Godfrey Ho

The DVD cover from Godfrey Ho's Golden Ninja Warrior. Richard Harrison is visible in the bottom left.

Godfrey Ho (何志強) is a Hong Kong-based movie director. He is best known for his "Ninja" films, a series of 1980s martial arts films made with a cut-and-paste technique. Ho would film footage for one film, and then edit and splice the shots together in a different order, often adding in footage from other films, and then dubbing over the result to create an (almost) coherent finished product. This allowed him to create four or five films with the budget of one. In total, Ho is credited as the director of over 90 films, of which approximately 40 contain the word "ninja" in the title.

1 Background
2 Career
3 Latest information
4 Quotation
5 See also
6 External links

Background

Reliable biographical information on Ho is difficult to come by, due to his obscurity and his recent relative inactivity (he directed only one film between 1995 and 2005, compared with more than 60 from 1980–1990). The problem is further exacerbated by his frequent use of pseudonyms. He has been credited under more than 20 different names during the course of his career, although his motives for doing this are unclear. Interestingly, neither Godfrey Ho nor any of his other pseudonyms are his real birth name, which, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), is Chi Kueng Ho (何志強).

In the Chinese-speaking world, Ho is usually credited by his real name.

Ho's pseudonyms include Godfrey Hall, Zhi Jiang He, Benny Ho, Chi-Mou Ho, Chun-Sing Ho, Charles Lee, Stanley Chan, George King, Tomas Tang, Bruce Lambert, Tommy Cheung, Tommy Cheng, Tommy Leung, Charles Lee, Alton Cheung, Ho Jeung Keung, Fong Ho and others.

Career

A notable feature of many of Godfrey Ho's films was the presence of the B-actor Richard Harrison in a lead role. Harrison, a reasonably well-known American B-movie actor 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 films without Harrison's knowledge. The damage done to Harrison's acting career by his association with Ho's films led him to retire in 1990.

Another curious aspect of Godfrey Ho's career is his connection with a man by the name of Joseph Lai. Lai is credited as the producer for many of Ho's films, although the relationship between them is unclear. The IMDB, until recently, listed Joseph Lai as one of Godfrey Ho's pseudonyms, implying that Ho produced his films himself under a different name. However, this has recently been changed, and the two now have separate entries in the IMDB database.

None of Ho's films have received a rating over 6.0 from IMDB users [1], with most being rated at 4.0 or below. Some of Ho's movies have been criticized as being worse and more ridiculous than Plan 9 from Outer Space, which has received international acclaim as the worst film ever made. Only a lack of votes serves to keep many of Ho's films out of the IMDB bottom 100 list [2], as it takes at least 625 votes to be eligible for the list.

Latest information

Godfrey Ho now teaches digital movie-making in Hong Kong at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Quotation

"I used to be a movie maker. Now I am teaching people to make movies. It really makes me glad when my students are happily showing me their works. Only if you've been through the whole process, can you understand how satisfactory and delightful it is."[3] (translated from Chinese)

External links

IMDB Entry for Godfrey Ho
MIC SPEED Professional Training Program and Courses (in Traditional Chinese; Big5 encoded)
NanarlandA French website that hosts a big section about Godfrey Ho's ninja movies, often making fun of them

Categories: Hong Kong film directors | 1948 births