aka Chinese Super Ninja 2

• Directed by Lee Tso-Nan
• Written by Chang Sin Yie
• Starring
  • Yang Hui-Sang
  • Chen Kuan-Tai
  • Shing Yung-Peng

  Produced by Lin Ho Yin

By rights, this movie shouldn’t work. It’s a cheap, unbelievable mishmash or borrowed plotting, silly characterization, and over-the-top ninja stunts. Not nearly the cynical waste that, say, Ninja Phantom Heroes is, but one really shouldn’t expect it to be better than, say, The Furious or Shaolin Devil, Shaolin Angel — in fact, objectively, it should be quite bit worse.

Instead, though, this is one of those divine accidents, where everything wrong comes together to make something right. Like Starcrash or Plan 9 From Outer Space, somehow all of the pieces of crap spontaneously become something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a movie that makes me want to delete the text of the review and just give you an entire page of screencaps.

That’s the problem with lady ninjas: They just don’t want to blend.

Borrowing liberally from the same background that informed Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury (and which later also gave us Fist of Legend), out story is set during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the early days of the Twentieth Century. At least, it’s supposed to be, but apparently they only had maybe seven dollars for period costuming, so aside from the occasional ninja suit or Japanese soldier’s uniform, most everyone is dressed circa 1980. The clothes, and the accompanying shag-lite haircuts, makes it seem like the Japanese were squatting in Shanghai for eighty years.

Anyway, over in Japan, young Wu Hsaio-Hui (which sounds like “Wu Sha-Wei,” but the spelling’s right off the video box) has been training with a ninja clan for the last seventeen years, thanks to her father’s longstanding friendship with the ninja master. her final test involves her dressing in her bright red ninja suit, and fighting off scores of ninja underlings in a trek through the woods. Along the way, we get to see plenty of the ninja-magic falderall that we’ve come to know and love, such as wirework that defies the laws of physics with baldfaced aplomb. Hsaio-Hui also does a trick like Superman does in the Fortress of Solitude in Superman 2, making herself appear to be in three places at once. Always love to see another impossible trick added to the ninja bag. Plus, she’s got a gender-specific gimmick — when disarmed and surrounded, she does a Wonder Woman spin and magically exchanges her bright red ninja suit for a skimpy pink bikini, which she graciously shakes for her captors. The male ninjas can’t help but be overcome by lust (they’ve been too long in the barracks of this otherwise all-male ninja school, methinks), and leap on her, whereupon she teleports to safety.

Her final task requires her to pass by Koloda, the other star pupil (and yes, I know that “Koloda” can’t possibly be a Japanese name, but that’s exactly what it sounded like, the tape has no closing credits, and the IMDb has only minimal credit info, so live with it). despite his condescending manner to her, Hsaio-Hui manages to use both her ninja skills and her brains (and a magnet which inexplicably emits a high-pitched whine) to gain the goal of the test, a ninja badge.

No one suspects Peter Parker’s secret identity…

When it comes time to graduate her, though, Koloda pitches a fit to the master, mainly because Hsaio-Hui’s Chinese, and a woman, and he’s sore that she beat him. (I’d think that if he had any legitimate objections to her training, he had a full seventeen years to voice them.) He even tries to attack her as she leaves the stronghold, getting a slapdown from the Master for his efforts.

Why’s she leaving? Not only to seek her fortune; her father back in Shanghai has been killed. Ready for a chunk of backstory? Good. See, Hsaio-Hui’s betrothed to Li Tong, a moustachioed dandy with slicked-back hair who, five years ago, inherited the Grand Poobahship of the Sung-Yi clan from his father. In that time, however, he’s become an obsequious collaborator with the Japanese, and Hsaio-Hui’s father snuck into his house at night to force him to give up either his quisling ways or his miserable life. Unfortunately, thanks to Li Tong’s bodyguards, Dad left Li Tong’s house as kibble.

Hsaio-Hui immediately hooks up with the “revolutionaries” (somebody shoot the translator, as it’s kind of hard for resistance fighters to be “revolutionaries”) and swears vengeance on Li Tong. Boy, she sure is cute when she’s angry. Actually, she’s just plain cute as a basket of kittens, no matter how you cut it — a rare and desireable trait in a lady ninja. (Granted, the leader of the trio in Lady Ninja: Reflections of Darkness was mighty easy on the eyes, but that movie was also as irritating as cracker crumbs in your jockeys.)

That night, she goes over the wall into Li Tong’s grounds in her bright red ninja suit. (I was kind of hoping that the red suit was one of the handicap conditions of her graduation test, but no, that’s her permanent ninja attire, camouflage be damned! Might as well be wearing bells…) She’s immediately discovered, probably thanks in large part to her bright red ninja suit, and beset upon by Li Tong’s four idiosyncratic bodyguards. She only just barely escapes, thanks to a mysterious rescuer in a skull mask.

Somehow, words fail me.

Realizing that a single lady ninja in a bright red ninja suit may be inadequate, she sets about to recruit a few fellow females to train. Unfortunately, since she’s not the teacher she considers herself to be, one of her students ultimately turns to the Dark Side and… whoops, sorry, wrong movie. To make a long story short, she recruits a kung fu expert, a virgin (that’s really all we’re told about her), and a girl from the local brothel named Chi-Chi.

The next five minutes are the “comical training” sequence, with the girls straining in flexibility exercises and such. Given the sheer number of ropes used in this, it was almost like looking at a collection of old men’s adventure magazine covers, with beautiful women in skimpy clothes tied up for Nazi gorillas. And somehow mud wrestling is part of the core training regimen. Who knew?

We don’t get to see how they train for those mystical ninja powers, but the girls soon get them: In fact, Chi-Chi uses them in two scenes in quick succession. In one, she invites a fat man into the revolutionary hideout with an offer of marriage and shakes her moneymakers for him — then teleports out of his embrace. (No, the scene has nothing to do with anything at all; nevertheless, I can’t complain about its presence, given the quality of the shaking the moneymakers receive.) In the other, she comes out of the lake where she’s been practicing the old “breathing underwater through a reed” technique (wearing a bikini — probably the most blatantly anachronistic costuming in the whole movie) and attracts the attention of four buffoonish Japanese soldiers. She lies around on the grass, glistening and purring like she’s in a Swimsuit Issue photo shoot, and when they try to jump her, she teleports away, and she and her ninja sisters kill them all.

Now THAT’S a ninja suit!

That second scene, while unquestionably silly, actually impacts the plot, as Li Tong is given a dictum by the Japanese captain to bring the soldiers’ murderers to justice within three days. So battle is joined in earnest.

Much of the rest of the movie is concerned with taking out Li Tong’s four Japanese-provided bodyguards, each an indiosyncratic character — a girl, a super-strong bruiser, a rail-thin Japanese with a spider tattooed on his head, and a guy who uses a razor-edged boomerang and a spiderweb net. (As a revolutionary leader explains in a briefing, “From the information I could get, each one’s different. They’re individuals, with their own habits.” I guess all those counter-Borg strategies are right out the window, then?) The fights with the four of them have varying levels of novelty, with the most memorable being Hsaio-Hui and Kung Fu Girl in their skivvies, fighting in what appears to be a wrestling ring with two inches of baby oil on the mat. Hoo-WEE!

By the end, we’ve had further intrigues, some reversal in who our friends and enemies are, the revelation of the mysterious skullfaced man, and naturally a showdown between Hsaio-Hui and Koloda (who’s become personal bodyguard to the Japanese general) with all the ninja tricks you can imagine, plus a new one (Koloda spins into the ground and tunnels!). But we all know that nothing can overcome a lady ninja in her bright red ninja suit.

Cool — I can make two Spider-Man jokes in a single review!

The fight choreography is quite good — both technically precise, and flamboyantly interesting (as opposed to, say, The Furious, in which obviously expert fighters still delivered ho-hum battles). In fact, that’s what carries the whole movie: The flamboyance with which everything is carried out from beginning to end. The filmmakers may not have had much (they may not even have had as much as they thought they had), but the one thing they did have was plenty of energy, and they put it front and center in front of the camera. (Well, that and … you know.)

Movies that shouldn’t work but still do — it’s like finding a piece of driftwood that works perfectly as a coatrack, or a potato in the exact likeness of Art LaFleur. It’s a happy accident, a piece of found art; such movies are like food and air to people like me. Viva les lady ninjas!

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 29
• breasts: 0 (but they make sure you know they’re there)
• explosions: 31
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0