Ninja: The Protector...

Ninja: The Protector (1986)

Producer Joseph Lai’s IFD Film and Arts Company produced a whole string of ninja movies in the eighties. Most of these films were directed by Godfrey Ho, a lot of them starred Richard Harrison, and most of them were cut and paste jobs cobbled together from multiple movies, and dubbed in a manner that tried to pass them off as a cohesive single movie. From what I have read, Richard Harrison was under the impression that he would be making three ninja pictures, but his footage was edited into enough other films that in the end he had his name attached to nearly a dozen ninja movies, and they are all pretty much a mess.

Although these pictures were made in Hong Kong, I do not think they were ever intended for the Cantonese language audience, and they were sold to many American video stores at the time. A lot of devotees to these cinematic mad libs cite the Golan-Globus classic known as American Ninja as the inspiration for these movies. But, I do not believe that the great Michael Dudikoff inspired the casting of the even greater Richard Harrison. No, I think Harrison was tapped as the lead in these films, because he bears more than a passing resemblance to the even more greater Franco Nero, and Franco was the star of the ninja movie that started it all; yet another Golan-Globus classic called Enter the Ninja.

In this particular example of a Godfrey Ho cut and paste job, Richard Harrison is Gordon; a Hong Kong cop who is also a ninja master, even though he constantly tells his fellow police officers that there is no such thing as ninjas. When Gordon isn’t sporting his camouflage ninja outfit he is a bit too comfortable in white tennis shorts, but I do think that I will recommend that camouflage ninja outfit for my friends that like to go deer hunting, and I wouldn’t recommend those tennis shorts to anyone. But, I digress, Gordon constantly finds himself confronting black clad ninjas that work for David Bowles as the villain Bruce, Bruce’s men are usually easily bested by Gordon who then proceeds to handcuff them to things like park benches before he calls the police station, and has one of the other cops go looking for the handcuffed ninja while stolen Peter Gabriel music plays on the soundtrack, the cop arrests the incapacitated ninja, and repeatedly steals our man Gordon’s glory.

Bruce is also a ninja master, he is running a counterfeiting operation, and one of his underlings is a woman that is running a modeling agency. Gordon sends a spy named Warren to infiltrate the modeling agency, he succeeds, and his modeling career takes off rather quickly. But, he doesn’t appear to be doing much in the way of spying, just engaging in a lot of sex with women that can help his career, and getting pretty wealthy in the process. Of course this doesn’t help his relationship with his girlfriend and she eventually attempts to kill herself while Warren is sleeping with yet another woman. Things get more complicated here, because in this case the woman that Warren is rolling around with (literally in this case) is the girlfriend of yet another of Bruce’s associates, a man known as Four-Eyes. This leads to Four-Eyes targeting Warren’s brother and his suicidal girlfriend.

In the end, it’s up to Gordon to yet again don his camouflage ninja suit, and face off against Bruce. This leads to a somewhat interesting showdown featuring ninjas on motorcycles and stolen Pink Floyd music.