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Godfrey Ho

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Godfrey Ho (Chinese language: 何志强 or 何致强) (1948–) is a former Hong Kong-based prolific film director and screenwriter, sometimes considered the Ed Wood of Hong Kong cinema. Ho is believed to having directed more than one hundred films, including over 80 movies from 1980 to 1990, but only one film since 1995, apparently retiring from film-making in 2000. Many of his works are now regarded cult films by aficionados of C and Z movies as being among some of the most unintentionally funny movies ever created.

Aliases

Godfrey Ho wrote and directed under different pseudonyms, and has been credited under more than 40 different names during the course of his career. In Chinese, Ho is known by two names, 何志强[1] and the less common 何致强.[2] The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) gives his birth name as Chi Kueng Ho, or Ho Chi Kueng using Chinese name order; this may be an error for Ho Chi Keung, a Yale Romanization of 何志强/何致强. Some of his pseudonyms include Godfrey Hall, Benny Ho, Ho Chi-Mou, Ed Woo, Stanley Chan, Ho Fong, Ho Jeung Keung and God-Ho Yeung.

Biography

The young Ho started his career as the assistant director for Chang Cheh at the Shaw Brothers Studio for a few years and worked alongside John Woo. His first film was a low-budget production entitled Paris Killers in 1974. It was while working with Shaw Brothers where he meet future partner Joseph Lai. Together, they started ASSO Asia Film, and its subsidiaries IFD Films & Arts and ADDA Audio Video.

According to the list of films attributed to him at his IMDb profile, Ho has directed at least 115 different releases, most of which contain the word "Ninja" as part of their primary or alternative titles (several titles also contain the word "Kickboxer"). The exact number of films directed and/or written by Ho is not known, since even he is unsure on the subject and most of the films have been re-released under different names. A number of Ho's films were also later further re-edited by Joseph Lai into NINJA MYTH, a collection of 32 one-hour "Television Specials" released by IDF.[3]

During the 1980s, Godfrey Ho became also associated with the production company Filmark International, the official boss of which was Tomas Tang Gak Yan.[4] Officially, IFD and Filmark were competing companies, however Ho's actors such as Stuart Smith (aka "Stuart Steen") appeared in several films from both companies. In the later interviews, Smith would confirm Ho was indeed the director of the Filmark films such as Ninja: American Warrior and Clash of the Ninjas. In 1996, the Garley Building housing Filmark's office and other businesses burned down in the notorious fire disaster and Tomas Tang passed away in this tragedy along with 40 other people.[5][6]

Godfrey Ho's last film to date was Manhattan Chase in 1999 (released in 2000). As of 2010 he is now teaching at the Hong Kong Film Academy.[7]

Films

Through the 1980s and early 1990s Ho has created a series of martial arts films made with a "cut-and-paste" technique, which means they were created with the help of splicing various unrelated material (including the recurring motif of absurd ninja-fighting scenes, often with little or no connection with the already disjointed plot) and dubbed more-or-less together. He would film footage for one micro-budget picture, and then edit and splice the shots together in a different order, adding in footage from the various obscure or unreleased HK, Thai, Filipino and other Asian movies (martial arts films, crime films, comedies, etc.) to fill the gaps, and then dubbing over the result to create a final product. This allowed him to create several Z movies with the budget of one, though it is often difficult to discern how much of the finished product he has actually filmed himself.

Godfrey Ho used an American actor Richard Harrison extensively as the lead role in many of his films. Harrison, a European B movie star 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 productions without his prior agreement; the damage done to his acting career by this association with Ho's films led Harrison to retire in 1990.[8] Ho's film making also included uncredited and appearantly unauthorized use of music from Miami Vice, Star Trek and Star Wars, and by Wendy Carlos, Iczer One, Pink Floyd, Tangerine Dream, Clan of Xymox and Steve Hillage, among others, as background score in his movies.

He also made some more proper movies, such as the 1994 martial arts film Undefeatable, the two Nikita-insipired female assassin Lethal Panther films in 1990 and 1993, and Laboratory of the Devil, which was an unauthorised 1992 sequel/remake of Mou Tun Fei's 1988 WWII shock film Men Behind the Sun (further followed by Ho's Maruta 3 ... Destroy all Evidence in 1994, in which he however reverted to extensive use of the old footage).

Ho appeared as a cameo actor twice, first time in Siu-Pang Chan's The Magnificent in 1979 and again in his own Mr. X in 1995 (in the role of Godfather Ho).

See also

References

  1. ^ "何志强 Godfrey Ho". IMDb.cn. Retrieved 2009-11-07.
  2. ^ "Hong Kong Film Archive". Retrieved 2009-11-07.
  3. ^ NINJA MYTH official website
  4. ^ Who is Tomas Tang?
  5. ^ Template:Fr icon La biographie de Godfrey Ho est sur Nanarland
  6. ^ Template:Fr icon La biographie de Tomas Tang est sur Nanarland
  7. ^ Figuring Out Godfrey Ho, PopMatters, Jul 20, 2010
  8. ^ "Richard Harrison (page 5)". Nanarland.com. Retrieved 2009-09-24.

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