In monthly column The A-to-Z of Trash, bad movie lover Eliza Janssen takes us on an alphabetically-ordered trip through the best bits of the worst films ever. This month, hilarious 1984 martial arts movie New York Ninja is an inspiring tale of forensic filmmaking, rediscovered decades after it was forgotten. It’s now blessedly available to watch on Tubi.
A set of film reels from 1984 are discovered in a lab, with between six to eight hours of unassembled footage. There’s no credits, leaving much of the cast and crew a mystery. No scripts or storyboards. Worst of all, no audio. What was there, however, was special enough to merit an awe-inspiring feat of cinematic plastic surgery: a ninja rollerskating across Times Square, a henchman who looks like Daniel Radcliffe and bites his rattail before going into combat, and enough rose-adorned romantic angst to remind one of The Room if it featured more ass kicking.
It was cult film distribution company Vinegar Syndrome who took ownership of 1984’s incomplete New York Ninja, and did the painstaking forensic work (and tireless lipreading) to Frankenstein the forgotten feature into a 2021 release. The love, effort, and archeological genius involved is enough to make me emotional, and so I can’t dismiss New York Ninja as merely a so-bad-it’s-good romp. It’s really two movies: the unintentionally hilarious martial arts mess that original director John Liu left to rot for reasons unknown, and “re-director” Kurtis M. Spieler’s thoughtful restoration. Like every great or memorable movie, it’s actually a documentary of itself. It’s also an absolute banger to watch with drunken friends.
Liu, an esteemed martial artist from the low-budget Taiwanese action scene, directs and stars as the titular masked vigilante. The protagonist’s name is also John Liu. Probably. His craft behind the camera is undeniably clumsy, but there are some startlingly immediate moments thanks to the film’s Big Apple setting: grimy subway chases, roundhouse kicks below the Brooklyn Bridge, and an opening shot that lingers lovingly on the World Trade Center. When John’s wife is slain by hoodlums working for sinister sex trafficker the Plutonium Killer, the guy doesn’t weep quietly over her photo. No; he downward kicks through a table of her memorabilia, and later leaps into the air in the splits while hollering “WHY?!!” at the heavens.
John’s a sound guy at a local TV news station, and as reports roll in of more women being killed and abducted, he picks up his katana and shuriken to violently track the trail of street crime all the way to the top. The action scenes are solidly choreographed and laughably repetitive, all kicking off with some poor shoulder-padded, wigged-up broad getting menaced by thugs. Our beloved ninja tragically only uses his skates to dispatch these goons once, but on foot or wheels he nevertheless accrues Spiderman-esque local hero status, attracting a flock of kids with ‘I LOVE NY NINJA’ T-shirts and posters wherever he goes.
The sadly now-anonymous cast of New York Ninja are uniformly colourful, Rattail with his cane and signature hairstyle being the MVP. His boss the Plutonium Killer is a riot, too, a sun-fearing freak in a limousine who’ll interrupt the film’s action every ten minutes or so with bizarre solo scenes in which he moans and vibrates above a glowing light, his flesh sloughing off and on again. When I was first treated to the film at Fantastic Film Festival, the abruptness of these unexplained, somewhat masturbatory villain scenes made the audience piss themselves with laughter. But one must wonder: was there some original version of Liu’s story in which the pointless interludes made perfect sense?
New York Ninja forces you to think like this, as a detective rummaging through the bloody remains of mangled story beats. A reporter is tasked with uncovering the city’s sex trafficking ring: when her boss remarks “do your job”, she replies, “certainly, it’s my job.” Did Liu, for whom English was presumably a second language, script this inanity? Or has the re-director Spieler left in a clunky lipreading for our postmodern, ironically appreciative tastes? The dubbed recreation’s cast of voice actors includes legends of kung fu cinema (Don “The Dragon” Wilson! Cynthia Rothrock!) and genre icons (Linnea Quigley, adult actress Ginger Lynn Allen, and Michael Berryman, a returning fave of this column), and each of them sound like they’re playing it straight. Speaking to The New York Times, Spieler claimed his only goal was to respect the botched source material: “we’re not trying to play up the silliness because it already comes through naturally.”
I call foul on this just a bit, as the reworked movie’s comic timing is just too on point—the weirdest and most unique moments plucked from a tangled mess of unedited negatives, curated and rewired to a contemporary sense of humour. For instance, there are errant F-bombs from henchmen with masked mouths, and one heavy taunts a victim by asking “hey baby, how ‘bout some head?” before delivering a headbutt. These are assumptions about creative intent on my part that are far more unfounded than Vinegar Syndrome’s exhaustive efforts. But they speak to the delicious guessing game of how New York Ninja engages its new audience: teasing us to fill in the missing pieces, to marvel at the second team of filmmakers’ surgical mastery.
We might only ever be able to enjoy the film as a simulacra, a remix of something that (being generous here) could’ve been better and more serious than it appears today. But, as you log in to Tubi and see Liu clack around on his skates, I’m sure you’ll agree the rescued end product is more than good enough.
