City Ninja (1986)

Today's movie is City Ninja,

Title Card

This was a strange mash-up of a movie. The main stars of this movie are Michael Chan and Casanova Wong, those names are either enough to get your interest or dissuade you from continuing further. But with out further ado, I present my review of City Ninja to you.




In a surprising turn of events this one actually has ninjas!

This is from the beginning of the movie, and aside from establishing the necklace that our heroes are after it seems to be from another movie entirely.

 

 We open the movie with this guy running through the forest from said ninja.

 They encounter this guy who receives the necklace from the white dude and proceeds to run off to keep the necklace safe. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for his, he is soon forced into an awesome fight scene with the Ninjas and promptly kicks their butts in a cool fight scene that is one of the highlights in this confusing movie. After this sequence these characters are not seen again. Except for the white guy who returns in the opening credits who fights the ninjas in a sequence that reuses the same clips over and over. Then that's it for them.

 Over the course of the next few minutes we are introduced to the main of this piece.

"Hero" #1

Michael Chan (Chan Wai Man)

A sleazy boxer who sleeps around and cheats on his girlfriend. He gets framed for murder and is sent after the necklace which is in Korea in the hands of our second hero.

 Hero #2

Casanova Wong ( Ka Sat Fat)

He has the necklace and is only to part with it for 200,000 American so he can marry his girlfriend. Anyway this guy is fun to watch, and throughout the movie a lot of his fights are staged in a manner reminiscent of Jackie Chan. There is one sequence where he uses his girlfriends legs as against his enemies in a pretty lighthearted fight scene.

Honestly though this one is more softcore porn with a total of 5 sex scenes and 4 bath/shower scenes. And none shot very memorably.

 Also this is very confusing and hard to follow movie because none of the twists make sense at all. For instance after Michael Chan is framed for the murder of his female manager, who he was sleeping with, he gets sent to Korea where he inexplicably turns bad and into a gangster boss.

See? He's wearing a suit! Surely a sign of evil

  He kills off one of the main bad guys who's name is Red Hair, because his hair is red, GET IT?

I'm not certain but I think it's a wig.

 So after he kills Red Hair he orchestrates the kidnapping of Casanova Wong's girlfriend from her kidnappers. So after this he stuffs her into a box and lures Casanova Wong into a warehouse to fight where, from what I can tell, Casanova kills her by delivering a flying kick, missing Michael Chan, and hitting the box she was in. I was thoroughly confused by this point. Overcome with grief Casanova picks up the body of his girlfriend and attempts to walk out, but the evil Michael Chan attacks the distracted Casanova and kills him with a kick to the throat, at least I think that's what happened because the find ends on a freeze frame. The next scene is of Chan back in Hong Kong and being arrested for the murder of his manager.

 So if my review seems disjointed it's because that's how the movie was, very disjointed and jumbled. But it had several awesome fight scenes, mostly thanks to Casanova Wong who is now on my list of actors to watch out for.

Now a little history on the movie. I did a little digging because I like to know stuff about what I am watching and I discovered that this most likely 2 movies mashed together.  

The Sequences that featured Casanova Wong were probably from "Hwaya" (1983) a Korean kung fu movie that featured Michael Chan as the bad guy.          

The rest of the movie is most likely from a never completed movie starring Michael Chan as a boxer. And in order to salvage their losses the studio that bankrolled the uncompleted movie decided to mix and match footage from their project with the aforementioned Korean production. Now as is par for the course with these types of productions, the title history gets a little confusing with it being known by several different titles.

In addition to City Ninja  Here is a list of other titles that I have found in relation to the movie.

Tou qing ke  

Ninja Strike 
Ninja Holocaust