Tou qing ke (1985) User Reviews

A decent Hong Kong "ninja" actioner

[themachomulatto · 5/10 · 12 January 2013]

This is a racy (in more ways than one) and somewhat entertaining martial arts film that contains decent to good action and an unusually large fill of nudity.

The plot is centered around one wealthy boss-man, David Lo, who is trying desperately to retrieve two halves of a precious necklace formerly belonging to his father before Red Head (who's villainous persona is just as lacking as the amount of thought that went into the creation of his name) and his thugs get the two pieces, and ultimately, the Swiss bank account number engraved into them, for themselves. Wan Lee, a boxing champion and some guy played by Casanova Wong are approached and used by each side over the course of this struggle and end up duking it out in the end. It's really not quite clear who the real good guy is but I personally didn't find this to be a problem. The ending was kind of odd and not as conclusive as it could've and should've been.

Wong delivers some fancy whirling maneuvers but overall the fight choreography is just passable. The action does become a bit more exciting at the end however.

There is plenty of silliness to be found in the excessive slow-motion climaxes that conclude some of the fight/death scenes, and naturally, in the dubbing, which contains great lines like "Hey! You haven't seen nothing yet! Now you're gonna see something!"

And speaking of "seeing something," there are many things to see in this movie; things of the womanly, soft, and supple variety. That is to say, that this is one "ninja" movie that is replete with T&A. It manages to not only titillate at times but also to add to the comedic value of the film, with the first sex scene in particular providing more "haha"s than "ooh"s and "ah"s.

One last thing I'd like to point out is just how unaptly titled this movie is. There are no more than two fight scenes involving ninjas and neither are anything special. As if that's not enough, these ninja fight scenes take place out in the country side, not in the city. Furthermore, our two . . . martially skilled protagonists do not employ any ninpo techniques at all, but I digress.

All things considered, if you dig poorly made kung-fu/ninja films, for the fights and their overall intrinsic goofiness, then this one's bound to entertain you for 80-90 minutes.

Energetic mess that makes no sense at all

[lemon_magic · 3/10 · 26 October 2007]

I saw this under the title "City Ninja", which makes even less sense than the title "Ninja Holocaust". Yes, there are a few ninja in this movie, but they aren't in the city, they are out in the country, where all good one-with-nature ninja types dwell. The other title, "108 Golden Killers" or some such, actually sort of applies here. The hero seems to fight at least 108 different opponents throughout the course of the movie. But really, who cares? This is a hyperactive, gonzo mess. It took a full 90 minutes to get through it. At the end of that 90 minutes, I was no wiser than before as to what the heck was supposed to be going on, or as to the moral or point of the movie.

The plot, as far as I can tell, is this: A necklace is bobbing around SE Asia (maybe Hong Kong, maybe rural Korea), and it has the number of a Swiss bank account written on it. Some underworld types want to get it, and they hire "Jimmy", a boxer/kung-fu expert, to procure it for them. So the necklace is a MacGuffin, a plot device to set in motion a nice "quest" movie, as well as a good excuse for an array of fight scenes.

This doesn't satisfy the director, though. He decided to throw in a seven-layer-salad of plot complications, detours and general irrelevancies including a weird, clumsy love triangle between Jimmy, the gang boss' mistress and a singer that involves a lot of soft-core porn (including a sex scene on a rowing machine -I hope he wiped it down after wards);dozens of odd characters (including "the bald headed gang") who pop into the movie at random and then disappear, never to be seen again; and fights that start up at the drop of a hat.

BTW Jimmy seems to vary in skill from "unstoppable Bruce Lee android clone" in some scenes to "unable to kung-fu his way out of a wet paper bag" in others. Seeing him almost get his clock cleaned in a boxing ring in one scene only to wade through an entire camp of armed ninja 20 minutes later is very confusing. And no, this isn't the kind of story where the character grows in skill as a result of his challenges; "Jimmy" simply continues to punch and kick people with varying degrees of success as the movie progresses. Although "progress" may be the wrong word.

More? The fight scene in the credits (between a Caucasian guy in a gi and black belt and 4-8 ninjas) seems to be imported from another movie entirely. The big final fight scene between Jimmy and an anonymous bruiser as he tries to rescue his girlfriend, seems to end with Jimmy getting his face kicked in, but the movie shows him walking around with his rescued girlfriend none the worse for wear just a minute later.

More? Jimmy can fight and kill 8 men at a time, but he can't wrestle a pistol away from his angry mistress and she accidentally shoots herself in the struggle. (She was holding a gun on him because he was about to leave here for the singer, and she was pregnant and upset about being abandoned. So Jimmy is a cad, along with everything else). Various tough underworld types seem to compete for the necklace, but I am blamed if I can keep them straight, or tell why we have to watch one of them shagging his mistress and why another one wears kabuki makeup.

More? The bad guys find Jimmy's girlfriend (the singer) and kidnap her (how they find her is never revealed, they just do) and then they put her on a table and...um...spin it. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be a form of torture or an odd sort of fetish foreplay before the actual (inevitable) rape attempt. (Of course there is a rape attempt. It's that sort of movie).

Even more? Jimmy is lazing about on the gangleader yacht with the mistress for an afternoon of sun and sex when the yacht is boarded by another bunch of the gang (I think), including guys in frog man suits with spear guns...and Jimmy jumps overboard (leaving his pregnant mistress to fend for herself). Then Jimmy's brother, who is seemingly psychic, chooses that moment to come to the rescue in a speed boat (!!) Did I mention that Jimmy has a brother? He has a brother, who is apparently the comic relief in the movie. Anyway, the bad guys chase Jimmy and brother in their own boat, and the chief bad guy keeps telling the guy at the throttle to "go faster!". You know, because apparently all the boat driver wanted to do was to not lose ground too slowly. But Jimmy's boat is too fast, or there are too many guys on the bad guy's boat, and our heroes happily flee, again, leaving (as I said) the woman to deal with things as best she can.

Oh, and at the end of the film the chief surviving gang boss has been arrested (for no reason we can see) and finks on Jimmy so that Jimmy is arrested (for the murder of the gang wife's boss he accidentally shot, not for the 90-100 other people he killed with his bare hands in the course of the movie) and the movie just stops.

I'd like to give 'City Ninja" the benefit of the doubt. I'm sure that in its original version it was a much better film here than the weird mongoloid spazz-fest that emerged as the version I saw on the Treeline 50 movie DVD pack collection. Stupid, but fun. 3 starts out of 10.

More sex scenes than ninjas

[Leofwine_draca · 3/10 · 24 February 2017]

CITY NINJA is a very poor addition to the ninja film cycle that has very little to do with ninjas at all, apart from exactly two tacked-on fight scenes featuring our black-clad friends (and a pretty cool red ninja at one point). These fights are shot in a wood somewhere and are quite amusing, featuring flying ninjas and the usual disappearing acts, but they have nothing to do with the central thrust of the story.

This film is a Hong Kong/South Korean co-production that has two distinctive plots, each featuring a different hero. Chan Wai-Man is the jet-setting hero tasked with retrieving a missing necklace, while Casanova Wong battles the usual criminal thugs all the while. Wai-Man's scenes seem to have been filmed in Hong Kong and Wong's in South Korea, leading to much choppiness and poor editing between the two story lines. In other words, you feel like you're watching a typical Godfrey Ho movie.

The action itself is quite plentiful, but poorly staged and uninteresting. A few familiar faces like Phillip Ko and John Ladalski are wasted in just a few seconds of appearance and the bad guys are all defeated too easily. Surprisingly, the director's real intent is to show as much sex and nudity as possible in his film. Wai-Man has a strenuous encounter with a girlfriend in a gym of all places while there are random shower, bath, bedroom, and nude scenes throughout. It all feels very gratuitous and more silly than grubby.

action-packed mid-eighties martial-arts romp-a-rama

[emj999 · 2 December 1999]

You know you're in for a rough ride when the box proudly proclaims that the characters in the film are "skilled in the use of deadly wapons" [sic]. The film stars Bruce Pok and Wang Li, whose names are written one above the other on the box trompe-l'oeil style to give the at-a-glance impression that we have a lost relic of the legendary Bruce Lee on our hands. Comfortingly, we see that the film is produced by the legendary Fuk brothers.

Initial disappointment that both the pictures and photographs displayed on the box bear absolutely no relation to the contents of the film is soon forgotten as incomprehension merges into glee as this little known treasure wends its way through the traffic of its stage.

The action begings on a beach in Hong Kong in 1944, where we see a man running for his life from several ninja assailants who seem literally to be exploding out of nowhere all about him. The quarry finds a peasant tending his paddy-field, and entrusts a necklace to him. We suppose that it is this that the ninjas seek.

Cut to modern day. Goodies and baddies alike search for the necklace. No reason is given, but there are enough spectacular scenes worked around this basic premise to keep even the keenest ninja hound at bay.

The snooker scene is a classic of the genre, and the terrifying, but aptly named, Red-Head leaves a chill in his wake. The hero's brother, Ha Soi, even has a tip for the female viewer, as he concocts a health-enhancing but surprisingly delicious-looking brew consisting of raw eggs and vinegar. His brother's performance on the rowing machine shortly after partaking of this potion is laudable.

The film ends as suddenly and bewilderingly as it began, with the viewer, if no further enlightened as to the whereabouts of the necklace, at least a good 90 minutes older, and wiser in the ways of Hong Kong movie-making.

A word for our foreign viewer: both dialogue-dubbing and background music blend superbly with the whole to provide a uniquely satisfying frisson between Oriental drama and Occidental knock-about comedy, the idea being that non-intentional humour is always far more effective.

Congratulations, those boys from Hong Kong.

Fairly lively 80's martial arts actioner

[Red-Barracuda · 5/10 · 6 January 2016]

Two martial arts experts are hired by gangsters to retrieve a precious item that they covet. Namely, a valuable necklace which has been split into two parts but which will reveal a Swiss Bank Account number when brought together. Different people have the different parts and with two separate teams in pursuit, needless to say, this leads to quite a lot of incident.

City Ninja is an example of the kind of low budget action movies being churned out in Hong Kong by the mid 80's. Its cheapness means this is pretty basic stuff in a lot of ways. As is mostly the way with these types of movies, the story-line is strictly by-the-numbers stuff which only really is there as a means of getting from A to B with as much martial arts action as is possible. As such, it's not especially distinctive or memorable from others in its category but will no doubt satisfy fans of this sub-genre nevertheless. I personally thought it was marginally better than average for this type of flick. The fighting scenes were pretty well executed and fairly convincing, while the odd downbeat ending appealed to me on account of its unpredictable strangeness.

End to end action movie with bizarreness of everything in-between

[mwilson1976 · 3/10 · 9 May 2019]

Aka Ninja Holocaust, this muddled production re-jigs the 1983 Korean action movie Hwa-ya for an overseas audience. There's practically zero plot logic but the movie features ninjas aplenty and the action is delivered in spades. The stars Casanova Wong and Chan Wai Man kick ass and have sex for most of the running time, at one point a couple have sex in the padded corner of a boxing ring and on a rowing machine. There's a fight in a pool bar, that sees Wong take out a room full of thugs while avoiding pool balls being shot at him by a kabuki makeup wearing Japanese villain, before he ends up in a mud wrestling ring. In another sequence there is a rooftop fight scene against an imposing African American sniper. It all ends with a crowd pleasingly intense fight between Wong and Wai Man.

Demented fun!

[HaemovoreRex · 9/10 · 29 April 2007]

Well first things first, the listing in question here is actually just another alternative title for the film Ninja Holocaust so don't be fooled! However, for all those who wish to read a review of this flick but can't be bothered typing in the said alternative title; fear not! - I've included the review below.

OK….let me try and shed some light on matters here….. As best as I could discern, the 'plot' involved a number of somewhat shady characters' search for a missing necklace that apparently had etched into it, the number to a Swiss bank account. Sounds simple enough? Well maybe on paper it might, but not on screen I can assure you! Containing enough sub plots to fill an average soap opera for a whole year, a veritable plethora of fight scenes (very well choreographed I might add) that break out at any given opportunity for no apparent reason whatsoever (!), a healthy dose of gratuitous nudity and sex (including one scene in which a couple are having intercourse in a boxing ring followed by on a rowing machine!) and a whole slew of characters who come and go without seeming explanation and you have one hell of a head scratching affair on your hands! But let's be honest – all this is such bloody hilarious fun! The film literally races along, not giving you time to take a breath from one energetic fight scene to another (or allowing you sufficient time to contemplate what the hell is in fact going on!) and when it eventually reaches it's abrupt ending you'll be left completely dumbfounded as to what in hell you've just sat through. Suffice to say, you won't really care as you'll be too busy nursing your stomach from laughing so hard throughout! Yes, it is indeed my honour to hereby award Ninja Holocaust/City Ninja the lofty status of a true bad movie classic! Tremendous fun from start to finish and I'm still none the wiser for what I've just sat through!

Superior Ninja Kicks

[rcoates-661-22249 · 8/10 · 29 August 2010]

Although the opening prologue sequence seems incongruous with the rest of the film, City Ninja doesn't quite fit the profile of the typically abominable cut-and-paste Godfrey Ho style ninja Frankenstein product with Caucasian actors inserted later. It's actually fairly decent, with fast pacing, respectable fight choreography, and relatively coherent storytelling.

The two heroes, if that's what they are, are boxers involved with Chinese and Korean gangsters all seeking a necklace with a Swiss bank account number on it. No character in City Ninja emerges as a clearly defined hero, however, and almost every man seems to be out for his own personal gain. The ending, consequently, lacks the upbeat feeling and payoff accompanying most kung fu climaxes, and is actually somewhat of a downer.

While Richard Harrison is nowhere in sight, devotees of bad ninja movies shouldn't be bored, as City Ninja offers its share of treats in that department, with ninjas exploding, flying up out of the ground, swooping from trees, attacking from underneath a bridge, and lobbing colored smoke bombs. There's also a lot of melodrama, funny bits of dialog, and fun and generous sexy scenes.

Strewth!!!

[HaemovoreRex · 9/10 · 1 April 2007]

Well first things first – the IMDb cast listing for this film is actually erroneous. The said listing in fact ostensibly refers to Godfrey Ho's Ninja Thunderbolt which was released the same year.

That aside and onto the film in question and - Jesus H Christ! – Where do I even begin with this one?!

OK….let me try and shed some light on matters….. As best as I could discern, the 'plot' involved a number of somewhat shady characters' search for a missing necklace that apparently had etched into it, the number to a Swiss bank account. Sounds simple enough? Well maybe on paper it might, but not on screen I can assure you!

Containing enough sub plots to fill an average soap opera for a whole year, a veritable plethora of fight scenes (very well choreographed I might add) that break out at any given opportunity for no apparent reason whatsoever (!), a healthy dose of gratuitous nudity and sex (including one scene in which a couple are having intercourse in a boxing ring followed by on a rowing machine!) and a whole slew of characters who come and go without seeming explanation and you have one hell of a head scratching affair on your hands!

But let's be honest – all this is such bloody hilarious fun!

The film literally races along, not giving you time to take a breath from one energetic fight scene to another (or allowing you sufficient time to contemplate what the hell is in fact going on!) and when it eventually reaches it's abrupt ending you'll be left completely dumbfounded as to what in hell you've just sat through. Suffice to say, you won't really care as you'll be too busy nursing your stomach from laughing so hard throughout!

Yes, it is indeed my honour to hereby award Ninja Holocaust the lofty status of a true bad movie classic! Tremendous fun from start to finish and I'm still none the wiser for what I've just sat through!

Stupid genius wonder film

[Bezenby · 8/10 · 5 January 2016]

Now this is my kind of crap! I'm saving this one for my kids, Godfrey Ho Jnr and Ninja Master Gordon Jnr! This may or may not be a Godfrey Ho film, but when you see a guy playing pool while hanging from a ceiling, you may start to think that Godfrey isn't a person, but a state of mind.

This one involves some white guy in Hong Kong in 1944 being chased by four ninjas (who can teleport etc). The white guy has a necklace which he gives to some local lad. After a confusing sequence where we see the same guy fighting the ninja on a beach, we fast forward to 1985 where fighter Wu ng Lee is hired by a local businessman to run a bar (and we see a woman strip topless and get Wung to sign her arse, but he draws a picture instead!). Wung's boss is the descendant of the guy with the necklace, and has somehow lost both halves of it, and needs it back as the Mafia are putting the squeeze on him.

Meanwhile, in the other film footage used, some young guy called Jimmy (after a particularly violent fight in a boxing ring) gets hired by the Boss from the new footage but before he finds out what he needs to do his middle boss gets killed. Meanwhile, in the new footage, Wu's boss is being neglected by her husband and starts up an affair with Wung, resulting in a sex scene that goes on forever, mostly using gym equipment! Did I mention that the old footage is from the mid-seventies? It stands out a mile. Except somehow it doesn't as Jimmy also seems to appear on screen with Wung Lee, which is really confusing because up to then I was certain this was a cut and paste film. My brain hurts.

The insanity then gets pushed further as Jimmy's boss, Redhead (literally a Chinese guy with red hair) thinks Jimmy has half the necklace (somehow, he does) and is intending on skipping town with Redhead's missus. Cue another sex scene and various battles. Jimmy is also up against two bad guys who have their own gangs (who also double as chairs for the bad guys – you have to see it to believe it) which results in a major ninja battle that goes on forever.

Meanwhile, Wung Lee gets his lover pregnant but wants to skip town with his fiancé while his boss is trying to kill him, resulting in the accidental killing of his lover and subsequent blackmail to go to Korea (where it turns out Jimmy lives). He's blackmailed by the bosses second in command, who also gets a sex scene. Everybody also forgets that a pregnant lady was killed about five minutes after it happens. That's life I guess.

Man, this is never ending! Except it does end rather abruptly after a few more fights, the worst speedboat chase ever, Redhead graphically getting his stomach blown out, and various other double crosses.

City Ninja, also maybe known as Ninja Holocaust, is one highly enjoyable pile of steaming crap. I can't believe I've written so much about the plot when most of the film involves battles and sex scenes. There's so much carnage and nudity in this film it's hard to complain about it, even though, you know, it's awful.

Highly recommended garbage!! Awful. Awfully good that is, in an awful way.

Quality Kung Fu

[jacobstaggs · 8/10 · 25 January 2019]

Casanova Wong stars in this gem and he lets his fists and feet (mostly feet) do the talking The fight scenes are packed with great choreography and frenetic energy. He has a great one on one with a boxer, a fight in a pool hall, sparking garage brawl, and an extended battle against ninjas and Chan Wai- Man. Casanova's Kicks are absolutely superb. The movie has a little twist at the end. The movie is let down by its frequent nudity but the back and forthness of scenes from Casanova Wong to Chan Wai- Man gives the film a flow and pattern to connect it all. Highly recommended.