Starring Sorapong Chatree, Sun Chien, Michelle Yim, Fan Chin-Hung and To Siu-Ming, directed by Edgar Jere, from Filmark International Ltd.
Also known as COUNTER DESTROYER
A scriptwriter called Joyce goes to an isolated rented villa to write her magnum opus about the last Emperor of China, but other film companies want to prevent this biopic from being made and will resort to murder to get their way. To make matters worse (and weird) the plot also involves hopping vampires, a crosseyed Taoist priest, a possessed phone, ninjas with automatic weaponry, poisoned lipstick, a razor-fingered spirit, a fortune-telling sacred bird, a muscular zombie-vampire that leaves sparkling footprints, an explosive bouquet of flowers, the ghost of a Ching Dynasty eunuch… and the silvery cyborg hero from ROBO VAMPIRE (1988)!
Robo-Warrior dude!
Ninja!
A not very scary hopping vampire
This poster rocks, even if the film doesn’t!
The dubbing, dialogue and acting in this cut-and-paste brain-warper, which is also known as COUNTER DESTROYER, THE VAMPIRE IS STILL ALIVE and COUNTER DESTROY, achieves levels of cheesiness that other Tomas Tang productions even fail to reach. The voice work for the actress playing Joyce’s friend is especially jarring!
Also known as COUNTER DESTROY
The various bits of unrelated footage, some from a Thai film called Killer Eyelashes, are tenuously linked, as usual, with new dubbed dialogue ‘seamlessly’ melding it together, but all logical narrative is swept away during a finale involving the robo-warrior, hopping vampires, the Taoist priest and a ghostly vampire kid who bursts from Joyce’s rapidly-swelling belly! This brat tells a couple of vampires that they are going to pay for killing his ‘mother’, even though it was the kiddy-vamp who actually killed Joyce by erupting from her stomach! The vamp-child then proceeds to urinate on the vampires, but don’t worry, folks, the film ends with Joyce somehow still being alive?! My brain hurts…
Does any of this happen in the movie? Ah, I don’t think so
Starring Simon Reed, Harry Carter, Henry Steele, Joe Nelson, Chiang Tao, Lu Feng, Chen Hung-Lieh, Angela Mao and Danny Lee, directed by ‘Bruce Lambert’.
Pasty-faced dude
Two dice, taken from hopping vampires, will help Mr Baker, known as the Gambling King, take over the whole gambling world! But Roger, the brother of a gambler forced to kill himself, promises to get revenge, which he does dressed as a white-clad ninja!
Ninja versus vampire!
You’ve got to grudgingly admire the don’t-give-a-f*ck plotting in producer Tomas Tang’s spliced-together specials from Filmark International. This particular film sticks new vampire & ninja content (probably shot by action director Chiang Tao and not Godfrey Ho, who is always credited as director for these kind of movies) into footage from another film called THE STUNNING GAMBLING, which stars Danny Lee and Angela Mao, featuring gamblers betting their lives on the outcome of games, including a super-fast card-dealing challenge.
THE STUNNING GAMBLING, a Taiwanese gambler opus, provides much of the footage used in this cut-and-paste movie
Greek VHS sleeve for NINJA: THE VIOLENT SORCERER with misleading cover art
‘The mystic knowledge of all ages is unleashed…’
With ninjas being taught anti-sorcery magic by a priest, seemingly unconnected scenes located on a war movie set and in a rowdy barroom, green & white ninjas with the ability to vanish and reappear, and a briefly-seen female ghost called Rose, NINJA: THE VIOLENT SORCERER ends with the two ninja heroes and a good priest combating multiple hopping vampires and an evil priest in a normal-looking suburban living room.
Directed by ‘Joe Livingstone’, starring Mick Stuart, Walter Bond, Richard Phillips, Suen Kwok-Ming, Wang Kuan-Hsiung and Angela Mao.
The narrative often struggles to make total sense
Newly-shot footage of hopping vampires, a silver-suited hero called Shadow Warrior and various ninjas is intercut into an older gambling movie called GIANT OF CASINO, which features Angela Mao and Wang Kuan-Hsiung. The freshly concocted plot involves blue-faced vampires used as part of a smuggling operation and ninjas sent on a mission to eliminate Steve Cox, the Gambling King.
Some traditional-style Chinese hopping vampires
Shadow Warrior arms himself with a couple of spears
Points of interest include ninjas turned into grinning hopping vampires, Shadow Warrior using a bell to distract a bunch bouncing vampires during a breakneck skirmish, a holy man performing a ceremony to heal injured vamps that seems to involve sticking sparklers into them, and a voodoo doll used to control a priest.
Ninjas are turned into grinning hopping vampires!
Just as this film seems to be on the verge of being almost coherent, the movie cuts to a shot of a ghost girl skipping, before jumping back to more Shadow-Warrior-versus-vampires action. Alex, aka Shadow Warrior, undergoes a ceremony involving a yellow-robed priest painting special symbols on his torso and then throwing shrine dolls ‘into’ his body. Alex becomes a more powerful version of the helmeted Shadow Warrior and, at one point, with the help of the priest, starts doing some moonwalking, before he batters his vampire foes with explosive punches and kicks!
Please note that there are no scenes of ninjas with rocket launches attacking helicopter gunships in the movie itself…
…but there are scenes of undead ninjas fighting silver-suited Shadow Warrior!
Often erroneously listed as a Godfrey Ho opus (nobody seems to know who definitely directed it, perhaps it was Tommy Cheng), this Tomas Tang production is a cheap, cheesy, cheerful challenge to every viewer’s sense of narrative logic. This brain-melter is also known as DEVIL DYNAMITE and, cheekily, ROBO VAMPIRE 2: DEVIL’S DYNAMITE, obviously in an attempt to pass off silver-garbed hero Shadow Warrior as the infamous ‘Robo-Warrior’.
Directed by Ted Kingsbrook, produced by Tomas Tang, starring Kent Wills, Trudy Calder, Lucas Byrne, Sorapong Chatree, Sun Chien and Jack Mackay.
Lots of people get eaten!
Master Cooper, who controls people-munching killer crocs from a golden cave, plans to team-up with Monica (Calder), the blonde sorceress who is running a ‘vampire business’. Together they hope their crocodiles and hopping vamps will take over the world, but agent Bruce Thompson (Wills) is determined to prevent this evil plan from happening.
VHS cover
A grungy-faced hopping vampire
Master Cooper dwells on his golden cave, sitting within the skeletal jaws of a croc
OMG! Where to start with this incredibly weird cut-and-paste flick?! Well, here’s just some of the things that occur… There are multiple crocodile attacks, both in the water and on land, with a high bodycount and much screaming. Monica performs seemingly pointless incantations, at one point causing several fish to spill from a vampire’s mouth, into a fishbowl, which then fly up into a different vampire’s mouth. A levitating dude loses his concentration and falls prey to a hungry crocodile. A guy vomits up maggots. A smaller man-in-suit croc does tricks for villagers. Some of the vampires are of the Chinese hopping variety, whilst others are more like zombie-vamps with green blood. Oh… and the crocodiles are actually the spirits of people who have become reptiles, so they often appear in human form too!
Witch-woman Monica has long, steel nails!
The croc footage stems from a Thai film called KRAI THONG 2 (1985) and the main crocodile, though not exactly a Hollywood-standard animatronic creation, is a pretty serviceable full-size model that munches down on many, many extras. The low tech attack scenes actually possess a pacy verve, as loads of people run, shout and get bitten or carried away. One of the reasons these reptile assaults stand out is because they are never isolated incidents: the various crocs don’t bother waiting around to pick off lone victims, they launch onslaughts against groups of people near their homes or at riverside markets. Most of these attacks involve the actors struggling in the reptile’s jaws, but there’s one particular scene that is quite gory, with limbs being bitten off, and I’m sure actual amputees were cast to portray these legless or armless victims.
A dude has his leg bitten off
A man tries to pull a victim back out of the croc’s mouth!
KRAI THONG 2 provided much of the footage for this cut-and-paste production
It’s a real WTF moment when one of the crocs turns into its human form (a young woman called Maria) for the very first time. It’s revealed that Maria is the deceased girlfriend of a local man called Jack and she says such things as “If you really cared for me, Jack, you’d be a crocodile too, and then we could both be together right away, what do you think?”
Jack makes a crocodile let go of its latest victim…
…and the croc transforms into his dead sweetheart Maria!
The film focuses more on the crocodile spirits in their human form later in the story, in scenes mainly based in the golden cave, referred to as Sea World. This is the location where two croc-demon guys, one called Donald and the other named Stephen, fight one another, with Stephen hurling small, stuffed-looking crocodiles at Donald!
Okay, now THAT is what you call a poster!
The film reaches dual climaxes, one involving Jack as a croc-fighting hero with a special spear & dagger, the other finale boasting a showdown between Bruce, vampires and witch-lady Monica, who suddenly develops a fake-looking, throbbing belly, from which bursts a slimy human head!
Bruce Thompson versus Monica!
The zombie-vampires leak greenish blood when they are stabbed
This dumb, fun Tomas Tang production, often mistakenly credited as a Godfrey Ho film, is utterly batshit crazy, filled with so much incident, including a croc biting the head off a water buffalo, a machine gun assassination attempt, and a crocodile with diamond teeth, that the film actually makes other cut-and-paste epics like SCORPION THUNDERBOLT look like coherent, perfectly normal movies by comparison!
At one point one of the crocodiles glides through the air!
Directed by Joe Livingstone, produced by Tomas Tang, starring Robin Mackay, Nian Watts and Harry Myles.
Japanese VHS cover
Tom, an anti-drug agent, is mortally wounded whilst taking on narcos, who are using Chinese hopping vampires as weapons and as a means to smuggle their heroin shipments. Tom dies on the operating table, but it is decided to transform him into an android… enter the robo-warrior!
We can rebuild him! We have the technology!
Narco villain
Dastardly priest
ROBO VAMPIRE, a cut-and-paste movie courtesy of producer Tomas Tang’s Filmark International, closely resembles the kind of productions made by director Godfrey Ho, the king of such chimeric flicks, which is why the film is very often falsely attributed to him. So who is ‘Joe Livingstone’, then? I don’t know the answer to that, but the owner of IFD Films & Arts Ltd, Toby Russell, assures me that it isn’t Mr Ho. So let’s move on…
Hopping vampire
A scab-faced vampire with a mouthful of his victim’s flesh!
Much of the footage in ROBO VAMPIRE, especially the hostage rescue mission sequences, is sourced from the Thai actioner PAA LOHGAN (1984). The new spliced-in material is all the hopping vampire and robo-dude stuff and, interestingly, these additional scenes are actually better lit than the original movie footage, which usually isn’t the case.
At one point robo-warrior levitates!
The main character, a stomping, low tech, silver-suited dude with a big gun, is not actually a vampire, as you might have expected considering the film’s title. He’s just a cut-price android, though he does skirmish with many scabby-faced, hopping bloodsuckers throughout the film’s running time.
Android versus vamps!
In one action sequence, the robo-warrior battles armed bad guys on a beach, where they attempt to immolate him, but when this fails he is assailed by vampires that pop-up from the sand. This is a shoddily-shot, gloriously cheesy set piece that ends with a tin foil-covered dummy, representing the android protagonist, being blown-up by a rocket launcher! But don’t you worry, the tech guys weld robo-warrior back together again pretty quickly and easily.
Such amazing special effects!
Though the jungle-based rescue subplot is a mainly underwhelming series of shoot-outs, fights, some water torture and explosions, with far too many characters being introduced into the story, a lot of the other incidents in the movie are quite memorable, including drugs being hidden in a real dead cow’s slit-open belly, romantic interludes between a ghostly woman and her gorilla-faced super-vampire lover, a bloody eye-poking, fireworks being fired from the ape-mask-vampire’s sleeves, and a fight between the now-topless female ghost and a priest! Once the she-spirit defeats the evil holy man, our android hero then scorches the gorilla-vampire with his machine gun, which is now in flamethrower mode (cue burning dummy on a wire)!
The female ghost
A gorilla-faced vampire! Yes, you heard me right: a gorilla-faced vampire!
Another shot of the girl ghost
Weird, cheap, trashy and cheerful nonsense.
You don’t mess with a flamethrower-wielding android!
IFD Film Arts was a Hong Kong film studio originally created by producer Joseph Lai after he split from Asso Asia Films. IFD made some martial arts action classics like THE MAGNIFICENT, DRAGON ON FIRE and THE DRAGON THE HERO, but what I want to chat about now are some of the other, madder, monster-oriented films that are linked to IFD – this is the Monster Zone blog, after all!
There’s a hopping vampire behind you!
Vampire and the E.T. Kid
IFD made films in many other genres beyond kung fu flicks, including war, horror, dramas, ninja films, romance, psychological thrillers, crime and animation.
Thunder of Gigantic Serpent
One subgenre that IFD is very famous for is the insane series of ninja movies (many directed by Godfrey Ho) from the 1980s. With titles including NINJA WARRIORS FROM BEYOND, NINJA TERMINATOR, ULTIMATE NINJA, NINJA THUNDERBOLT, NINJA DESTROYER and NINJA DRAGON, these films featured ninja characters who were given amusingly dated, anglicized names (like Alfred, Rodney, Harry, Gordon and Bruce) to appeal to western audiences.
Typical IFD ninja movie art
Godfrey Ho was a movie-making machine! He directed over one hundred films, including more than eighty movies from 1980 to 1990, and many of them were IFD ninja flicks. These very unhinged, low-budget, pasted-together, mind-boggling, semi-senseless films sported soundtracks with music ‘borrowed’ from the likes of Jean-Michel Jarre and Pink Floyd, mixed multiple genres into the brew and were, obviously, great fun to watch. Back in the 80s his colourful ninja VHS covers could be found everywhere!
Ho, who was actually trained at the prestigious Shaw Brothers studio, created most of these kung fu opuses with a cut-and-paste technique: splicing footage from different (already existing) movies together, then adding additional recently shot ninja scenes to act as ‘plot glue’ for the new story. An English language track would then be added to help the movie make some form of sense. The preposterous results included such things as the scene where killer crabs crawl out of a cooking pot to go on the offensive and the jaw-dropping moment Ninja Master Harry receives an important message via a small, plastic, talking robot toy!
Clash of the Ninjas
Speaking of Ninja Master Harry: he was played by Richard Harrison, one of the western actors brought in to play the ninjas. Just to be sure audience members knew what his profession was, Harrison often wore headbands with the word ‘ninja’ clearly written on them! As an added bonus, several of these films included scenes of a stern, serious-looking Harrison having deadly, important conversations on a plastic Garfield phone. The madness, the madness!
Don’t mess with Richard Harrison: he rocks!
Richard uses his Garfield phone…
My favourite IFD cut-and-paste ninja flick is SCORPION THUNDERBOLT (1988). This is an unhinged IFD classic of weird plot elements, involving a witch with spiky fingers, soft core sex with a murderous femme, a magic ring and a girl who periodically transforms into a slimy, killer snake monster! The audacious icing on the crazy-cake that is SCORPION THUNDERBOLT is the soundtrack, which includes purloined music from the movies CARRIE, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK and ALIEN, plus bits from Jean-Michel Jarre’s Oxygene!
UK VHS cover
German VHS cover for Scorpion Thunderbolt
Spike-fingered witch
SCORPION THUNDERBOLT ‘s serpent monster scenes are taken from an earlier film called SNAKE WOMAN and are some of the most enjoyable parts of the film: the glistening-skinned, big, clawed, rubbery reptile-beast-person bloodily attacks a bunch of victims, including one woman in a shower. The pacy movie features a blind flute player (who may be the reason one of the female protagonists periodically turns into the monster), a scene where loads of snakes slither over a car, and an amusing moment involving some characters proudly displaying a papier-mâché tadpole-ish model that they claim resembles the snake-beast!
Characters in the movie show off a model of what they think the terrifying snake monster might look like!
Serpent creature shower attack!
Scorpion Thunderbolt’s snake monster footage was taken from this film: Snake Woman
Beyond their many ninja productions, IFD also released some pretty out-there animated titles, including SOLAR ADVENTURE, a part live action, part anime South Korean movie featuring kids using Transformers-type robots to fight green-faced aliens… who have teamed-up with Kim Il Sung: the then-leader of North Korea!
Solar Adventure
Kim Il Sung!
One of the aliens from Solar Adventure
To cater for those with more esoteric tastes, IFD created/released such bizarro productions as ROBO KICKBOXER (a guy in a silver suit kicks the asses of other kickboxers), THE KILLER ELEPHANTS (featuring, er, killer elephants), THUNDER OF GIGANTIC SERPENT (a giant puppet snake goes on the rampage) and VAMPIRE RAIDERS NINJA QUEEN (which has a scene where a woman accidentally sunbathes on top of a hopping vampire on the beach!)
Cool!
Thunder of Gigantic Serpent
Godfrey Ho used footage from Taiwanese film King of Snake to create his cut-and-paste kaiju flick Thunder of Gigantic Serpent
Yikes!
The Killer Elephants
Evil ninjas and hopping vampires threaten the entire hotel industry!
Robo Kickboxer
Another one of these mad movies is the flick ROBO VAMPIRE, which involves a Robocop wannabe dude taking on hopping vampires. Not content with this one film, IFD also released COUNTER DESTROY… that also boasts scenes of a Robocop wannabe dude fighting hopping vampires!
A movie about a Robocop wannabe dude fighting hopping vampires!
Another movie about a Robocop wannabe dude fighting hopping vampires!
Other films that are part of the current IFD catalogue (the new owners of the catalogue are based the UK) include: DEVIL’S DYNAMITE (a Shadow Warrior battles vampires), NINJA THE FINAL DUEL (which includes shots of a special ninja team riding giant, rubbery, flying aquatic spiders), HUNT FOR DEVIL BOXER (featuring ghouls, zombies and a sacred sword), CROCODILE FURY (there’s an evil witch, croc attacks and vampires in this mash-up), VAMPIRE AND THE E.T. KID (a UFO lands in Taipei and awakens a group of buried vampires), DRAGON AGAINST VAMPIRE (friends rob a grave and evoke the wrath of the evil dark arts villain Black Dragon) and FIREFIST OF INCREDIBLE DRAGON (a period-set kung fu movie that has scenes of a human heart flying about the place, killing people!)
Spider-riding ninjas! (Shame they don’t feature much in the actual film)
Ninja the Final Duel
Devil’s Dynamite
Crocodile Fury
Hunt for Devil Boxer
This movie looks SO low key…
Dragon Against VampireThe flying killer human heart from Firefist of Incredible Dragon!
As mentioned at the start: IFD boasts some cool kung fu movies and iconic stars of that genre, including martial arts royalty Wang Yu, Hwang Jang Lee, Bolo, Gordon Liu and even Bruce Lee (footage of Bruce was legally used in FIST OF UNICORN). But it’s hard for me not to keep revelling in the madness of the cut-and-paste flicks, which are so far beyond what is deemed typical movie-making that it’s impossible to use regular judgements like ‘bad’ or ‘good’. And, maybe in this time of glossy, big-budget, franchised, homogenous filmmaking, it’s a relief to sometimes delve into some anarchic cinematic absurdity.
Ninja with a machine gun!
Check out the ninjas on the water spiders!
French VHS cover for Scorpion Thunderbolt
Vampire and the E.T. KidCrocodile FuryVampire and the E.T. Kid
Ninja cut-and-paste flick that features a pesky female ghost
In this flick a ninja plays a special flute to lure a bunch of snakes!
Giant frog experiment from Thunder of Gigantic Serpent
Robo Vampire
Okay, one more gif from Robo Vampire…
Devoted to every kind of movie and TV monster, from King Kong to Godzilla, from the Blob to Alien.
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