As his audience grew more demanding and trends changed, Ho cut together robots, vampires, zombies, giant serpents and all kinds of weirdness in with the ninjas. It’s a brave approach whose results, while undeniably chaotic, were compelling. No matter how many films you’ve seen, you’ll never guess what’s coming next in a Godfrey Ho film. His style rips the rule book to pieces. Even the soundtracks were often stolen from recognizable bands or other films’ scores. What a surprise it is, for example, in Ninja Terminator when Pink Floyd starts playing just before a fight breaks out! When asked by the website Narnarland.com (whose Ho archives are unrivalled) why he kept splicing the same ninjas into so many films, Ho replied simply it was “because they are on a kind of mission so the mission can be in this movie or another one.” You can’t argue with his logic, even if the nature of the mission itself is frequently shrouded in ninja mystery. A ‘confidential blueprint,’ a ‘top technical secret’ or some ‘very important documents’ will often be at the centre of it but the contents of these vital McGuffins are never revealed.

As these films were pumped out by the dozen and mostly by Ho alone in an editing suite, information is scant and contradictory as to what was being shot, when and who by. Memories of the elusive Ho vary wildly, depending on who’s being asked. Some say he was a good-natured and enthusiastic professional, always friendly and reliable with payments. Others paint him as an inveterate liar, a dangerous conman, and known Triad associate, who would kill animals on set and laugh about it.

Veteran genre actor Richard Harrison has been outspoken of how he believes Ho ruined his career. He allegedly signed up for a couple of ninja films and had his footage spliced into at least twenty (all of which had him credited as the star). As a final irony worthy of one of his own narratives, Ho retired from moviemaking at the end of the ’90s and now teaches at the prestigious Hong Kong Film Academy. Pretty impressive work for a guy whose films are often namechecked as some of the worst of all time. Funny as it may seem at first though, this makes a strange kind of sense. Before he deconstructed his craft into notorious no-budget ninjas, Ho had to learn it and learn it well. He began his career working for the legendary Shaw Brothers as an Assistant Director to Chang Cheh who, at this point in the mid-70s, was riding high with evergreen kung-fu classics like The Blood Brothers and The Savage Five. John Woo was actually Second AD on The Blood Brothers and Godfrey Ho was First!

It’s strange to think about, given their subsequent trajectories, but both of these auteurs first learned the ropes of shooting, editing, dubbing and directing under the intense hardworking conditions of the biggest and best studio in Hong Kong.

Wanting to branch out but realising that he could never compete with giants like Golden Harvest or the Shaws, whose mainland success was tremendous, Ho figured there was no point even trying. Instead he noticed a gap for Hong Kong films in the international market. Many directors were scared to chase it but Ho prophetically saw this as the way forward. Cutting his teeth on a string of moderately successful, low-budget martial arts movies (and realised that the ones with caucasian actors sold better internationally), Ho hit his stride when he hooked up with producer Joseph Lai. Lai was adept at international film sales and had many contacts on the festival circuit. He set up a video production company called IFD with an old school friend – the mysterious Tomas Tang (whom many believe to be Godfrey Ho himself, despite there being no concrete evidence either way) – and they bought the rights to a ton of Korean, Tawainese, Thai, Japanese and Chinese films, some of which were incomplete, all of which were cheap and/or tough to market.