Ninja Killer

Twenty minutes of low budget American ninja action is pasted into an Asian thriller concerning a woman seeking revenge on her ambitious husband after he ditches her for the boss’s daughter.

Producer Joseph Lai, Tomas Tang or whatever you want to call him strikes again with Ninja Killer, another hack job where low-grade American ninja action is cut into a completely different and unrelated Asian film.

It’s always a little fun to see just how bad these two-in-one films really are. The thriller story takes up the majority of the running time and is mildly entertaining itself, but contains no martial arts action of any kind. An ambitious young man who settles in with a hot-tempered lover coldly decides to ditch her in favor of the boss’s daughter. The lover refuses to give her man up, he retaliates by dumping her in river, and she returns on his wedding day to return the favor with a big knife. The ‘ninja killer’ part comes along in some unrelated footage with its own plot about a ninjitsu-skilled investigator trying to bust a criminal organization made up of four men that spend most of their time sitting around a conference table in a small, bare room. The two stories are patched together by having the ambitious young man working for the crime boss. The boss has several “phone conversations” with the man.

The ninja scenes are really, really terrible and the acting is worse. There is a chopped up scene early on where the hero takes on two sword-wielding goons on bicycles. Near the end, the same dude spars with the crime boss in a wooded area. Let’s just say that I’ve seen better choreography and camera work in no-budget short films posted on the internet. But the film earns its half star with the appearance of a ninja in yellow garb who is wearing a headband that says, “Ninja.” That’s high-concept entertainment right there.

Ninja Killer is, for lack of a better word, crap. It’s amazing to me how a film like this continues to exist while many film classics of bygone days are lost forever to the ravages of time. Perhaps we can thank misleading marketing for I doubt anyone would touch it otherwise.