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Ninja Phantom Heroes
(aka Ninja Phantom Heroes USA, Ninja Phantom Heros, Ninja Empire)
1988; directed by Bruce Lambert

Hailing from one of the kings of the 1980's straight to video Z-movie, Filmark International, Ninja Phantom Heroes is yet another cut-and-pasted effort from "director" Bruce Lambert -- which is not, as many sources point out, a pseudonym for Godfrey Ho, because Ho never worked on Filmark productions. Anyway, Lambert takes low budget white boy ninja antics and slaps them into Struggle for Leader, an equally low budget release helmed by B-lister Lee Chiu.

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Using the pseudonym of Bruce Lambert -- probably to try and throw US and European film distributors off of his scent -- producer Tomas Tang crafts his normal brand of magic here, featuring the story of a group of ninjas doing gunrunning for a Triad gang and Arabs. Yes, I'm sure that doesn't really make any sense, but this is Filmark we're talking about here, so we're lucky that there's any plot present as a whole. Actually, this is one of Filmark's more coherent films, mostly because they didn't use all that much of their own home-brewed footage here, instead having the original scenes from Struggle for Leader dominate the running time.

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As an early 1980's gangster movie, Struggle for Leader's not all that bad. Sure, it's very generic -- the genre was still waiting for John Woo's A Better Tomorrow to revitalize it. The story is straightforward and hold no surprises. And the wooden English dubbing is infuriatingly bad at points. But there's still some fun to be had here, especially when a very angry hitman played by perpetual heavy Johnny Wang Lung-Wei exacts some bloody revenge.

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Unfortunately, though, after any good scenes come on display here, the viewer is then "treated" to Filmark's usual well-worn playbook of silly drivel such as ninjas dressed in camouflage, yet still wearing brightly colored headbands with "NINJA" emblazoned upon them, employing "magic" like fifty cent smoke bombs. Yeah, it's funny for a little while, but it's ultimately a one-trick pony that barely manages to limp to the finish line.

RATING: 4

This movie is available from Amazon.

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