Taiwan Black Movies at IFD & Filmark ( Part 26): Ninja Operation Knight & Warrior Unpublished!

My many trips to Hong Kong during the late 90's and the first years of the new century allowed me to collect enough information about IFD & Filmark movies and the people who worked on them. Of course, the spanish video releases were also a very valuable help on this task for unveiling the true story behind these productions. But at one point I found myself in a dead-end situation. If I wanted to continue researching about Lai & Tang productions I needed the help of several people that in some ways were related not to IFD or Filmark but to Hong Kong in general and Hong Kong cinema in particular. And here is where people like Teddy Wong, editor of HKMDB, enters. 

Teddy knows very well my interest on those movies bought by IFD & Filmark and I think he enjoys my uncontrolled reactions of happiness & anxiety when a movie has eventually been discovered or "unmasked". I know the work of this humble blog is just a hobby but offering some information that has never been published is something else...it is like a small discovery of something that was practically impossible few years ago. And that's the feelings I enjoy most!. So, after many years of being looking for the taiwanese movie used on IFD Ninja Operation: Knight & Warrior, at last, we can say the "Quest" has been accomplished. Ninja Operation: Knight &Warrior has been unveiled!!!!!

 

 The story of how Ninja Operation: Knight & Warrior was done was explained quite well by Godfrey Ho himself on an interview my friends from Nanarland.com did to him. Please click HERE to see the full interview. But we didn't know what movie was behind it. Ninja Operation: Knight and Warrior was done using a taiwanese film titled A GIRL ROGUE. 

 A Girl Rogue was directed in 1984 by Chiu Chan Kwok who has on his credits some important & popular films like Gun n´ Rose directed by Clarence Ford with Andy Lau, Alan Tang & Simon Yam as main stars along others like Leon Lai or Loretta Lee. We also owed Mr Chiu funny movies such as Lucky Seven or several movies of the Kung Fu Kids franchise. But as always, IFD also bought another movie from Mr Chiu that were released under new titles with Ninja fotage. So, checking Chiu Chan Kwok profile on HKMDB we can see he was also the director of the taiwanese movies used on Ninja Showdown. 

As always on these kind of posts, what we need now is finding a copy of A Girl Rogue to check & enjoy it on its original form. Thanks again to the hard and priceless effords of Teddy Wong and special mention here to Michael Kistner who has been the one who made this entry possible. Michael is also an editor of HKMDB and shares with me a passion for finding the movies used by IFD and Filmark.

Ninja Operation :Knight & Warrior on Widescreen

This blog was born just in order to give some credit to the movies produced & distributed by IFD / Filmark, Godfrey Ho, Joseph Lai & Tomas Tang among others. I was tired of reading & listening these movies were the "bottom of the barrell", "the worst  films ever" and similar expressions said by people who generally don't know how those movies were done or by people who watch Ninja Terminator looking for Arnie....said in a different way, we can't watch 55 days in Pekin expecting to see a Wong Fei Hung movie...so, we can't see an IFD ninja movie expecting to see a  ninja movie like American ninja saga or anything related to classic Ninjitsu or a classic japanese ninja films. Once this premise if fully understood & digested IFD & Filmark movies are nice cinematic experiences of exploit cinema since they contains all the ingredients for a perfect "ninja salad": ninjas, kung fu, erotic scenes, stolen music, asian actors from different countries, a very exotic if not a lost film from the southeast asia,etc etc..

This is in my opinion the first & most importat fact why IFD & Filmark films are so unfamous but there is a second reason. Because of the video boom most of those films were edited to be seen on TV, so the different releases were edited on horrible FULLSCREEN and that effect makes the movie less dynamic, we lose a lot of details & in many ways it is not confortable to see a film on that format.

To prove what I said above, I would like you to check what David Pinnegar nicely reccomended in his nice message: A WIDESCREEN VERSION of the very best ninja movie ever produced by IFD Ninja Operation: Knight & Warrior ( aka Silent Assassin). This film deserves to be watched on its widescreen format to apreciate that peope at IFD knew their duties.

  

 Fully Uncut & Widescreen version of NINJA OPERATION: KNIGHT & WARRIOR. IFD Property, Please respect the Coypright laws

 This video has been possible thanks to RockoMylers from Youtube & on his own words: 

 Special thanks to Emperor Ing for supplying me with the English audio source for this video; without him this wouldn't have been possible. Yes, it's the film restoration that the entire world has been waiting for: a complete version of Godfrey Ho's Ninja: Operation Knight and Warrior a.k.a. Ninja: Silent Assassin in its original 2:35:1 aspect ratio(or as close to it will probably ever be). This little piece of video wizardry was pulled off by combining the audio from a (relatively)high quality encode of the pan-and-scanned VHS of Ninja: Silent Assassin- the American version of Ninja: Operation Knight and Warrior- with the more complete image from the French VHS release of the film which was titled Black Ninja(no relation whatsoever to the 2003 direct-to-video Clayton Prince film of the same name). Surprisingly, putting this together required much more than simply overlaying the English audio over the French video and doing a bit of color correction, because the latter not only runs at the PAL standard of 25 FPS but also uses a markedly different print as its source than does the American tape.The differences generally amount to a matter of frames at reel changes which were easily fixed by repeating or cutting a few frames as needed, but on some occasions there are a few seconds of material that are outright missing from the French print andon those occasions I had no choice but to default to the pan-and-scanned American VHS. Thankfully, those occurences are few and far inbetween, but they DO happen so keep that in mind. Also, there are some issues with this version that slipped by me when I was editing this in Vegas- rest assured that those will be ironed out as much as possible by the time I upload this to a file host. In any case, enjoy your partially-restored audio-visual trainwreck.