When talking about Godfrey Ho, we've often referred to him as the Ed Wood of ninja movies, but that comparison gives Wood far too much credit. Ho's short but amazingly prolific career makes Wood's seem quaint.
Godfrey Ho's IMDb page lists 149 directing credits, 30 of which were released in the year 1988 alone. He also has 121 writing credits, and more than 70 other credits. Almost 100% of these credits come during a 22 year time span. That's more than impressive, it's almost impossible! But, it's also an indication of what kind of quality we're looking at.Many Godfrey Ho movies shoehorn in a subplot featuring American actors in suspiciously mismatched footage, wearing the most 80s "ninja" costumes you could possibly imagine, talking to each other about ninja-ing while getting everything you could possibly get wrong about ninja, 100% wrong. These subplots are completely nonsensical and full of laughable overdubbed dialogue. That isn't to say the rest of the over dubbing makes more sense, nothing said on screen matches what happens on screen.
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| The man himself. |
Speaking of the main plots, each Ho film we watch seems to be two movies cut together in ways that could makes sense (if you ignore the 80s ninja) but always manage to fall short of that. That only makes the action scenes that much more enjoyable though because you have absolutely no idea what is going to happen. Literally anything can (and usually does) come from left field in the middle of a pretty straight forward action scene, and it's always wonderful. And we've only scratched the surface when it comes to watching his films, but each time we think we've seen it all, he pulls out some new stops leaving us to assume it couldn't get weirder than that, surely...
I love his films.
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