Posts Tagged ‘Godfrey Ho’

Top 5 B-Movie posters of Neal Adams!

Posted: 29/05/2022 in Top List
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Unfortunately the comicbook community lost one of all- time greats recently- Neal Adams, legendary artist on everything from Batman (where he co- created Ra’s al Ghul & Man-Bat) to X-Men, famous for his dynamism and photo- realism as well as his fight for artist’s rights (most notably for Superman creator’s Siegel & Shuster).

But there’s a part of his career that’s not spoken about that often and that is his prolific movie poster work in the 70s. There’s been a number of times that after finding an obscure B-movie I thought to myself- that looks like a Neal Adams cover. And sure it was just that.

Through his Continuity Studio he did some of the best poster of the Kung Fu craze era (and also great cover for the Deadly Hands of Kung Fu magazine) and honestly- sometimes those posters were more impressive than the movies themselves! That’s definitely true for the Bruceploitation one. Beside Martial Arts movies he also did a number of Horror and SF posters that are almost as good.

So here’s our little list of best Neal Adams movie posters with a little bit of trivia thrown in:

05: BLACK DRAGON’S REVENGE (1975)

Released right at the beginning of a Bruceploitation craze Black Dragon’s Revenge aka Death of Bruce Lee (1975) features three rivals factions fighting for a secret manual left over by Bruce Lee ( secret manuals were all the rage back in those days).

Movie features the legendary American Martial Artist “Black Dragon” himself- Ron Van Clief as a detective trying to solve Lee’s murder, Philip Ko (The Boxer’s Omen, The Invincible Armour) and another name we’ll talk about very shortly “La Pantera” Charles Bonet. Hell, it even has a young Yuen Qiu (landlady from Kung Fu Hustle)!

Poster nicely captures both the explosive action and the exotic Hong Kong setting.

04: ENTER THREE DRAGONS (1978)

Enter Three Dragons aka The Dragon on Fire (1978) is a Bruceploitation as it gets. It has not only Godfrey Ho staple Bruce Lai in it- but it has a distinction of being a debut of our favorite Bruce Lee- clone– Dragon Lee who plays his brother. Confusingly Lai is called Dragon Hong in this and Dragon Lee is called Bruce Hong so try to keep that straight.

Even thou the poster is monochromatic it still has a powerful triangular composition that works like a charm!

03: DEATH PROMISE (1977)

Death Promise (1977) was an American response to Hong Kong Martial Art flicks of the day with an interesting “evil landlords” gentrification theme. Despite a lot of silly story beats and the obvious low budget– it’s lead, Charles Bonet is great and charismatic action hero and he definitely should have done more!

Adams captures all the crazy energy and I especially like the combination of blood splattered lettering and a rat wandering in front of it. Great detail!

02: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

Phantom Of The Paradise (1974) is one of the more eclectic movies Adams illustrated. Combination of horror, comedy and rock music written and directed by young De Palma and scored by Paul Williams.

Poster also has a distinction of being a collaboration of two comicbook legends being drawn by Adams and painted by underground comic legend Richard Corben (DEN,Mutant World)!

01: WESTWORLD

Without a doubt the most legendary movie Adams worked on (although Grizzly has it’s fans too) is Yul Brynner’s Westworld (1973). There’s actually two different versions of this poster but this is my favorite- it shows you all you need to know about the movie.

Bonafide SF classic about amusement park full of cowboy robots (what could go wrong with that) was written/ directed by writer Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park, Twister). It spawned the sequel movie Futureworld (1976) , sequel series Beyond Westworld (1980) and even contemporary HBO reboot series (2016) that’s still ongoing.

Worse Interview: Richard Harrison speaks!

Posted: 26/10/2018 in Tribute, Worse Interview
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If you’re child of the 80’s like we are you’ll probably remember seemingly endless stream of Ninja movies staring mustachioed white ninja called Gordon on the TV. Later I would find out that those were directed by the notorious Hong Kong director by the name of Godfrey Ho (also known as  Godfrey Hall, Benny Ho, Ho Chi-Mou and Ed Woo) who routinely used cut- and- paste method producing dozens of Ninja movies every year. One of the tricks he used was to buy an unfinished Taiwanese film (or 10) and pepper it with his default Ninja fight scenes to create a unique mutant of the Martial Arts genre (often featuring dual storylines by sheer necessity).

Most of those Joseph Lai produced gems featured Harrison (sometimes even without his knowledge or approval), anything from Ninja Terminator (1985) to Ninja Strike Force (1988). And I can’t forget all the brightly colored uniforms or those headbands with Ninja written on them to this day!

Quite possibly the greatest scene in the history of Martial Arts cinema!

To go back in time even more so Harrison started his career much like Eastwood acting in Italian movies– albeit initially in the sword and sandals genre (The Magnificent Gladiator). He would eventually move up to the more commercial Spaghetti Western films (Gunfight at Red Sands, also first Ennio Morricone scored film ever) before becoming the European answer to 007 aka 077 (no, I’m not making this up). Also you should definitely check out his Italian team- up with  Bruce Le called Challenge of the Tiger. Eurospy meets Bruceploitation– you don’t see that every day!

Beware of that buff Italian guy!

He also famously turned down the opportunity to act in A Fistful of Dollars and recommended Clint Eastwood for the role. He jokingly said he considers that his greatest contribution to the world of cinema.

He first started collaborating with a Hong Kong studio when he played  the title role of Marco Polo in  Shaw Brothers‘s production in 1975 and Commander von Waldersee in The Boxer Rebellion a year later. More than a decent start. But in the 80’s with the fall of both Western and Eurospy movies he ended up signing a multi- picture contract with Joseph Lai’s Imperial Entertainment which lead him to Godfrey Ho and as they say- the rest is history!

We want to thank Guru Khalid Khan for this wonderful interview, It’s really uplifting to see a legend like Harris still alive and kicking  while being charismatic as he ever was.