Ninja Champion (1986)

Ninja Champion (1986)
Aka: Ninja Connection
Original Footage: Poisonous Rose Stripping the Night

Cast: Bruce Baron, Pierre Tremblay, Philip Ching, Jack Lam, Choe Eun-hye, Im Bong-gi, Yoon Yang-ha, Baek Hwang-ki, Dragon Lee
Director: Godfrey Ho (new footage); Kim Si-Hyun (original footage)
Action Director: Philip Ko Fei; Baek Hwang-ki (original footage?)

 

Ninja Champion doesn’t really stand out among the handful of Cut n’ Paste films that I’ve seen so far. My thoughts are that the entertainment value of these films derive less from the quality of the inserted ninja footage (and the attempts at dubbing a connection into the two sets of “films”) and more from the source film. Ninja Terminator, for example, was entertaining because Joseph Lai and Godfrey Ho chose a Korean martial arts film starring Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee and fan favorite Jack Lam to build a new movie on. This movie also chooses a Jack Lam movie, albeit one that belongs to the Rape Revenge sub-genre of exploitation film.

Original footage: a woman named Rose (Choe Eun-Hye) is out camping with her fiancé, George (Jack Lam), when they are ambushed by three assailants. George is knocked out and Rose is taken and tied to a tree. At that point, the assailants whip her and then rape her, leaving her badly injured. She’s rushed to the emergency room, where she plead with the doctors to NOT administer anesthesia, since she wants to embrace the pain. In the meantime, George ends the engagement and marries another woman, the daughter of a crimelord named Larry. Jerk-off. You couldn’t even wait a few months, buddy?

Anyway, several months later, Rose is back, posing as a diamond smuggler—we see her arrive at another crime boss’s house, where she removes her blouse to show them the “goods”. She meets up with one of boss’s men (one of the rapists) at a nightclub and takes him back to her hotel room. She laces her nipples with poison, so that when he goes in for a suckle, he gets paralyzed. Rose proceeds to drown him in a bathtub. Not quite a "Best Death Ever" situation, but it's in that ballpark.

A couple of days later, Rose and George reunite, but she’s all Miss .45 and all. Despite his pleadings for a reconciliation—what about your current wife, Mr. Heartbreak Kid?—she informs him that after she’s killed the other two rapists, she’ll kill him as well. Their meeting is broken up by the arrival of a bunch of hired goons, whom George fights off. Meanwhile, Rose is “arrested” by a shady-looking cop, who turns outs to be Rapist #2. He takes her to an abandoned building to off her—preceded by a strange scene in which she asks to put on her make-up before dying. Fake Cop Rapist responds, “Okay, but don’t do too a good a job, or I’ll have to rape you again.” A fight breaks out and Rose does all sorts of damage on the guy: beating him with her high heels and purse, slamming his fingers in the car door, and stabbing him. She finally crashes the car with him in it. He survives, but Rose shows up dressed as a nurse and puts two bullets in his head…despite the fact that there is a policeman standing guard just outside.

She sets her sights on the third rapist, who’s the second in command to Robert, the main diamond smuggler. She takes him back to her hotel to seduce him, but he’s onto her and is able to kiss a poisoned grape(!) into her mouth, seal her in a coffin, and leave her for dead. So what happens when Robert heads to the docks to make a deal and there’s a woman ready with the goods, looking just like Rose and identifying herself as Cherry?

New Footage: a ninja/Interpol agent named Donald (Dragon Force’s Bruce Baron) gets a call form his superior (Richard Harrison and his trusty Garfield telephone), telling him that he needs to keep an eye on ninja master Maurice (Pierre Tremblay, of Heroes Three and A Better Tomorrow), who’s in league with Robert. Donald starts offing Maurice’s top ninja enforcers one by one until the two meet. There we learn that Maurice wanted to supplant Robert (from the Korean film) and put Larry in charge of the diamond smuggling. He had his ninja coup d’état all planned out, but then Rose showed up and started killing Robert’s men for him. So he just sat back at let her do the work, although George’s meddling threw a wrench in that plan…

In a lot of cases, the original Korean films have been lost and only these IFD Cut ‘n Paste Films are left. I wonder if the situation is similar to the American release of Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967) in which the studio made the mistake of sending the American distributor the original master print, which inevitably led to Korean negatives getting lost and the American version being the only existing one. I’m not sure if that’s the case of Ninja Champion, but that would be interesting.

What is especially fascinating is that Poisonous Rose Stripping the Night is a straight-faced rape revenge film—if a little goofy at times…like Rapist #3’s irrational fear of snakes—peppered with the occasionally surreal moment, like Jack Lam’s ability to teleport during his fight sequences. Oh, and at one time, one guy grabs Jack Lam’s waist to throw him, and Lam demonstrates the ability to shrink his waistline about five sizes smaller! I’m guessing that just general insanity of the original film made this a good fit for IFD’s business model, but man. Jack Lam does throw a decent kick, though. Those looking for exploitation won’t get much more than violence: the sexual aspects are muted by the odd decision to “frost” over the female nudity in several places.

The fights in the new ninja footage were choreographed by Phillip Ko, who jumped back and forth between these sorts of films and smaller roles in Sammo Hung movies before he found his new calling in the Philippines. The choreography isn’t that bad, but the ninja duels are extremely short, including the final showdown between the righteous White Ninja Donald and the evil Red Ninja Maurice. But given the general paucity of new inserted footage in this particular venture, I don’t think anyone will notice.