Godfrey Ho

Godfrey Ho (Chinese language: 何志强 or 何致强, born 1948)[1] is a prolific former Hong Kong film director and screenwriter. Ho is believed to have directed more than one hundred films, including over 80 movies from 1980 to 1990 before his retirement in 2000. Many of his works are now regarded cult films by aficionados of Z movies as being among some of the most "so bad it's good" entertaining movies ever created.[2]

Godfrey Ho
Born
何志强 or 何致强

1948
Other namesVarious; see aliases
Occupations
  • Filmmaker
  • Teacher
Years active1974–2000/2002
WorksEst. 157 movies, including Undefeatable, Honor and Glory, Ninja Terminator, Full Metal Ninja, Shadow Killers Tiger Force

Aliases

Godfrey Ho wrote and directed under different pseudonyms, and has been credited under more than 40 different names during the course of his career. In Chinese, Ho is known by two names, 何志强[3] and the less common 何致强.[4] The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) gives his birth name as Chi Kueng Ho, or Ho Chi Kueng using Chinese name order; this may be an error for Ho Chi Keung, a Yale Romanization of 何志强/何致强.

Some of his purported pseudonyms include Godfrey Hall,[5] Benny Ho, Ho Chi-Mou,[6] Charles Lee,[7] Ed Woo, Stanley Chan, Ho Fong, Ho Jeung Keung and God-Ho Yeung.

Biography

The young Ho started his career as the assistant director for Chang Cheh at the Shaw Brothers Studio for a few years and worked alongside John Woo. His first film was a low-budget production entitled Paris Killers in 1974. It was while working with Shaw Brothers where he met Joseph Lai. Together, they started IFD Films & Arts and ADDA Audio Video.

According to the list of films attributed to him at his IMDb profile, Ho has directed at least 115 different releases, most of which contain the word "Ninja" as part of their primary or alternative titles (several titles also contain the word "Kickboxer"). The exact number of films directed and/or written by Ho is not known, even he is unsure on the subject and most of the films have been re-released under different names. A number of Ho's films were also later further re-edited by Joseph Lai into NINJA MYTH, a collection of 32 one-hour "Television Specials" released by IFD.[8]

Godfrey Ho's last films to date were Manhattan Chase in 1999 (released in 2000), and the animated film Ali Baba & the Gold Raiders (released in 2002). As of 2010, he is now teaching at the Hong Kong Film Academy.[9]

Films

Through the 1980s and early 1990s Ho created a series of martial arts films made with a "cut-and-paste" technique, which means they were created with the help of splicing various unrelated material (including the recurring motif of ninja-themed scenes, often with little or no connection with the already disjointed plot) and dubbed together. Several of the films' titles are an amalgamation of the word "Ninja" and the title of an already existing movie, for example, The Ninja Force, Ninja The Protector, Full Metal Ninja, and Ninja Terminator. He would film footage for one micro-budget picture, and then edit and splice the shots together in a different order, adding in footage from the various Asian movies, and then dubbing over the result to create a final product. This allowed him to create several Z movies with the budget of one, though it is often difficult to discern how much of the finished product was actually filmed by his crew.[10][11]

Godfrey Ho used American actor Richard Harrison extensively as the lead role in many of his films. Harrison, a European B movie star in the 1960s and 1970s, agreed to act in several of Ho's films in the early 1980s, although this footage was later spliced into many more of Ho's productions without his prior agreement; the damage done to his acting career by this association with Ho's films led Harrison to retire in 1990.[12][13] Other noted actors appearing in Ho's productions include Stuart Smith, Edowan Bersmea, Gary Carter and Pierre Kirby.[14]

Ho's filmmaking also included uncredited and apparently unauthorised use of music from Miami Vice, Fight! Iczer One, Kamen Rider Super-1, Star Trek, Star Wars, the Super Sentai franchise, Combat Mecha Xabungle, Kyojuu Tokusou Juspion, and Silent Running, and composed by Wendy Carlos, Vangelis, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Clan of Xymox, Hideki Matsutake, Steve Hillage, and Peter Schickele among others, as background score in his movies. The song "Just Like You" by Chris & Cosey was used without permission twice in the film Deadly Silver Ninja (1978) while "The Jet Set" by Alphaville was used during a fight scene in the film Untouchable Glory (1988). [15]

He also made some more mainstream movies, such as two martial arts films starring Cynthia Rothrock: Honor and Glory (1993) and Undefeatable (1994), two La Femme Nikita-inspired female assassin Lethal Panther films in 1990 and 1993, and Laboratory of the Devil, which was an unauthorised 1992 sequel/remake of Mou Tun Fei's 1988 WWII shock film Men Behind the Sun (further followed by Ho's Maruta 3 ... Destroy all Evidence in 1994, in which Ho reverted to extensively re-using old footage).

Ho appeared as a cameo actor twice, the first time in Siu-Pang Chan's The Magnificent in 1979 and again in his own Mr. X in 1995 (in the role of Godfather Ho). Godfrey's most recent credit is a cameo appearance in Scott McQuaid's Space Ninjas in 2019, where he plays a janitor. Director Scott McQuaid noted that his B movie title was inspired by Ho's 70's ninja films and he wanted to pay homage to his work, so he wrote a scene specifically for Ho to appear in.

See also

Bibliography
  • Odham Stokes, Lisa; Braaten, Rachel (2020). Historical Dictionary of Hong Kong Cinema. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9781538120620.
  • Daniel R. Budnik (2017). '80s Action Movies on the Cheap: 284 Low Budget, High Impact Pictures. McFarland. ISBN 978-1476626871.

References
  1. Odham Stokes; Braaten, 2020, p.185
  2. Vorel, Jim (10 July 2014). "The Best of the Bad: The 15 Greatest B-Movie Directors". Paste Magazine. Retrieved 16 February 2023. In the schlock pantheon, Godfrey Ho would sit on a special throne made out of tinfoil, compost and detritus that washed up out of the sea onto the shores of his native Hong Kong. Nobody's ever cranked out so many z-grade movies in such a short period as Ho, who produced literally hundreds of films (nobody knows how many) under various pseudonyms, largely in the 1980s.
  3. "何志强 Godfrey Ho". IMDb.cn. Retrieved 7 November 2009.
  4. "Hong Kong Film Archive". Retrieved 7 November 2009.
  5. Odham Stokes; Braaten, 2020, p.185
  6. Charles, John (14 June 2015). The Hong Kong Filmography, 1977-1997: A Reference Guide to 1,100 Films Produced by British Hong Kong Studios. McFarland. p. 12. ISBN 978-1476602622. Retrieved 30 January 2023. Director Ho Chi-mou is actually profilic schlockmeister Godfrey Ho, who also goes by the Cantonese names Ho Chikeung and Ho Chun-sing.
  7. Dendle, Peter (2010). The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. McFarland. p. 211. ISBN 9780786463671. Retrieved 30 January 2023. Zombie vs. Ninja Dir: Godfrey Ho (as Charles Lee).
  8. NINJA MYTH official website
  9. Figuring Out Godfrey Ho, PopMatters, 20 July 2010
  10. Daniel R. Budnik, 2017, p.2 "Ho and [Joseph Lai] were known for their cut and paste style of filmmaking, in which they would acquire the rights to a random Asian film, the genre was irrelevant, and insert newly shot footage of Australian actors dressed as Ninjas."
  11. Funnell, Lisa; Yip, Man-Fung (2014). American and Chinese-Language Cinemas: Examining Cultural Flows. Routledge. p. 93. ISBN 9781317910251. Retrieved 30 January 2023. Godfrey Ho, the man behind many of IFD's "cut-and-paste" ninja films...
  12. "Richard Harrison (page 5)". Nanarland.com. Retrieved 24 September 2009.
  13. Lines, Craig (5 May 2015). "Ninjas All The Way Down: The Mysterious World of Godfrey Ho". Den of Geek. Retrieved 14 February 2023. Veteran genre actor Richard Harrison has been outspoken of how he believes Ho ruined his career. He allegedly signed up for a couple of ninja films and had his footage spliced into at least twenty (all of which had him credited as the star).
  14. Odham Stokes; Braaten, 2020, p.186
  15. Charles, John (14 June 2015). The Hong Kong Filmography, 1977-1997: A Reference Guide to 1,100 Films Produced by British Hong Kong Studios. McFarland. p. 12. ISBN 978-1476602622. Retrieved 30 January 2023. ... Most of the music has been stolen from Halloween II, The Hidden, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm, Near Dark,...
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