It sometimes seem like half of my movie reviews for this site include complaints about muffled dialogue, characters I can’t tell apart, or other reasons that I can’t understand just what the heck is going on. Regular readers would be forgiven for thinking that either I’m a complete idiot or I should spend my time watching better movies (of course, both possibilities can be true at once). But so help me, the plot of Ninja Destroyer, a 1986 effort by prolific Hong Kong director Godfrey Ho, is hard to follow.

This was the first film by Ho I’ve watched–at least, I think it was. One of the themes of this particular series is keeping an eye out for movies I might have actually watched back in the ’80s that I could have forgotten about due to the passage of time and the fact that I was a more passive viewer as a kid. So far, nothing has rung a bell; I thought I might have seen Enter or Revenge of the Ninja, due to the titles being familiar, but they didn’t bring any memories back. In any case, based on what I know of Ho, whose reputation for recycling and combining footage rivals Jerry Warren’s, I’m quite willing to place the blame for my confusion squarely at his feet. It’s not me, it’s him.

Ninja Destroyer is actually two movies: the first, which takes up most of the running time, concerns a dispute over an emerald mine near the border between Thailand and Vietnam. A group of rebels mounts periodic attacks on the work camp, hoping to take over so they can use the emeralds to fund their activities. The owners hire a man named Harold to defend the camp, but he gets greedy and decides to make his own play to take over. A third force, the Black Knights, a group of black-clad horsemen, led by a mysterious masked woman, periodically rides in to battle the rebels. A young man named Chester gets caught in the middle and plays the various forces off of each other. I could go into more detail if I felt like watching Ninja Destroyer again and keeping track of all these people, but I really don’t. Suffice it to say that with its struggles over resources and borders, double-crosses, and horseback chases, the oft-repeated cliché applies here: it really is a Western if you think about it.

The second strand of the plot, clearly filmed separately and connected to the rest by dialogue, is where Ninja Destroyer gets its title: the CIA has trained an elite squad of ninjas, led by a man named Michael (Stuart Smith), and they’ve gone rogue, working with the Vietnamese against the Thais and training the rebels in the tactics they use to terrorize the emerald miners. The US government cannot let this potentially embarrassing evidence of covert activity survive, and the only man who can eliminate the ninjas is Byron (Bruce Baron), once Michael’s closest friend and a ninja himself.

Interestingly, the memory of the Vietnam War is fresh in everyone’s mind: the emerald miners are afraid of Thailand becoming the next Vietnam, and the Americans are concerned about rogue assets pulling the region back into conflict. (Note that, since this is a Hong Kong production, all of the American characters–and many of the dubbed Asian characters–have British or Australian accents.) Byron is supposed to liaison with Chester, and Michael occasionally has conversations with the rebel leaders, but those are the only connections, and it’s clear from the way their conversations are filmed that the actors never got anywhere near each other.

While the plot is confusing, the action is the real draw, and there is some fun to be had. The back of the DVD promises “incredible kung-fu heel-to-skull techniques,” which is a fancy way of saying that a lot of people get kicked in the head. There is a lot of kicking and tumbling, but there’s also quite of bit of gunplay (the raids on the mining camp are more like something out of a war movie or, like I said, a Western) and knife action. The transfer on the DVD is clearly from a VHS source, with occasional tracking lines, and I was struck by an increase in static around one shot of a fighter with a big knife having his blade turned on him by Chester and sticking himself in the gut, as if that were somebody’s frequently rewound favorite shot. Say what you will about 4K transfers, you don’t get that kind of insight into your fellow viewers’ minds with digital formats.

And of course there is the ninja action, with Byron taking out Michael’s squad one by one before the final confrontation. The ninjas in this are of the superhuman variety, performing incredible feats (with the aid of the camera, of course): leaping onto rooftops, hiding in unlikely places (my favorite example of this is Byron hiding behind a Chinese hat and rolling along the ground to shield himself from Michael’s arrows), and even disappearing and reappearing in different places with a sci-fi pinging noise. The film makes you wait until the last ten minutes for this, but it’s worth the wait, as it’s paired with dialogue that sounds like it was written by Garth Marenghi:

Byron: You’re coming back for the court-martial.

Michael: Damn your court-martial. Don’t be such an asshole!

B: I won’t stop until I’ve stopped you.

M: Let’s make a deal. I’ll offer you a million dollars.

B: A million dollars won’t bring back a million people’s lives.

There’s more where that came from, but you get the idea. I award Ninja Destroyer one out of five throwing stars, a rating I just made up.