Driving & Parking - THE NINJA SQUAD (1986)

There's a tried and consistent method of producing ninja movies. A plot is written that involves ninjas, though in some cases this is overlooked. After that, people are casted, acting as ninjas, and they are filmed doing things. Many movies have been produced this way.

There is another way.

This other way is never written down. It is only passed on, with measures taken to ensure that any intended recipient of the knowledge will use it wisely. In poorly lit bars, strange men in unusually unclimatic clothing - heavy capes in July, or in robes from not just another time but another place, or plane, entirely. Men in silks of so many colours and layers that they work as a thick, opulent jumper. They study patrons at length, often for hours, hunched over in some deep watchful meditation, then leaving, quietly and mysteriously.

After perhaps a half dozen of these silent visits, with the inititate in potentia developing nervousness about their silent observer, they come over to talk. The patron is bought a watery martini, the drink of filmmaking, with the olive limply floating at the periphery of the glass.

It is from this drink their instruction begins.

This may take months. In snippets of conversations, in the fragrant, whispered exhales from pipes in backalley dens. A story from weeks old editions of newspapers from London. The contents of dreams, or a girl advertising cola on the side of a passing bus. All enigmata, all synchronicity, is up to the initate to decode, place together, and from that, scry their education.

Properly deciphered, it amounts to a new way of producing movies. It is too long to recount, and its essence drifts into illegibility as soon as its committed to text. Roughly, it amounts to:

"Get another movie, and add ninja sequences to it."

The ninjas here are authentic, their names steeped in tradition - Gordon, Ivan (the red), and Billy. Not to overlook even small historical details, they're all assigned different brightly coloured outfits. Each has a bandana that states their profession, "ninja", like how the feudal system operated historically.

Ivan, the antagonist, has one goal, and that is to become the ultimate ninja. To do this, he challenges Gordon to a dual, and says if he does not accept, he will kill one ninja each month.

Meanwhile Billy, Gordon's protege, has taken his ninja training to the city, in the hope of making a life for himself.

Dubbing auditions for the feature are held in damp, late night expat bars. The sort of place where the air conditioning blows in cold, wet condensate from failing seals inside the single, inadequate wall unit. Greasy businessmen, fresh from their latest failure to get an export deal from China's new but poor quality electronics industry, suddenly have papers thrust at them with dialogue written on. The criteria for picking these actors is unclear, but being adept at reading the lines convincingly is low down on priorities. Secret movie making techniques value different skills.

Across the island, in almost identical settings, housewives, bored from trying to chat up the bar staff, are given similar sheets of paper. Smudgingly photocopied, stained from dirty bar tables, near unintelligible even when new. To be able to read them is perhaps the real test, like an alchemical formula.

They all convene in the same place, some back alley recording studio. The equipment was all bought new, by some US west coast TV station in 1958, all valves and huge 10 inch reel to reel recorders. From there, it bounced around to local stations, then across to Europe, already with far too many hours between service intervals. There, it found its way to some eastern bloc AM radio station, already grease coloured, all the type faded off the controls, valves held in with the foil out of cigarette packets. Its last gasp is here, in a Hong Kong recording studio, having been won at a game of poker a few years before. So imbued with grime at this point, if anyone had considered cleaning it, it would have stopped working entirely, its patina being woven into it to the point where it becomes its essence. The engineers try their best, but only know half the controls, the others too degraded and fragile looking to risk touching.

In a fog of smoke not limited just to tobacco, the actors are asked to recite their lines into an oversized microphone, as a jittery projection of the movie is played onto the back wall.

Payment is sometimes in cash, but more often in favours, a forgotten bar tab, a greased palm for the acquisition of an export license, or the contact for a doctor of the area, known for writing prescriptions first, and diagnosing later.

One day, a voice actor asks his hosts, "is there any music in this?"
The sound engineer and sound director look at each other through the smoke in the room.
"What do you mean?" the first asks.
"Like," the actor seems hesitant now, not exactly being a voice of authority in this industry, "a score, you know. A soundtrack."
The two staff look at each other again, anxiety on their faces. This is something they've totally overlooked.
"Would it... help?" the director asks, unsurely.
The man nods and smiles knowingly, "oh yes, but don't worry, I know someone who can help."

He returns the next day with a young woman in tow, who is almost pushed into the office, and he's off again. In front of her she is grasping a stack of records.
"Dad" she says uncertainly, "said uhh.. just.. to bring my records and uh,..."

The young woman is Jacolyn, 18, who is still in the grips of some sedative she took earlier. She is dressed entirely in black, with laddered fishnets, a black skirt, a pvc jacket and extensive kohl around her eyes, enhancing the paleness of her complexion. She has an unhealthy patina, but it looks partially studied, like she's been working at it.

She glares at them until they offer her a cigarette.
"He said.. something, I guess some movie..."
The engineer offers her a chair, "that's right. Have you got anything?"
His manner indicates his desperation, having gone home and watched TV the previous night, then realising that yes, a lot of movies had music in them.
"Well..." she looks at the records clutched to her chest, "what kinda.. movie is it?"
"It's a ninja movie," he replies, with some pride.
A moment, and then a smirk crosses her face, and she tries to suppress a giggle, "yeah.. sure.. this is what you want..."

She sits down and spreads the records across the cluttered desk. Even from the sleeves, there's a definite macabre tone to all of them. The engineers look uncertainly at each other, knowing that at this stage, it would have to do.

Jacolyn spends the next couple of hours chain smoking, watching the staff's bewilderment increase with every passing record. It's music neither of them have ever heard before. They keep looking at each other with this shared question, 'western audiences like this?'

She leaves later, giggling to herself, having been paid in cigarette cartons. The staff put down her demeanour to having taken something, a not unfair assumption.

Everything about the Ninja Squad has this quality to it. Or rather, everything original to it does. The main rider, the film on which the rest of it is hung upon, is a fairly competently made action B-movie about someone overcoming a crime gang who kidnapped his sister. Its the other parts, the carelessly applied wedge of a ninja movie, the first wave goth music, that make it so peculiar.

We learn that the secret technique of making a ninja movie is more than just editing in scenes, that it acts as a distortion field, a sort of smog layer over the original. It permeates the source material.

You get a sense of what it was like, at some fringe of filmmaking that doesn't really outlast the 80s. The ninja actors appear in other Godfrey Ho films, but only got paid royalties for one picture. Unfair on them. They give their all, and it wouldn't have been nearly as good if they hadn't.

It is a ninja movie by technicality, produced by some third hand guess at what was driving the boom in martial arts films in the west. It is chasing a gaudy, oversaturated VHS copy of something it only, perhaps, saw in a dream, or in the front display window of an electronics retailer.

The result is thoroughly entertaining.