Ninja Terminator (1985)

dir. Godfrey Ho

All of Godfrey Ho’s films, including Ninja Terminator and Ninja: Silent Assassin, are a mad delight. His MO was to film original scenes, then take an existing martial arts film, dub over the top, and cut the two together. In other words, his “movies” are hybrids of two entirely different films. Half of Ninja Terminator is taken from a Korean production called The Uninvited Guest Of The Star Ferry; it doesn’t take a genius to discern that the clipped British accents over the top weren’t part of the original audio. The bits Ho filmed himself include a teeny-tiny threat-delivering robot and a Garfield telephone. Throw in pieces of a magic statue, a couple of extremely tepid sex scenes, and hostages tied to bombs. All put together it creates an inscrutable but hilarious mess.