New York Ninja (1984/2021)

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Flack
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New York Ninja (1984/2021)

Post by Flack »



In 1984, director John Liu began work on a movie titled New York Ninja. For reasons lost to time, after principal filming was completed, Liu got on the first plane to Vietnam and promptly retired from the business, abandoning his film in the process. The footage went into storage and the film was never finished.

In 2019, an employee working for film restorers and distributors Vinegar Syndrome discovered they had the original New York Ninja film footage in their storage archives. VS employee Kurtis Spieler got the greenlight to edit the original footage and ultimately release the film. Turning the discovered footage into a movie that makes sense was not easy. Some of the scenes were missing, some appeared to be rough takes, and as he got closer to the end it appeared the film might not have even been finished. On top of all that, no audio recordings existed, which meant that all the dialog would need to be created from scratch, along with a soundtrack. Instead of combining the footage chronologically, Spieler took all the scenes, recut and reordered them, and then hired voice actors to record all new dialog. The end result is New York Ninja (2021).

The film begins when a member of a TV camera crew (Liu) discovers his girlfriend/wife is pregnant. Sixty seconds later, a violent street gang slits her throat and jabs a knife into her belly for good measure. The killers are working for the Plutonium Killer, who has gangs roaming New York City and kidnapping women to turn into prostitutes.

I think?

New York Ninja, no matter how you edit the footage together, doesn't make a lot of sense. Lui becomes the New York Ninja and, dressed in white, takes to the streets of NYC to disassemble the organized gang responsible for kidnapping women and the death of his true love. At one point he rescues a 10-year-old kid who's being shook down by grown ass men for his lunch money, and later Liu tracks down the police chief (I think?) and wonders why nothing is being done to solve his wife's murder. It doesn't help that a lot of these people don't seem to have names in the film (including Liu, the lead character), making it hard to keep track of who is who.

If plot is not the film's main attraction then it must be the all the ninja action, at least one would think. Liu is obviously trained in the martial arts, but it doesn't appear anyone else is -- nor does it appear they know how to fight, or if there was even a fight choreographer on the set. Many of the fight scenes look like teenagers pretending to be professional wrestlers, attacking with slow kicks and punches that don't go anywhere near their intended targets. And then -- maybe intentional, maybe due to the chop-socky editing -- weird shit happens, like when the New York Ninja suddenly dons roller skates and skates away from his enemies, only to be running on foot again in the next scene. It's tough to tell if the movie was originally intended to be tongue-in-cheek or if that was just a by product of all the editing.

What further confuses the tone is the voice acting, which is played completely straight. Re-editor Spieler read the actors' lips the best he could, replacing the exact lines when he could and matching syllables when he couldn't. To fill in some of the exposition there's some off-camera voice work and a couple of title cards. I've seen worse voice dubbing on legitimate film releases so I've got no problem with that.

The film's biggest problem is the film. There are all kinds of weird things, like people videotaping the ninja with comically large 80's-style VHS cameras, that never pay off. The kidnapped women, we learn, are strapped to walls in an underground cave that resembles the set of a Motley Crue video. And when one of the actors removes his face (!) revealing himself to be someone else, I... don't even know what to say.

I'm a fan of 80s ninja films and I suppose that this final cut of New York Ninja is better than losing the film forever, but this is a case where the concept, idea, and effort are better than the final cut.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

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AArdvark
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Re: New York Ninja (1984/2021)

Post by AArdvark »

This sounds like it was intended to be a comedy, or maybe satire. Or possibly a lot of New York Ninja cocaine was involved

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