Suddenly the ninja appears without warning decapitating the drug kingpin and backflipping to safety amid the sudden blast of machine-gun fire from the bodyguards. The chase is on with henchmen getting slashed left and right as the ninja races through the compound diving through a plate-glass window while simultaneously disabling the elevator button with a well-thrown shuriken. Finally cornered and outnumbered the ninja flings a smoke bomb at his feet and vanishes from sight.
That’s the kind of scenario we come up with when we think about ninja movies. Sounds cool eh? So why aren’t we still making ninja movies apart from the ones featuring those fucking turtles?
Well we used to have ninja movies back in the ’80s. Hundreds of them. And one man messed the ninja subgenre up so badly that it had to be abandoned. That man is infamous film director Godfrey Ho.
After ninjas made a brief but amazing appearance in the hit miniseries Shogun in 1980 western audiences wanted more of the black-suited stealth assassins. We got more. In fact we got plenty. Ninjas got an entire shelf at Blockbuster all to themselves. VHS tape after VHS tape of ninja cinema. And it was terrible. That’s because the movie companies swiftly realized that any film with the word “ninja” in it would sell regardless of the quality so there was no need to make any genuinely good ninja movies.
Sure every now and then somebody would attempt to make something half-decent but such efforts were lost in a sea of crap. Most of the crap came from Godfrey Ho who made about 75 per cent of all the ninja flicks in the video store. And Godfrey Ho is the worst. He didn’t even make complete films — he’d just shoot 40 minutes of moustachioed white dudes horsing around wearing headbands with the word “Ninja” on them. Then he’d edit those 40 minutes together with 40 minutes from some other unreleased action movie that he purchased from Hong Kong or the Philippines. Each Godfrey Ho film randomly switches back and forth between two completely unconnected narratives with two completely different sets of actors. It’s astonishing.
Needless to say the viewing public eventually realized that any so-called “ninja” movie they rented was almost certainly going to be an unwatchable pile of crap and demand for the genre plummeted. Sure people still occasionally make movies with ninjas in them but they are no longer the big genre they once were.
Similarly the subgenre of the Video Game Movie has been assassinated by one man — Uwe Boll. You all know the story by now; for a brief time there stupid people were determined to watch every single movie that was based on a video game. It was the Godfrey Ho ninja situation all over again. One terrible director dominated the genre and deluded fans kept watching hoping that things would improve and they never did. Today there are still films being made that were adapted from video games but not very many of them and they tend to get completely ignored. Hey did you catch Need for Speed (2014)? Didn’t think so.
So damn you Godfrey Ho for killing the ninja movie; and damn you Uwe Boll for killing the video game movie. Also thank you.
Seriously — thank you for saving us. Those weren’t thriving genres you destroyed; they were weak sickly creatively bankrupt genres that were bad news long before you guys came along. The viewers were mindlessly supporting all kinds of terrible crap until you had the courage to walk these genres out behind the woodshed and shoot them. Now if somebody elects to make a ninja movie or a video game adaptation it won’t be to jump on a bandwagon; it will be because they have a genuine interest in doing something original with the genre. All thanks to two terrible filmmakers. Bless you both.
