Endless is the quest for the acolytes of the ninja way as teached by Master Ninja Ho, after all – as E. Honda once said – the training never really ends, and there are at least still DOZENS and DOZENS of cut-n-paste ninja flicks from the IFD Film & Arts mill left to review and catalogue properly.
Ninja The Shadow Killers is definitely one of them, but this time we have something slightly different in terms of the witch’s brew that will pass for a film, as i’m pretty sure i never saw any other one where he spliced his western ninja footage…. into a women in prison film.
Definitely a genre we don’t really cover to any degree here, not on purpose or anything, but yep, indeed, the “host movie footage” is taken from 1976’s Taiwanese-Hong Kong-South Korean film Prisoner 470 (reminding me of yet another movie series i could be watching instead), and is also notable how this time we have a female ninja protagonist/master, Jenny, played by Deborah Grant.
As to what “Jenny the ninja” (shouldn’t be “kunoichi”?) is doing in the rewritten plot, she has been hired by a millionaire to save his daughter Sylvia from the hands of the nasty ninjas that kidnapped and planned to sell her as a sex slave to some rich douchebag perv or worse.
The concoction is as random as it seems, i mean, The Ninja Squad did start out with editing into the title with a rape scene… so yeah, i’m no really THAT shocked, but if anything, you’d expect to be since we’re tackling a WIP movie, i knew that before going in, for better or worse.
But this is so NOT the case, because it’s such an underwhelming, unmemorable and especially TAME women in prison flick, like, despite the tortures there’s no real gore shown, many showers and baths but not even a tidbit of nudity to be parsed, as the camera angles hide any possible display of anything… aside from like 5 frames of asses that the original editor i guess didn’t care about.
I say “original editor” because, let’s be honest, Godfrey and crew never had issue showing random ass sex scenes and nudity in many of previous (or later) ninja cut-n-paste jobbos, they pretty much had to use all the footage lifted we can, for the purposes of shooting little new footage and getting dozens of “complete ninja films” out in VHS. So it probably was always a tame WIP flick.
At least you can take solace in the goofy ass “original non-asian ninjas” scenes with their British and Hong Kong-bound actors, as Ninja The Shadow Killers has indeed some primo goofy cheese, like the ninja rowing boats and using a “river ninja torpedo” so they can kidnap women.
And given they also crank the goofy shit very high here by having the lead “female ninja master” woo farmers like Betty Boop… there’s some tonal whiplash between this Looney Tunes shenaningans and the actual WIP movie, obviously there is, even if they did censor shit, but tone is just another of the many casualties you have to account for when rummaging through this slop.
It’s not the worse either, but it definitely belongs – like many of his cut-n-paste brethen – to the mediocre ninja swamp of just kinda there, another reminder that this IS the more natural result of them slamming ninja footage into ANY kind of random asian movie they could get their hands on, stuff that is digestible only to those accostumed to this kind of ninja trash, with the only major distinction being a woman as the “good ninja master” due the base film being a WIP this time.
Though i have to give credit to the finale here because this is the rare occasion where it actually feels like one, as in it’s almost 10 minutes (already indicator of a lot more original ninja footage shot for this film), instead of the usual 2 minutes max of anti-climax action, and almost redeems the movie into “so bad it’s good” quality, it’s that kind of incredibly stupid, goofy shit that makes these films legendary, between the aforementioned “shadow editing walk”, the seduction comedy routines out of a 50s comedy film, and the magic-infused rocket launcher of ninja doom.
So yeah, overall, far from the worse or the more forgettable, the ending does help it a lot more than it usually does, thanks to them at least shooting more than 5 minutes of colored ninja jumpsuit footage overall.
Not quite “effort” but close enough, i’d say.
Wise Cafe (International) 