DVD review The Ninja Squad (1986)

A supreme ninja master and his disciple confront Ivan the Red, a power hungry ninja. When the police fail to help, the young disciple must reveal his amazing fighting ability to save his sister and avenge his mother's murder. The Ninja Squad is written by AAV Creative Unit and Stephen Soul, it´s directed by Godfrey Ho and Robert Young. The acting is horrible, the camerawork and editing is pretty decent. It´s the product of standard Godfrey Ho filmmaking technique, take a old unreleased Asian movie, shoot some new footage with a caucasian cast and splice the new material into the original movie and whoopsie you got a new flick. We get several WTF moments, usually featuring Richard Harrison who plays The Pink Ninja aka Ninja Master Gordon and the scenes of him training with his sword is so hilarious that I laughed out loud. Richard Harrison, btw, have later stated that Godfrey Ho killed his career with his output of really cheezy and shitty ninja flicks. The new footage makes out perhaps 15 minutes of The Ninja Squad, it consist mostly of training montage and ninja versus ninja action as Ivan The Red (Dan Wheeler, who runs around in a bright red and gold suit) seeks out different ninjas, kill them and collect their headbands. Yes this is a flick were the ninjas wear colorful clothes and headbands with the text Ninja. The old Asian footage is from a vigilante flick which provides several shoot outs and fightscenes (through re-dubbing and editing, the main character in that footage now apparantely is Ninja Master Gordon´s student but he doesn´t display any martial arts prowness at all as he instead prefers to shoot the bad guys with automatic weapons). The action (old Asian footage) is pretty routine stuff and pretty badly staged, the fight choreography in the new footage is decent and very much "Hong Kong". The changes between old and new footage is obvious and very hard to miss. There is no gore (they evidently couldn´t even afford any fake-blood) or T & A in this.
This review is based on the region 1 DVD release from Crash Cinema Media.
Rating: 0½ out of 7. I kinda enjoyed it, it´s entertaining in a trashy sort of way. Fans of trashy cinema has to see this.

/JL