (1986)

Admirable film.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

When a woman named Rose is attacked in the woods and raped, she makes it her mission to track down her assailants one by one and get violent revenge. After killing one of them, she's on the run from the law, mainly represented by Interpol agents Donald (Baron) and George (Lam), though she and George continue to see each other on the sly. But the Interpol agents are also interested in these dastardly characters because they just so happen to be a gang of international diamond smugglers. Aren't they all. Presumably this is where Richard Harrison, playing a guy named Richard, comes into the picture and some warring ninjas face off in acrobatic duels, but it's hard to tell. Will Rose get her revenge? And what are all these ninjas doing here? Find out today...? By Godfrey Ho standards, this particular outing is relatively straightforward. By any other standard of movie-making, it's still a silly, nonsensical oddity, but what we have here is more or less a revenge drama with a couple of spliced-in ninja moments. Maybe Ho and the gang injected the ninjas simply because it was the Ninja Boom of the 80's and in order to get your movie in video stores, it had to have the word "ninja" in the title somewhere. And being the honest man that he is, he wouldn't give the public a movie called Ninja Champion and deprive it of ninjas. (Though to get really specific, it's not exactly clear who the "champion" refers to, but that's neither here nor there.) The movie would have worked just as well without said ninjas, however, and as a revenge drama it more or less works, if Godfrey Ho's style means anything to you.Of course, the loud, abrasive dubbing is here, but to counteract that the clothes the characters wear and the home decor are truly something to behold, as they usually are in Mr. Ho's works. While George is an "Interpol agent with a license to kill", and Bruce Baron, who has had an interesting career in low budget movies, is there to back him up (though he does look a lot like Richard Harrison, so his casting adds yet more unnecessary confusion to the proceedings), and of course Harrison is here, from some other movie no doubt, but the most welcome re-appearance is the Garfield phone (first seen in Diamond Ninja Force). It's back! Fans must have demanded it, and it was nice to see.Then a guy in a Michael Jackson jacket fights a guy with a bow-tie wielding a sword. Or, as an abbreviation, MJ Jacket vs. Bow-tie Sword. And including the aforementioned Baron and Harrison, the whole movie is a cavalcade of admirable mustaches. The baddies wear very weird clown makeup at random times, and of course our ninjas wear headbands that say "ninja" on them. Naturally, it all ends up at an abandoned warehouse, and by Ho standards the ending isn't even that abrupt.So if you know and love the nutty cinematic stylings of Mr. Ho, here you will get what you're used to.Others will probably be confused, but likely still reasonably entertained.

If I hadn't known about Godfrey Ho's penchant for cobbling together parts of disparate movies to make new product, the experience of watching "Ninja Champion" would have made me question my sanity. Even with that useful bit of foreknowledge, my critical consciousness could barely withstand the drubbing this move inflicted on it. Movie number one is an amazingly turgid and incoherent story about a young woman who is raped while on a camping trip and decides to avenge herself by infiltrating the diamond smuggling gang the three rapists work for and killing them one by one. (BTW, one of her attackers is "the boxing champion of all Asia", yet he is brought to his knees when he is whipped with what appears to be...a shoelace.Admittedly, he had just been poisoned.) Movie number two appears to be about 7 scenes (and a total of maybe 15 minutes) which feature a series of confrontations between a good ninja in white and some bad ninjas in red. These scenes are violently jammed at random into movie number 1, with only a few unconvincing and contrived lines of dialog to link them in any way to the far longer and more involved events of movie number one. The good news about these scenes is that three of the red ninjas appear to have some pretty good acrobatic and wu-shu skills, so they each put on a nice little exhibition before the white ninja suddenly shows up and attacks them. (We get no explanation about how the white ninja found them.) The bad news is that both the white ninja and the head "red" ninja wear huge headbands that actually say "ninja" on them...you know, the kind of headbands that a 12 year old might buy from a Times Square shop because he thought they were cool. Movie number one might have actually been watchable if seen in its original language with subtitles. But the translation and voice work here are so wrong-headed and silly that the dialog keeps yanking you out of the picture. I think that variations of the phrase "kill the damn bastards (who) raped me/you" were used almost 100 times. It's as if high school junior plotted the thing and a middle school student who saw "Death Wish" once wrote the dialog. Further reinforcing this feeling is the fact that none of the characters in the screenplay are given last names; so a typical line of dialog goes like this: "I'm glad you killed those bastards. My name is Larry." (Yes, a Chinese importer and underworld figure named "Larry".) You can imagine 9 year boys on a school playground saying stuff like this with no difficulty.Anyway, the first movie comes to a (tragic) end, and then the 2nd movie tacks on another scene where the head red ninja explains (and explains and explains) to the white ninja how he (the red ninja) was actually responsible for all of it. Then he laughs maniacally. No, really, he does. Then they both teleport (!) to a playground, and they have on their headbands (that say "ninja" on them), and the red ninja jumps up on a jungle gym and the white ninja skewers him. The end. I find it almost impossible to believe that the people who put this movie together thought that anyone above the age of 10 would be able to watch this thing without getting a splitting headache. (And why would a 10 year old be interested in the plot of the "main" movie?) And yet, they did; not once, but several times. I know this because my "50 Martial Arts Classics" collection has not only this movie by Ho, but also "Ninja the Protector" (which is slightly better) and "Ninja Empire" (which is even goofier.) It's amazing (and distressing) to think that two decades ago you could apparently put out anything with "Ninja" in the title at make at least a little money off it...because these movies are Ur-Cheese.The only reason "Ninja Champion" gets more than one star is that some of the countryside and urban scenery are quite nice, and there are those nice little circus demonstrations by the three red ninja before they get turned into sushi.

This is one of the very best of the many cut and splice ninja outings as cobbled together by those legendary cinematic rascals Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho.What can I say? This is absolutely mental!!!!!!!!! It truly has to be one of the most unfathomable, illogical and downright demented films I have ever had the pleasure (and confusion) to sit through! The plot in this is without doubt the most bizarrely complex and muddled I have ever witnessed in any film! The ending especially, when Maurice the evil ninja explains 'the beauty' of his plan (complete with a maniacal laugh!) is completely and utterly baffling and I frankly defy anyone to follow it without rewinding the scene a good few times in order to take it in! Needless to say, Donald, our ninja hero played by always welcome genre regular Bruce Baron, is mightily peeved upon learning the villain's evil scheme (and no doubt also by his bewildering recounting of it!) and challenges him to a climatic battle which just has to be seen to be believed! This film is about as crazy as they come and is all the more fun for it although be warned, it may well induce severe brain damage!!!

Ninja Champion is a collage of martial arts movies glued together by a ridiculous plot. But that's what Godfrey Ho is known for. In the 80's Mr. Ho discovered you could take a bunch of cheap crappy movies and edit their fight scenes together to make a new movie!The plot for Ninja Champion is as follows; three men rape a woman. The men turn out to be part of a diamond smuggling ring. The woman's ex-husband is an Interpol agent who wants to stop the diamond smugglers and help his ex-wife kill the three men that raped her.Throughout this movie there are random scenes of nameless guys beating each other up for no reason. Nothing is ever explained. In one fight scene, one of the men changes from a guy with no shirt into a ninja dressed in a red suit. This is never explained, but then again the reason these people were fighting in the first place was never explained either.If this movie were intentionally made as a comedy it would be the work of a genius. However, I don't think that was the case.