Godfrey Ho (Chi Kueng Ho (何志強)) (1948–) 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, though it is often difficult to discern how much of the finished product he actually filmed himself. Ho has directed over 90 films, of which approximately 40 contain the word "ninja" in the title.[1]
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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 to 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). Ho's pseudonyms include Godfrey Hall, Zhi Jiang He, Benny Ho, Chi-Mou Ho, Chun-Sing Ho, Charles Lee, Stanley Chan, George King, Ho Jeung Keung, Fong Ho, and others. In the Chinese-speaking world, Ho is usually credited by his real name.
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. Harrison has stated that the damage done to his acting career by this association with Ho's films led him to retire in 1990.[2] Many of Ho's movies are revered by aficionados of bad movies as being among some of the most unintentionally hilarious movies ever created, featuring, among other things, Benny Hill-esque car chases run on sped-up film, roller-skating ninjas, and superfluous rape scenes which often have little or no connection with the already disjointed plot. Ho is also noteworthy for his uncredited use of music from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Wars, Wendy Carlos, Miami Vice, Iczer One, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream and Steve Hillage among others, as background music in his films.
Latest information
Godfrey Ho now teaches digital movie-making in Hong Kong at the Hong Kong Film Academy.[3]
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."[4] (translated from Chinese)
