Zombie vs. Ninja: Godfrey Ho

We meet again, Godfrey Ho. For those who are not familiar with this chopsocky legend, Ho was a Hong Kong based film director who made over 80 movies during the 80's via a "cut-and-paste" technique. This technique is described as such: "He would film footage for one micro-budget picture, and then edit and splice the shots together in a different order, adding in footage from...various obscure or unreleased...Asian movies...to fill the gaps, and then dubbing over the result to create a final product. This allowed him to create several Z movies with the budget of one." In an attempt to reach a wider international audience, much of the original footage that Ho would shoot would involve Caucasian actors, such as Richard Harrison or Pierre Kirby, in leading roles. The results were cinematic Frankenstein abominations bereft of narrative coherence. The 1989 film Zombie vs. Ninja was the first Ho film that I managed to watch from beginning to end. I had previously tried watching some of his other films, but they were so boring and confusing that I had to give up. Think about that for a second: I've watched Béla Tarr's Sátántangó (1994) and THESE were the films that exhausted my patience. Anyhow, Zombie vs. Ninja is essentially the South Korean film The Undertaker in Sohwa Province (1983) with new footage featuring Kirby as the legendary ninja Duncan who pops into the film every 15-20 minutes to give a pep talk to the main characters. The basic story is that after a young man named Ethan (yes...a South Korean named 'Ethan') is beaten during an attack that killed his father, he becomes the apprentice of the local undertaker who teaches him an odd style of martial arts. Part of Ethan's training is fighting re-animated corpses brought back to life by his master. I have to complement the South Korean footage: the numerous fight scenes actually do a great job demonstrating Ethan's growth as a fighter. But the atrocious, borderline offensive dubbing and the added Kirby footage do nothing but drag down and complicate this otherwise straightforward martial arts film. And while these additions do provide the film with a layer of camp and kitsch, it is not enough to salvage the production.

3/10