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If by the mention of the name Godfrey Ho, you think first and foremost
of these terribly made ninja
films starring Richard Harrison [Richard
Harrison bio - click here], you can't really be blamed because
he made tons of those, which were actually cut-and-paste jobs, combining
existing Asian movies (some but not all of them unreleased) with new
sloppily made ninja footage starring mainly Caucasian actors. On the basis
of these films, Ho was once dubbed as the Asian Ed Wood [Ed
Wood bio - click here], which does injustice to both men, as
while Ho was clearly more talented than Wood in terms of craftmanship, he
certainly lacked Wood's enthusiasm for filmmaking (and a few other
things). Truth is, Ho is quite a talented action filmmaker if one lets
him, and to blame
the lack of quality of his cut-and-paste ninja jobs solely on him actually
shows little more than ignorance towards other aspects of commercial
filmmaking, like budgeting, editing, producing, marketing and the like,
all things that are usually outside of the director's responsibility, and
if you like Ho want your film to be a commercial success rather than an
artistic masterpiece, you leave these aspects to those who are supposed to know
better, for better or worse. And fact is, despite their shoddy looks,
these ninja movies have become international successes. Besides all
that, Ho has proven himself to be quite capable a director away from his
cut-and-paste jobs, and has turned in quite a few cool action flicks - but
more about that later ... One important note before I pen the
man's life story though. The biographical information about Ho available
is sketchy at best, and in biography pieces about him, hard facts are
often clouded by the writers' opinions, so much so that in
some articles, rumours and made up stories vastly outweigh actual facts.
It's not made any easier by the fact that in the few interviews on hand (I
didn't actually speak to the man himself, maybe another day though ...),
Ho sometimes contradicts himself from interview to interview, sometimes
even in the same interview, which I blame not so much on him trying to
conceal something but on a bit of a hazy memory and the simple fact that
it is impossible to remember sometimes obscure facts about all of the 100+
films he has made during his hectic career. Still, it doesn't help my
research, nor do the endless number of pseudonyms which he used or which
were forced upon him, names like Robert Young, Godfrey Hall, or Joe
Livingstone, to name just a few. That all said, this article will probably not be the
definitive biographical account of the life and times of Godfrey Ho, this
still remains to be written, but an I hope valiant attempt to bring the
diffuse facts about him into order ...
Early Life, Early Career
Born Ho Chi Kueng in 1948 in Hong Kong, Godfey Ho was always
fascinated by films, so he entered filmschool at age 17, but back then he
studied acting rather than behind-the-camera work. Eventually, he went to
Canada to study film, but insufficient knowledge of English or French
brought him back to Hong Kong rather quickly.
In the 1960's,
Ho apparently worked as a bit player and a low-rank technician on
several long-forgotten movies before he hooked up with legendary
production company Shaw
Brothers. Once there, he hooked up with scriptwriting powerhouse
Ni Kuang, and did lots of (uncredited) writing for him. Ho quickly rose up
in the ranks though, and eventually he became the assistant director of
Hong Kong action icon Chang Cheh - for whom Ni Kuang wrote quite
regularly by the way - in the early 1970's, and remained with him pretty
much until he started a full-fledged directing career of his own.
During
their time together, Ho worked on quite a few of Chang Cheh's seminal
films, like Boxer from Shantung (1972, Chang Cheh, Pao Hsueh Li), Water
Margin (1972, Chang Cheh, Pao Hsueh Li, Wu Ma) and Blood Brothers
(1973, Chang Cheh). On several of these films he shared responsibilities
with a young John Woo - whose later career would differ considerably from
Godfrey Ho's, as Woo always was a kind of visionary while Ho never aspired
to be anything else than a craftsman. Of special interest among
Ho's films with Chang Cheh might
be Marco Polo (1975),
especially since it was his first encounter with Richard Harrison [Richard
Harrison bio - click here], a man who would be of quite some
importance later in Ho's career ...
Going to Korea
Godfrey Ho directed - or rather co-directed, together with Kuo Ting
Hung - his first film in 1974, when he was still assistant director to
Chang Cheh. The film in question, Paris Killers, was a cheap
production which was shot in Paris mainly to boost production values, and
for which Ho and his partners raised the money themselves just to make the
thing happening. Unfortunately, back then, Ho and his partners did not
know the first thing about the distribution side of the film business, so
they only managed to sell the movie to a few markets before it
disappeared. Even early on in his directorial career, Godfrey
Ho had no delusions about his greatness as a director, and he also was
down-to-earth enough to learn from the failure of his first film and grasp
the importance of distribution deals and similar technicalities. Also,
after the split from Shaw
Brothers, Ho knew exactly what he could and couldn't do, and his
time with Chang Cheh certainly gave him plenty of training in the action
genre. So, when Ho wanted to become a full-fledged director, he wasn't
aiming too high in terms of quality movies but hooked up with Asso
Asia, a distribution company owned by Joseph Lai and Tomas Tang,
and they offered him to direct a string of low budget martial arts films
in Korea, films made with a Korean cast and crew and co-directed by Korean
directors that would nevertheless deal with Chinese themes and would be
made to look Chinese. The thought behind this was that Hong Kong films
back then were popular worldwide, and with the fledgling home video
industry there was a new market right around the corner - yet these films
back then could be produced lots cheaper in Korea. Now of course, mock-Hong Kong movies would not
have sold very well in Hong Kong itself, so Asso
Asia (and its follow-up organisations, Joseph Lai's IFD
Films & Arts and Tomas Tang's Filmark,
which both took over parts of Ho's Korean output after Lai and Tang parted
ways) hardly ever distributed these films domestically and aimed for
international deals - and quite successfully so, I might add.
Godfrey
Ho's Korean movies - films like Enter the Invincible Hero (1977), Dragon,
the Young Master (1978), Golden Dragon, Silver Snake (1979), Fury
at Shaolin Temple/Raiders of Shaolin Kung Fu (1979), Magnificent
Wonderman (1979), Dragon, the Hero/Dragon on Fire
(1979), Dragon's Showdown (1980), Snake Strikes Back (1981),
The Grandmaster of Shaolin Kung Fu (1981), Bruce Lee's Ways of
Kung Fu (1982), Raiders of Buddhist Kung Fu (1982), Incredible
Shaolin Thunderkick (1982), Martial
Monks of Shaolin Temple (1982), Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger
(1982), Leopard Fist Ninja (1982), Fist of Golden Monkey (1983),
Champ Against Champ (1983) or Revenge of the Drunken
Master (1984) - are all competently made period action films, but competently
made in terms of craftmanship and considering their low budgets and hectic
production schedules. In fact, Ho directed a whole lot more films in Korea
than those mentioned here - the true number of which will probably never
be determined - and he usually had a Korean co-director, who for some
reason most of the time remained unmentioned. Nowadays, these films are
perhaps best known for their wild mix of genre mainstays (including the
frequent use of ninjas for no apparent reason) and their total negligence
of historical or even cultural contexts - though all these films are
supposed to be period pieces set in China -, but at the same time they are
also full of action, fast paced and to the point to remain entertaining -
at least in a superficial sort of way.
Many of these films have
Korean Bruce Lee-imitator Dragon Lee in the lead, but actually, these
films keep the Bruce Lee-angle relatively low compared to brucesploitation
pics from other studios. Another regular in Ho's Korean output was Korean
Tae Kwon Do-star Hwang Jang Lee, a fixture in martial arts cinema at
least since his appearances opposite Jackie Chan in Snake in the
Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master (both 1978, Yuen Woo-Ping). Thing
is, in the early 1980's, the martial arts genre started to change,
especially when production company Cannon proved you could turn a
(sloppily made) martial arts movie with a mostly Caucasian cast into an
international hit with their Enter the Ninja (1981, Menahem Golan) starring Franco Nero [Franco
Nero bio - click here]. Now that got Godfrey Ho and the heads
of IFD
Films & Arts and Filmark
thinking ...
Cut-and-Paste Ninjas
By the early-to-mid 1980's, the market for period martial arts flicks
of the kind Godfrey Ho was making in Korea had rather dried up, so a
new recipe was needed, and Ho quickly came up with an idea lifted directly
from above-mentioned Enter the Ninja
- to make contemporary ninja movies with Caucasian actors (or gweilos, as
they are pejoratively called in Hong Kong) in the leads. Now that might
sound like an ambitious plan, but really it isn't: The gweilo actors did
not have to know any martial arts because they would don ninja costumes
including full facial masks in every fight and thus could easily be
substituted by stuntmen, it also wasn't too important that they knew how
to act because these films were action- and not character- or story-driven,
so pretty much everyone Caucasian could be in these films (and in fact, Ho
often hired pure amateurs, which sometimes painfully shows) - and to keep
costs to a minimum, Ho's ninja films usually featured massive footage from
other existing Asian films (some unfinished, some unreleased, some released
around the world) that have no relation to the films' main plotlines but
serve as perfect filling material to bring the films to feature length. One
has to understand here that Ho's ninja-films were never meant for domestic
release, where gweilos playing ninjas must have seemed even more bizarre
than Koreans pretending to be Chinese, but everywhere else in the world and
especially in the West, the ninja films, despite their low budgets and
schizophrenic storylines, soon became a fixture on the shelves of all
video rentals ... When Ho came up with his ninja-concept, Asso
Asia, the company which had sent him to Korea, was no more, but
its two bosses, Joseph Lai and Tomas Tang had each set up their own
production outfit, IFD
Films & Arts and Filmark,
respectively. Godfrey Ho remained loyal to both men though, and thus he
sold his idea to both of them.
With the lack of a complete and precise
filmography of Godfrey Ho, it's impossible to say which of the producers
was the first to make a cut-and-paste ninja movie on Ho's idea, but it was
definitely IFD
Films & Arts that cut the bigger piece out of the ninja pie,
simply because it had something Filmark
didn't have or didn't want to afford: Star power.
In the mid-1980's,
probably with Ninja Thunderbolt (1984), B-actor Richard Harrison [Richard
Harrison bio - click here] - who like Enter the Ninja's
Franco Nero [Franco
Nero bio - click here] had a past in spaghetti Westerns - launched his career as a
movie ninja, making dozens of ninja movies with Godfey Ho as well as with
other directors at IFD
Films & Arts. Now Harrison might not have been the greatest of
actors, but he brought a certain dignity to his roles, and a certain
professionalism to the making of these films that made him a good
collaborator on these films. The more noteworthy of his ninja-movies were
probably Ninja
Terminator (1985), Ninja the Protector (1986), Diamond
Ninja Force (1986), Ninja Dragon (1986), Ninja
Squad (1987), Hitman the Cobra (1987) and Ninja: Silent
Assassin/Black Ninja (1987).
In many of these he plays a
character called Ninja
Master Gordon, though these films have no direct narrative
connection to one another. In later days, Richard Harrison claimed he was
tricked by Ho and Joseph Lai into appearing in quite that many films
because he had only ever signed on for one film. This is of course pretty
much impossible given the big number of ninja movies he was in and his change of appearance, hairdo etc from one film to the next - but it might
very well be the truth that thanks to running-time-stretching
cut-and-paste techniques, more than one film could have been squeezed out
of every so-called film Harrison had been making.
Another star - or at
least better known actor - Godfrey Ho had at hand for his ninja films was
Bruce Baron, who was in Ninja Champion (1985), Challenge of the Ninja (1986) and The Ultimate
Ninja (1987) among others,
but he didn't match Richard Harrison's charisma or drawing power, and he
was much more difficult to work with, so he was never used as much as
Harrison. Black Adolphe Beni, who was in Ninja: Silent Assassin/Black
Ninja (1987), was probably IFD
Films & Arts' attempt to go blaxploitation. This black
actor had been quite a star in his native Cameroon and all over Africa,
but in the international market, his marquee value was rather limited ...
yet Godfrey Ho managed to lure him over to Filmark
as well to make Top Mission (1987). Apart from Beni, Filmark
also occasionally cast Stuart Smith, another of the more prominent
names in IFD
Films & Arts' stable of actors, for example in Ho's Ninja
in the Killing Fields (1984), but in all, the company concentrated
more on subject (this being ninja) than on names. Ho's more prominent
ninja-films for Filmark
were (to pick just a few) Tough Ninja the Shadow Warrior (1986), Shadow
Killers Tiger Force (1986), Ninja Fantasy (1986), Ninja
Phantom Heroes (1987), Ninja Extreme Weapons (1987), Ninja
and the Warriors of Fire (1987), Empire of the Spiritual Ninja
(1987), and Death Code: Ninja (1987) - and the trashy titles of
these films usually do the movies justice ... In respect to Filmark,
it should maybe be noted that there are various rumours about its owner
Tomas Tang, one of which claims Tomas Tang was actually an alias of
Godfrey Ho, who used the alias to make films away from Joseph Lai and IFD
Films & Arts, who had him under contract - which doesn't make
too much sense though, because since Tomas Tang was the production partner
of Joseph Lai in Asso
Asia, Lai would either have noticed that this Tang is not the Tang
he worked with back in the day, or if Ho was Tang all along, then Lai would
have been the first to not be fooled by the Tang-alias. Other sources
claim Tang was any number of men, whoever felt like being him, but fact is
that someone died in a fire at the Filmark-office
in 1992 who was identified as Tomas Tang. Maybe it's this somewhat (but
not really) mysterious death that has sparked all the rumours in the first
place ... A few words to Ho's ninja films for both IFD
Films & Arts and Filmark
(which were mainly distinguishable by the presence or absence of Richard
Harrison in the first place, and he was by far not in all IFD
Films & Arts ninja movies): They are very bad, only very few
of the actors can actually act (and Ho typically cast tourists or
businessmen mainly on the basis of their white skin colour), their plots
were badly conceived and often failed to make too much sense (though
usually it was something about supreme ninja power), the quality of
the fight scenes ranged from poor to just about average, the films'
budgetary constraints were plainly visible, the ninja rituals and ninja
code they featured were completely made up, and their depiction of ninja
magic (like magically changing into ninja costumes or rendering oneself
invisible) were ridiculous in the hilarious sense of the word. And then there were of course
these ninja costumes: While usually, ninjas are portrayed in black, here
they wear all colours of the rainbow - including, it should be pointed
out, camouflage -, and in several, not all films though, they also wear
headbands with the word ninja printed on them, just to avoid
confusion. In all, these costumes just like something out of a cheap
carneval store - which might exactly be what they are. Then there are of
course those other films that are interwoven with the ninja plot:
sometimes those are urban gangster and martial arts movies that somehow
ring true with the ninja portions of the plot, as in Ninja
Terminator for example, at other times though, these films have
nothing whatsoever to do with ninjas, as in The Ultimate
Ninja, which features a (probably Thai) revenge story that even at
one point makes a shift of 20 years into the future while the ninja plot
does not duplicate that shift. In another instance, Diamond Ninja Force,
a horror film builds the backbone of the ninja footage, which only makes
very little sense. In other instances, even dramas or women-in-prison
movies were used to bring the films to feature length. It seems these films
were stuffed with whatever other stuff was available on the market at any
given moment, and only after buying was a story built around them to make
the new films. When saying Godfrey Ho's ninja-films are bad,
one also has to admit they are hilarious - at least if you are a bad movie
masochist just like I am, you can't help but loving them, even against
better judgement. Their bad costumes, bad acting, absurd stories,
schizophrenic appearance and whatnot have an almost hypnotic effect to
them - you know it is bad, and yet you just can't turn your head away ... It
should be noted here that usually, the lack of (objective) quality of
these films is usually blamed on Godfrey Ho and him alone - and certainly,
part of the blame is his, but it should also be noted that both IFD
Films & Arts and Filmark
also employed other directors to make cut-and-paste movies at the time,
and it's anything but certain that Ho had much influence on the editing of
his films - one mustn't forget that Ho didn't consider himself an auteur
but mainly a craftsman who couldn't care less about a director's cut
and the like. It's not even clear that Ho had any influence on the choice
of the films interwoven with his own material, or the choice of the costumes, and he certainly had no
influence on the films' budgets (or lack thereof). Generally speaking, for
him the films were just hack jobs to put bread on the table, and he was at
least as able as the next man to make films under the rather poor
circumstances his ninja films were made under - and eventually, he
produced virtual gems of bad taste ...
Considering they were just made as action quickies for the video rental
crowd, it's almost fascinating that many of Ho's ninja epics are still
around and have been re-released on tape and DVD countless times over the
years. Only the audience for these films has actually changed: It's no
longer the undistinguishing action fan wanting a quick fix who watches these
films but the cult crowd (or at least a certain segment thereof) that sees
these films' qualities in their shortcomings and watches them for their
absurdities and almost otherworldly depictions of life as we know it. And
I'm pretty certain that at least in one instance, a scene from one of
Godfrey Ho's ninja films, Ninja
Terminator, has found its way into an Oscar winning (best
screenplay) movie, Juno
(2007, Jason Reitman): The scene in which Ninja
Terminator's lead Richard Harrison [Richard
Harrison bio - click here] makes a seminal phonecall from a Garfield-telephone
is perfectly mirrored in the scene in which Juno as played by Ellen Page
tries to get an appointment for her abortion via her hamburger-telephone.
Now I have no clue if this was a conscious reference (nor do I know if my
claim is an outright lie - at least it wasn't meant to be), and if I ever
get to talk to director Reitman or screenwriter Diablo Cody, I doubt this
question will be high up on my list - it's just a beautiful thought that
elements of Ho's ninja oeuvre from the 1980's could have found their way
into relatively highbrow and hip movies from the latter part of the 2000's
...
Of course, the ninja hype could not go on forever, and by the late
1980's it was actually already on the decline, which did not cause Ho and
his employers at both IFD
Films & Arts and Filmark
to give up their wicked ways of making movies - and to be quite honest,
why should it? Instead they just adapted their cut-and-paste techinques to
other, not too different genres, with variable success, though rarely as
financially rewarding as the ninja-series.
The one logical step was of course to adapt the ninja genre for the
kiddie market with the Thunder Ninja Kids-series starting in
1990, a tactic that in itself is a bit of a rip-off of the Lucky
Kids- and the Lucky Seven-series from the 1980's - not
that Ho or his producers would have minded too much.
Then there were of course the kickboxer films: After ninjas had gone
out of fashion, for one reason or another kickboxing had become incredibly
popular especially in the West, the prime market of IFD
Films & Arts and Filmark
- and thus Godfrey Ho was making films like Kicking Buddha (1990), Kickboxer:
The Fighter, the Winner (1991), Kickboxer King (1991), Robo-Kickboxer
- Power of Justice (1991), Little Kickboxer (1992), Kickboxer
from Hell (1992) and Kickboxer Against the Odds (1992) for his
employers. He also tried his hands on superhero cinema with the
unfortunately rather obscure Catman in Lethal Track (1990) and Catman
in Boxer's Blow (1993). All these films were done in the cut-and-paste
tradition of the ninja series, as mentioned above and are about just as
enjoyable (in a good or a bad way, you decide!).
Ho's best (funniest) non-ninja cut-and-paste flick though is Robo
Vampire from 1988, for which the expression film is almost too
small a word - it's an experience. To give you an idea about the very
weird quality of the film: It's a mix of RoboCop (1987,
Paul Verhoeven), a very serious film about a cop who has been turned into a
robot, and Mr
Vampire (1985, Ricky Lau), a pretty funny film about hopping
corpses. Now these two genres don't go well together, as you can probably
imagine, yet they were merged anyways, but not (as in other cases)
because pre-existing material from another film necessitated the inclusion
of certain plot elements into the movie, nope, the hopping corpse- and robot-cop-elements were all shot specifically
for this movie, so the viewer
is confronted with a police robot battling it out with the hopping dead on
purpose. The obligatory pre-existing snippets spliced into this one by
the way are from a Thai mercenary movie and are almost impossible to work
alongside the newly shot footage. Now I have no idea what Godfrey Ho and
whoever else were thinking when making/editing this movie, but the result
is unlike everything you have ever seen - which is not exactly a good
thing maybe, but a so-bad-it's-good thing.
Of course, the era of cut-and-paste movies had to come to an end
eventually, for one because with the beginning of the 1990's, the audience
perception of and expectations in Hong Kong movies had begun to shift, thanks
to many high quality films produced there and distributed worldwide that
differed significantly from the image of Hong Kong cinema created in the
West by way too many inferior B-movies and cut-and-paste epics in the
previous decade. Especially the high octane action movies by Godfrey Ho's
former colleague John Woo which even impressed the arthouse crowd are
worth a mention here. Also Hollywood had found out they could do bad martial
arts movies starring Caucasian actors for the video rental crowd just as
well (or just as badly) as their Hong Kong rivals, and they began to take
over the market in the latter part of the 1980's. Plus, big budget Hollywood
began targeting the undistinguishing action crowd, once prime consumer of
Ho's cut-and-paste films, more and more from the 1990's onwards, with
films that were not much better than Ho's, but cost about hundred times as
much - but they also had a considerable marketing budget behind them.
All this eventually brought the production of Godfrey Ho's
cut-and-paste movies to a grinding halt ... and given the overall poor
quality and the amazing number he has made of them, it's probably best
that way ...
Moving Up in Quality
Godfrey Ho must have foreseen the eventual decline of the
cut-and-paste movies he was working on for quite some years, as even in
1989 and 1990, when he was still working on ninja movies on a massive
scale, he made 3 films outside the genre (and away from both IFD
Films & Arts and Filmark),
the cop-movies Angel Enforcers (1989) and Princess Madam/Under
Police Protection (1990) and the female assassin flick Lethal
Panther/Deadly
China Dolls (1990). All three movies are of course no works of art
but formula movies of the girls with guns-variety, but they are
well-conceived, well-written and are made out of one piece instead of
several films hastily cobbled together.
Especially Lethal
Panther is a pretty remarkable film inasmuch as it shows what a
talented filmmaker Godfrey Ho can be given the opportunity. You see, Lethal
Panther is not just a good film for someone who has spent the last
five years making inferior ninja movies, Lethal
Panther is a really good action film, it's incredibly well-paced,
features a nice and involving storyline that even got heart, great action
setpieces, and a light-footed directorial effort that's essentially
flawless ... unfortunately, Godfrey Ho would never again reach such
heights, but then again, Lethal
Panther is really good.
In 1992, Godfrey Ho was
hired to do a sequel to the notorious war torture movie Men
Behind the Sun (1988, Mou Tun Fei), Men
Behind the Sun 2: Laboratory of the Devil. Interestingly, Ho's
film is not so much a sequel but a remake of the original Men
Behind the Sun, even replicating that movies most gruesome special
effects - many critics by the way claimed that Ho simply took the most
gruesome scenes out of Men
Behind the Sun and put them into his movie in his own
cut-and-paste-style, but if you watch these films back to back you can
clearly see this is not the case, all the effects sequences were newly
(re-)staged. Interestingly, Ho's film, just like the original a torture
porn about unspeakable Japanese atrocities in Manchuria turing World War
II, won more acclaim from the critics and is widely considered the better
film of the two - though that's not saying very much given the
sensationalist style and questionable qualities of the first one.
That
all said, Ho's work on Men
Behind the Sun 2: Laboratory of the Devil was at least good enough
to get him back for another installment, Men
Behind the Sun 3: A Narrow Escape (1994), which is a direct sequel
of the second film inasmuch as it shows Uni 731, the Japanese research
team that was invovled in the most gruesome human experiments in the first
two films, on the run, with a self-produced plague virus set free among
them ... Ho's Men
Behind the Sun films were reasonable successes, but he didn't
find himself nearly as at home in the torture porn genre as he did in the
action genre, and thus when a fourth (totally unrelated) movie, Black
Sun: The Nanking Massacre, was made in 1995, the director of the
original, Mou Tun Fei, was back in the director's chair. The film was
rather a disappointment though.
After his Men
Behind the Sun films, Ho returned to the action genre with Deadly
Target/Fatal Target (1994) starring
Yukari Oshima and The First Assignment (1995), two ok but less
than special genre movies, but it was already in 1993, when the film Honour and Glory
- filmed in between the two Men
Behind the Sun movies - marked Godfrey Ho's first collaboration with Cynthia Rothrock, a former
karate champ and multiple black belt bearer, and one of the very few
Caucasian action stars who had their breakthroughs in Asia before making
it (relatively) big in her native USA.
Given Rothrock's history in
martial arts, it's hardly surprising that Honour and Glory is a cop
movie of the martial arts variety, typical mediocre genre stuff (especially when
compared to the outstanding Lethal
Panther) - but successful enough, and obviously Rothrock and Ho
got along well enough to work with each other again two more times over the
years: Undefeatable (1993) was a rape.and.revenge movie of the
martial arts variety, with Cynthia Rothrock of course playing the avenger,
while in Manhattan Chase (2000), Rothrock - by 2000 definitely past
her prime - plays a cop out for revenge.
Fade Out on a Bright Note
Manhattan Chase was Godfrey Ho's
last movie as a director, and while it was ok, it wasn't one of his
better ones and certainly not a fitting swansong for Ho - but despite
retiring from filmmaking, he hasn't gone lost to the film world, quite the contrary, since the late 1990's, Ho has been teaching filmmaking
at various Hong Kong organisations, most recently the Hong Kong Film
Academy. Now this has been a point of ridicule for many mal-informed
film critics and wannabe critics, who merely judge Ho by the quality of
his ninja movies and are totally blind to the fact that Ho indeed was
always a director who could get things done, no matter how poor the
circumstances - and thus he is in my eyes more than able to teach aspiring directors
the craft of filmmaking - not the art of filmmaking of course, but then
again you can't teach how to create art, you only can teach a craft, and
sometimes, under ideal circumstances (as was the case with afore-praised Lethal
Panther), craft can evolve into something more ...
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