Shadow Killers Tiger Force (1986)

Shadow Killers Tiger Force (1986)
Aka: Ninja: The Shadow Killer; Shadow Killer
Original Footage: Girls in the Tiger Cage (여수 407호, South Korea, 1976)

 

Starring: Wayne Archer, Deborah Grant, Danny Raisebeck, Kenneth Smyth, Sun Chien, Chang Seng-Kwong, Poon Cheung, Karen Yip Leng-Chi, Shen Yi, Chen Hung-Lieh, Jin Bong-jin, Kim Ki-joo, Lee Wan-Chung, Seo Mi-gyeong, Heo Jin
Director: Cheng Kei-Ying, Shin Sang-ok
Action Director: (for new scenes) Chiang Tao

 

Shadow Killers Tiger Force is another cut-n-splice ninja picture brought to you by Tomas Tang and the “good” people at Filmark. Yup, the same blokes who gave us Ninja in the Killing Fields and The Jaguar Project are up to their old tricks again, taking movies from all over Asia (and SE Asia) and inserting cheaply-filmed footage of Caucasian actors dressing up as ninja. This one is interesting, because the ninja footage (set in the modern day) is tacked on to a WW2-era Women-in-Prison flick from South Korea called Girls in the Tiger Cage. Moreover, the original movie was directed by the infamous (and legitimately famous) Shin Sang-ok.

Shin (also known as Simon Sheen) was a super-important South Korean film director during the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, his works shaped the landscape of Korean movies throughout the 1970s. During the early 1980s, Shin and his ex-wife, actress Choi Eun-hee, were kidnapped by North Korean agents at the command of dictator Kim Jong-il. Kim was a famous fan of cinema, especially Hollywood (despite the fact that regular North Korean citizens cannot partake of foreign media under threat of imprisonment or death). He wanted Shin Sang-ok to make movies for him in North Korea. Most famously, he made the giant monster movie Pulgasari (which also featured FX work from the Japanese crew at Toho, including Teruyoshi Nakano).

I won’t go too far into Shin’s story, although it is worthy of its own movie. Shin and Choi were able to escape from their guards while attending a film festival in Europe, where they took a taxi to the American embassy. They defected to America, where Shin was able to find work in Hollywood. He produced a children’s film called The Adventures of Galgameth, a remake of his own Pulgasari. He also directed The 3 Ninjas Knuckle Up and produced its follow-up: 3 Ninjas: High Noon at Mega Mountain. He and Choi were eventually repatriated into South Korea, where he spent his final years.

This cut n’ paste piece of ninjasploitation cheese starts with a bunch of Chinese people at a park getting kidnapped by ninja assassins. Actually, they kill the men and run off with the women. At one point, they break up a kung fu demonstration by former Venom Mob troupe member Sun Chien (The Five Deadly Venoms and The Plot) and kill him (unlike Instant Rage and Ninja in the Killing Fields, Sun Chien actually gets to fight a little). One of their kidnapping victims is Sylvia (Karen Yip, whose character in Girls in the Tiger Cage was named Kuan Mo-Hua), the daughter of a rich Caucasian guy (Kenneth Smythe, of Ninja’s Extreme Weapons and War City 3: The Extreme Project). Rich Caucasian Guy hires a female (and white) ninja named Jenny (Deborah Grant, of Vampire Raiders: Ninja Queen and Aces Go Places V) to infiltrate the ninja prisoner camp and free Sylvia. Oh, and the ninjas work for a dangerous man (Wayne Archer, of Bionic Ninja and Golden Ninja Invasion) who plans on selling the girls as white slaves to buyers all over the world.

Most of the ensuing film is taken from Girls in the Tiger Cage, only stopping for a few minutes here and there to show Jenny “watching” Sylvia’s interactions with her fellow inmates. Also, Tomas Tang and company do the thing where they have characters from both sets of footage have a conversation (despite different sets and backdrops), mainly in the case of Wayne Archer and the evil lecherous prison warden, played by perennial 1970s villain Chen Hung-Lieh (Cub Tiger from Hong Kong and Chivalrous Robber Lee San). Initially, Sylvia is the target of the Queen Bee inmate, played by Shen Yi (of Cave of Silken Web and The Angel Strikes Again). The two are at each other’s throats until Sylvia rescues the girl from a rock slide during forced labor—which includes both mining and running a sweatshop. Sylvia tries to escape numerous times (via the sewer, hiding in cafeteria waste, etc.), although each attempt ends in her re-capture and subsequent torture. She eventually escapes via helicopter, robbing the head ninja (Wayne Archer) of a girl to sell to sheiks in the Middle East. Girls in the Tiger Cage must set some sort of record for setting up the most opportunities for sleaze—including two group bath sequences and a sex scene between the Warden and a female inmate--and then pointedly not showing anything. The violence is tame. The torture is tame. Most of the nudity is covered by the actresses’ arms. This is definitely Vanilla WiP filmmaking.

The movie ends with one of the most goofy and over-the-top finales ever seen…in any movie. Jenny the Ninja faces off with the head ninja. It starts off with your basic katana battle, although Chiang Tao’s choreography is very much staged more like a Chinese sword fight than anything you’d see in Japanese martial arts. The two combatants then travel through a solid wall (a lá Kitty Pryde of the X-Men) into a house, where Jenny suddenly appears in belly dancer gear and starts performing a hypnotic dance of seduction. Once she has him where she wants him, she slices off his head with a whip…but the head re-attaches itself. They use their smoke bombs to teleport back into the woods, where they continue fighting. Sylvia’s father show up and pump his body completely full of lead. But he’s still not dead. Sylvia takes an RPG, writes a Taoist spell on it with her blood, and then one of the dad’s men fires it from a bazooka. Evidently, Taoist spells are capable of transforming rocket-propelled grenades into super-intelligent heat-seeking missiles. The rocket follows the guy around for several minutes, finally detonating when it traps him in a house. The end.

What? Do you need an analysis after reading that final paragraph?