Godfrey Ho fascinates me as a filmmaker who focused on quantity over quality, perhaps more than anyone else I can think of. Over the course of 10 years, he released over 100 “movies” with the majority made by buying the rights to other, often low budget unknown movies from Korea or the Philippines & adding in footage he filmed himself to create frankenstein’s-monster, barely coherent movies. He was a Hong Kong director who thought he could find success in the West by hopping on trends, specifically the fascination with ninjas in the 80s. He also included white people because he thought westerners wouldn’t watch movies with just Asians, often by having any white person he found in Hong Kong to use in his films. He made literally dozens of movies about ninjas with titles like Ninja Terminator & Bionic Ninja in this cut & paste style.   

I cant say that any of them are actually good movies by any metric, yet they amassed cult infamy in the unintentional humor of their existence. I discovered one of his few movies he made of all original footage near the end of his career called Lethal Panther that honestly should be placed up against others in Hong Kong’s great 80s & 90s run for action movies. Ho very openly combines all of the top trends in the Hong Kong movie industry, one of which being girls with guns which was a whole subgenre then of often having beautiful women playing action heroes getting into extravagant shootouts, a very John Woo esque heroic bloodshed plot & softcore porn. Up until the handover of Hong Kong to China, Category III films, what we would consider x-rated here, made a surprisingly large amount of all of Hong Kong’s films with actors like even Donnie Yen of Ip Man appearing in softcore porn.

I should disclose the version I saw was on YouTube which cut out & censored all nudity but unless you’re really that horny I don’t think it cut out anything too important. For someone who knew Ho’s other cut & paste movies, I was so surprised at the competence and even beauty at some shoots. Somehow this movie that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page was considered important enough to get an HD remaster and it looks amazing. Idk if it’s intentional or not but the remaster makes everything look so bright & oversaturated but it works so well; everyone looks like they’re from that period where the 80s bleed into the 90s & the effects make them look cooler. The plot is like a mash up of everything John Woo made up until then therefore pretty hard to follow; something honestly normal for Hong Kong action movies of that era. You didn’t watch these movies for a good plot.

This isn’t the first 90s Woo ripoff movie I’ve seen & honestly this one is so better in terms of watchability. I feel like you can teach  any of these old Hong Kong action movies in film school to show how to do some aspect of filmmaking even something considered lower quality like this; they directly steal Woo’s trademark slow fight scenes but still pull it pretty well, whoever did the cinematography got some good shots & the way of doing dangerous stunts in the pre cgi era no one could match Hong Kong in. My enjoyment of these less serious action movies always increases just by the factor if the people & the settings look cool which this has both. This might be the most 90s Hong Kong action movie I’ve seen as in a snapshot of all the trends combined into one. It might be bold to call this a good movie but compared to basically 90+ of the other movies Godfrey Ho made, this is art.