Three Films Make A Post: Run for your life before they devour you

Halabala (2025): This Thai production directed by Eakasit Thairaat about an killer cop and a handful of idiots hunting a crazy killer in a haunted forest is a bit of a frustrating mess. It never can decide on a tone, wavering between Thai gore, psychological horror, ill-advised post-Tarantino-isms, and whatever else you can come up with. Whenever it actually hits on something creepy or interesting in a scene, it’s going to undermine it completely in the next; the climax is a particular mess, and a waste of a perfectly good monster suit to boot.

Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue (1992): This is the first of three unconnected Kamen Rider V-cinema movies. It is also the longest and the least artistically successful one.

It is actually a great idea to double down on the body horror element inherent to Kamen Rider as a whole – crossing people with bugs and all that – but the film doesn’t really commit to the horror for too long, finds itself not clever enough to rip off the relationship bit from The Fly properly, and shoots a third of its action scenes via bug vision, so the audience can’t actually see what’s going on in them. Which is a bit of a shame, for the rest of the action sequences are full of the great joys of direct-to-video action and tokusatsu. Hell, they could even afford a helicopter for the climax.

The film isn’t without its charms – Geena Davis should have had a foetus shooting golden light from her abdomen as well – but it’s also not as fun as the film you’ll see in your mind when you hear “Kamen Rider body horror”.

The Great Chase (1975): To avenge her father, race car driver and karate ace Shinobu (Etsuko Shihomi) has joined up with a secret government organisation. Her investigation, during which she also turns out to be a mistress of disguise (she does old ladies, dapper young men, and even older ladies from Cambodia) and a fashion icon (some of the costuming choices alone would be worth the price of admission), eventually leads her not only to the man who killed her father, but also the guy responsible for it: Bin Amatsu, who likes to rape women while wearing a furry suit (including a head), accompanied by loud classical music. Afterwards, he stuffs the traumatized victim in full plate mail, because why not.

So yes, this is indeed a Norifumi Suzuki movie, full of stuff that is as problematic as it is outrageously fun, as well as half a dozen cool fight showcases for the ever wonderful Shihomi, and a choice Toei funk soundtrack. It’s not his most extreme or outrageous Suzuki joint – Shihomi had certain standards – nor his most offensive but it is certainly still quite a bit of fun.

The Visitor in the Eye (1977)

Original title: Hitomi no naka no houmonsha

Some weird tennis boarding school in Weird Japan™. Aspiring young tennis player Chiaki (Nagisa Katahira) sees her dreams of a tennis heroic future of doing her best shattered when her young teacher Imaoka (Shingo Yamamoto) hits one of her eyes very badly with a ball, blinding her in it. Chiaki does the full brave heroine who doesn’t mind having her dreams crushed routine but Imaoka feels so guilty – a feeling certainly heightened by him being maybe a wee bit inappropriately in love with his student – he’ll do anything to help her get her eyesight back, something your normal men of medicine just won’t be able to help with.

Which leads our teacher friend directly to the man we know and love as Black Jack (house favourite Jo Shishido), rogue surgeon, sometimes mad scientist, and all-around grump. Black Jack wants a lot of money for the operation but most of all, he needs Imaoka to provide a replacement cornea for Chiaki. And, no, he’s not going to take up Imaoka on his offer of one of his own corneas. That’d be stupid! Insert Jo Shishido hitting an innocent table with full force here. Anyway, Imaoka does what any young man in love would do and breaks into the nearest eye bank (that’s what the film calls it, and who are we to doubt its wisdom in things medical?).

The ensuing cornea transplant works out well, and soon Chiaki is playing tennis again, young love is blooming between student and teacher (who, shocked reader, is basically her age, so stay calm) and the film is all set for a treacly happy end after only thirty minutes. Alas, Chiaki starts seeing a goofily sinister guy in a cloak whenever she is close to water. She’s feeling rather drawn to her hallucination too, so when she encounters the man from her vision in real life she’s already more than halfway in love with him. The mysterious man with the dubious taste in clothing is Shiro Kazama (Toru Minegishi who manages to act even more melodramatically than his character is written), as melodramatic a pianist as his cloak wearing habit suggests, and feels as deeply drawn to Chiaki as she is to him. Does he have a rather gothic romance style secret that just might get Chiaki killed? Of course he does, he’s a melodramatic artistic soul wearing a cloak!

After and through some other business I’m not going to get into now, apart from telling you it’s weird, Imaoka and Chiaki’s best friend and tennis double partner Kyoko (played by another house favourite, the wonderful Etsuko Shihomi) try to find out what the heck is up with Chiaki now, and will perhaps learn a terrible secret in time to safe her life.

It might come as a bit of a disappointment that this weird concoction concerning Osamu Tezuka’s wild and wonderful manga character Black Jack in a live action adventure doesn’t actually feature too much of Black Jack himself, particularly since Shishido plays him with the charming and hilarious style of overacting that befits a character as exalted as everyone’s favourite rogue surgeon. It’s really more of a slightly long-ish cameo, but then, the sheer scenery-chewing of Shishido might have eaten up all the beautiful scenery as well as the consciously artificial sets director Nobuhiko Obayashi throws at his audience’s corneas.

Obayashi is well loved around these parts for his epochal – and epochally weird – female coming of age tale Hausu. The Visitor in the Eye is stylistically cut very much from the same cloth as the director’s master piece (not too surprising seeing as they were apparently shot during the course of the same 12 months). So expect the director to have an astonishing control over all the technical aspects of filmmaking, but also expect him to use none of these techniques in a sane – or at least common way – with tonal shifts between the broadest comedy and off-beat gothic romance being the least of the peculiarities a viewer will encounter. There are beautiful shots (Obayashi is a great fan of extremely artificial orange sun light) that are at once nearly painfully kitschy, inspired, and campily ironic, staging of scenes that revels in the artificial nature of everything in this movie, sudden switches in the score from the diegetic to the non-diegetic that might cause one whiplash once one begins noticing them, and so much visual information that seems coded in at least three ways at the same time, uniting conscious camp, absolute earnestness, and plain weirdness.

The script, very much in the spirit of some of Tezuka’s work, loves these shifts between high-brow, low-brow and what the hell just as much, going into short digressions of bizarre humour (even for a viewer by now somewhat accustomed to Japanese tastes in these things), inserting pretty insane cameos (personal favourite is Sonny Chiba rolling in wearing a cowboy outfit and grinning as a loon getting hit on the ass with a pan by Shihomi in a perfectly pointless yet wonderful scene), sudden genre shifts, and a heightened emotional intensity that is as silly as it is awesome.

As regular readers will know, I’m not generally a big fan of the camp approach but the way Obayashi handles it in his better films – a group to which this one most certainly belongs - always does manage to get me, perhaps because the director’s camp is often as beautiful as it is silly and usually seems very much to have an actual point beyond the power of posturing. Because, as Hausu is a film about a young girl growing into a young woman (while fighting off melons, woman-eating pianos and so on), The Visitor in the Eye appears to me very much to be a film about different kinds of love, comparing the oversized kind of ROMANCE(!) that can end in things like double suicide to the just as honest, just as intense, but more quotidian thing a guy like Imaoka has to offer. The former, of course, is rather attractive, but it is also less real than the latter. Sorry, Norah Ephron.

Now, while I think The Visitor in the Eye is a rather wonderful film (if you can cope with the sensory overload or even do as I do and rather relish it after a while), I still think Hausu is Obayashi’s masterpiece, because the latters weirdnesses are even greater yet also more on point with what the film is trying to say, and its tonal shifts feel more organic in its way. But then, this might come down to personal taste. Plus, saying a film is not quite as brilliant as Hausu, is not exactly a put-down in my house.

Message From Space (1978)

aka Return to Jelucia

Original title: Uchu kara messeji

Silver-faced, kabuki-inspired intergalactic villain Rockseia (Mikio Narita) and his black-clad troops have conquered Jelucia, a planet full of people who dress like space hippies (crappy robes, leaves on their heads and all), though their not non-violent but only really bad at fighting. The planet's last hope lies in sending out eight magical space walnuts to find eight heroes to rescue it. Two of the Jelucians, Esmeraldina (Etsuko Shihomi!, wearing what looks like a white silk bathrobe - and the leaves) and Urocco (Makoto Sato) are supposed to follow the leaves in a space ship that looks like a clipper and help bring the heroes in.

Turns out magical space walnuts have no taste at all when it comes to heroes, and choose a bunch of dumb space jocks (Hiroyuki Sanada, Philip Casnoff, Peggy Lee Brennan), a shady gambler type guy (Masazumi Okabe), a former space general played by Vic Morrow and his pet robot. Later - much too late - Hans (Sonny Chiba!), the true heir to the throne of Rockseia will join in too, but before that, it's mostly scenes of the crappy non-heroes selling Esmeraldina into sexual slavery (from which she is freed by the bad guys to be kidnapped), pouting a lot and being annoying. Well, and Vic Morrow talks a lot with his robot (turns out it was a good thing R2D2 didn't talk back).

Anyhow, after the audience has spent too much time with the film's crappy heroes, Rockseia falls in love with Earth and decides to conquer it too, so off he and his minions go by way of having Jelucia turned into a giant spaceship without any of the inhabitants having noticed. Will our intensely crappy heroes ever do anything about it?

By now, Kinji Fukasaku is actually better known for his great yakuza films and his general awesomeness than for the weird pieces of cracktastic nonsense he produced whenever he took on the job to be really commercial (for the uninitiated: you can usually recognize these films by featuring an "international" cast or being made during the 80s). If you only know Fukasaku from his more earnest-minded work, Message From Space will come as a bit of a shock, for not only is it nonsensical bordering on totally incomprehensible, it's also a film that barely seems to have been directed at all.

There's certainly little on display of Fuksasaku's usual dynamic (sometimes chaotic) visual style - much of the film seems done with a nailed-down camera, and concentrates on framing and staging everything in the least interesting way imaginable. The film's visual side is clearly not helped by sets that are the opposite of lavish. Jelucia and what we see of Earth are the sort of brown, sandy non-entities that make the rock quarries that so often tended to stand in for alien planets in SF movies look colourful and fanciful.

The script is no help at all, either: there's not much actual plot, nor dramatic tension. Nobody does much - and that slowly - until the film suddenly remembers that it's supposed to end soon after, and everything that might have been interesting had it been developed in the time that came before suddenly happens at once.

Despite these failings - and I haven't even mentioned the film's wasting of Sonny Chiba on a longer cameo and of Etsuko Shihomi on the classic princess role - there is something about it that makes Message eminently watchable, namely, its utter, ludicrous silliness that makes it a brother in spirit to the great Alfredo Brescia's Star Wars rip-offs. Kabuki traditions, truly bad space opera, moments of surprising violence and childish silliness collide in the most ridiculous ways. Space clipper ships meet horned helmets galore; an evil emperor is under the thumb of his mother, who is played by a guy (again the kabuki influence?). Tetsuro Tanba pops in for a minute as the new chairman of Earth; there are space fireflies. Earth is home to a wicked witch with her Plutonian son; Vic Morrow goes on a diplomatic mission dressed up as the camp version of an 18th century navy admiral. I'd say there's always something happening, but the film's tone (until the grand finale which by the way makes no sense at all) is so sedate it's more honest to say there's always something to look at.

 

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Dragon Princess (1976)

It's 1966, and New York City has a major crime problem. The City goes for the obvious solution - hire a Japanese karate instructor to teach the cops martial arts. But there are two different instructors vying for the honour of teaching police men how to cripple their victims without guns. On one side is the intensely honourable Okinawan Kazuma Higaki (Sonny Chiba! in one of his patented cameo roles), but on the other glares evil bastard from Tokyo Hironobu Nikaido (Bin Amatsu). Higaki would be perfectly willing for the police to make a decision and just get on with things, but his enemy isn't so laid-back. When Nikaido loses a duel Higaki never even wanted, he lets his three pet assassins loose, crippling and nearly killing Higaki in front of his little daughter Yumi.

For some reason, Nikaido decides to allow Higaki to live, at least if he leaves town. Thinking about the future of his daughter, Higaki agrees and moves to LA. A bit bitter and broken, Higaki raises his daughter (soon enough to be played by house favourite Etsuko Shihomi) the martial arts training way, so that she will be able to avenge the family honour and "the purity of karate" on Nikaido. It's about as happy and satisfying a childhood for the girl as you'd expect. When Yumi punches her father too hard during training and he dies, it's time for her to go to Tokyo - to where Nikaido has returned years ago to become the Big Man of karate culture - and set her vengeance in motion.

Obviously, Yumi's enemy still uses the same trio of assassins, and just as obviously, it won't be easy for our heroine to kill them. At least there's another nice young man (Yasuaki Kurata) infiltrating Nikaido's dojo who's also quite angry at her enemies to help her out when need be.

Dragon Princess might not be the best martial arts film produced by Toei featuring Etsuko Shihomi and/or Sonny Chiba, but given how many great (or at least greatly entertaining) films these two made in the 70s and 80s, that shouldn't be much of a deterrent to anybody.

This one is still much too entertaining to be mediocre, but the mandatory madness of Toei's films in this particular genre is very subdued; in fact, if not for the sputtering mad New Yorker beginning, there wouldn't be enough madness in the movie to even use the word. Even the assassin trio is rather quotidian for a martial arts movie - I mean, honestly, if the worst you got is a blind (thanks, Sonny!) assassin who can be driven mad by a bunch of little bells, you're the straight man in this genre.

Fortunately, madness is not all I like about Toei's martial arts movies of the period, and Dragon Princess' director Yutaka Kohira fulfils all other stylistic wishes to the best of his abilities. So yes, there are scenes of Chiba, Shihomi and Kurata being 70s cool while Toei funk plays on the soundtrack, there are sudden spurts of psychedelic directing flourishes in form of anti-naturalist (but pretty) colour choices in the sets, bizarre framing decisions and some really dubious uses of tinting. The film also shows the mild distractibility (why not put a fight scene in here? what do you mean, there's no plot reason for it to be here?) I've grown to love in its kind.

It's a bit disappointing that the movie doesn't do much with Yumi's early reluctance to do karate, but on the other hand, films about reluctant fighters often tend to make their protagonists look not so much like people in true doubt about their way in life, but like lazy douches who wouldn't help an old woman who collapses right in front of them back on her feet again. And who would want to see that in a movie that ends with Etsuko Shihomi punching a guy's lungs in although she has a broken arm?

 

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Return of the Sister Street Fighter (1975)

Original title: Kaette kita onna hissatsu ken

After her adventures in Japan in Sister Street Fighter and Sister Street Fighter: Hanging By A Thread, everyone's favourite female martial artist Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi) has again returned to her native Hong Kong. To nobody's surprise, she isn't going to stay there long, though. Sho, a private detective friend from Japan (played by Sonny Chiba's decidedly less awesome brother Jiro) comes to tell her that her old friend Shurei (Akane Kawasaki) has disappeared and is probably held captive by the criminal organization of a certain Oh Ryu Mei. For some reason, the detective is also bringing Koryu Shurei's little daughter Rika. The only lead Sho can give Koryu about Shurei's disappearance is the last person Shurei spoke with before she disappeared, a woman named Suzy Wong in Yokohama. Then, it's time for Sho to get killed in the mandatory attack on our heroine's first informant.

Now, there's really not much else for Koryu to do than to pack her bags and Rika and go to Yokohama. As always, the bad guys are starting a series of failed attempts on Koryu's life once she arrives, and as always, she (and in this case Rika) puts her trust into a junkie who is secretly working for the bad guys - in this case Shurei's sister Reika (Miwa Cho). Of course, there are lots of fighting, a little sneaking and crying and a redemptive death or two in Koryu's future, as well as the "surprising" revelation that the least freakish character (Yasuaki Kurata) among Oh Ryu Mei's killers isn't a bad guy at all.

Plotwise, this third and last Sister Street Fighter movie is quite a disappointment. Although the first and second movie were already a bit similar to each other, this one is more or less a remake of Hanging By A Thread, just with an even more ridiculous - and therefore satisfying - gold smuggling plan and a few elements pilfered from the first movie added to the mix. In theory, this sort of recycling is too cynical even for an exploitation movie, and should lead to the sort of movie that puts me into an even more annoyed mood than is my natural state of mind. In practice, I didn't mind the films lack of originality much, because Return - despite everything -still does manage to be a slightly different film from its predecessors.

For one, Return is quite a differently directed movie than the other two parts of the series, with (on the negative side) fewer of the moments of colourful visual excess Kazuhiko Yamaguchi seems to like to put in his movies as often as possible, but (on the positive side) also an even greater emphasis on keeping the action tightly flowing. Yamaguchi always has shown a hand for the latter in his movies, but often seems to prefer the weirdly psychedelic or the full-blown freak-out to the dynamic. That's of course lovely too, yet a script as close to that of a film that was made less than a year before is better served with getting a different treatment, as happens with Return.

And really, I'm not going to complain much about a martial arts movie full of exciting martial arts sequences. That would be rather silly.

Another reason not to complain about Return is the nature of its main villain. Oh Ryu Mei has the most Blofeld-like sense of style of all the main villains in the Sister Street Fighter movies (although he prefers a guy with a ridiculous hair cut who works as a food taster and wheel-chair driver to a cat), a sure way of showing his henchpeople who's boss, a lair that also makes excessively clear who is boss - what with him sitting five meters above his henchies, and an electric fist. Confronted with this kind of evil, I'm utterly helpless.

The rest of the film is as you'd expect: Etsuko Shihomi is awesome and cute (and sort of looking like a friend of mine, actually), the child actress annoying, the evil assassins silly as you could wish, the soundtrack funky as expected in this sort of Toei production, and everything's over and done with an hour before most films made in our century would be. It's a film that never overstays its welcome, and that is as generous with its bits of awesomeness as it is with its fight scenes.

So it's all good.

 

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Sister Street Fighter: Hanging By A Thread (1974)

Original title: Onna hissatsu ken: kiki ippatsu

After her adventures in Japan during Sister Street Fighter, Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi), everyone's favourite kicker of evil behinds, has returned to Hong Kong. She has kept her talent for being at the right place at the right time, and so is present when some brutal martial artist thugs are attacking a private eye. Koryu is able to drive off the attackers, but can't prevent the detective from being mortally wounded. At least, before he dies the man is still able to give her his glass eye and beg her to bring it to a certain Doctor Wang, whom Koryu already knows as the father of her old school friend Birei (Hisayo Tanaka).

From Wang, Koryu learns that he had hired the dead detective to find out what happened to Birei, who disappeared. The glass eye - as glass eyes do - contains some photos that make clear the young woman has been kidnapped by a Japanese gang of human traffickers. Birei's father, knowing that Koryu has experience in Japan and is quite good at not getting killed, begs the fighter to travel to Japan and get his daughter back. Of course, Koryu agrees.

About ten seconds after she has arrived in Japan, our heroine is distracted by the first of many attempts of the human traffickers to permanently get rid of her, but Koryu's not the type to get phased by a little violence and solves the problem without too much of an effort, even if she has to fight ninjas on the roof of a moving train.

After that, it's time to visit her sister Hakuran (Tamayo Mitsukawa), who is supposedly working as a designer of jewellery, but is in truth part of the Osone group that is responsible for Koryu's problems. It's not that she has much of a choice in that, mind you, because the Osone group need a talented jeweller like Hakuran too badly not to press her into service through violence and sadism. They're not just human traffickers selling their victims into prostitution, you see, the group also uses an alcoholic surgeon to sew jewels into their victims' asses in a newfangled smuggling ploy. So Koryu has her work - and an obvious source of melodrama - cut out for her.

For her second Sister Street Fighter film, the Toei higher-ups seem to have trusted the abilities of Etsuko Shihomi enough not to put her mentor Sonny Chiba at her side to steal her lamplight. She's getting a bit of male help again, but where Chiba was typically memorable in the first movie, her new sidekick's just there to break a bit of second-string henchman skull and point Koryu into the right direction from time to time. That sidelining of male protagonists is of course a good thing - there are more than enough movies with Chiba and co. strutting their stuff admirably, so there's no need to fill a film with "Sister Street Fighter" in its title with guy cooties too.

By now (and still in the second year of her movie career), Shihomi has really hit her stride and doesn't just show off appropriately photogenic and brutal martial arts skills, but has also mastered the three expressions of emotion most important in this arm of martial arts cinema: the pissed off look, the violently determined look, and the mean stare. That's no small feat with a face that does fulfil all rules and regulations of cuteness afforded that have come down to the Japanese moviemaking culture from their venerable forefathers.

What's best about Shihomi's position in the film, though, is something completely different, and something I'd usually associate with martial arts films from Taiwan and Hong Kong rather than with Japanese films of the 70s. It's how matter-of-factly the film treats its heroine being a female ass-kicker. Koryu's gender does not seem to be a thing even worth mentioning for most of the movie. There's barely a sentence of the usual "but how could a girl beat me?" stuff coming from the bad guys; it's as if the film just doesn't put any importance on it.

While Shihomi effortlessly carries her part of the movie, returning director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi does not seem to be at the top of his game. The cinematic basics are of course realized with the highest level of craftsmanship - this is a Japanese movie of the 70s made by highly knowledgeable professionals, after all - but the creative visual flourishes that elevate a film from good to "what did I just see" levels aren't really forthcoming. When he's not moving his camera around to produce a dynamic feeling, Yamaguchi mostly goes for the overuse of zooms and a high amount of shots from below at a slanted angle that certainly look peculiar, but are not peculiar enough to push the psychedelic buttons I was hoping for seeing pushed going in.

More problematic some viewers could be the perfunctory way the emotional and melodramatic parts are integrated into the storyline, but this just looks to me like a film concentrating on what it does best (brutal violence) and mostly ignoring what it does worst (crying). Owing to that, Hanging By A Thread is not an emotionally complex movie, yet it isn't supposed to be one.

A bit more disappointing to me is that Yamaguchi (or his script writers, veteran director, writer and madman Norifumi Suzuki and Masahiro Kakefuda) dials down the batshit insanity of the proceedings compared to a first movie that in its turn was already dialled down from the insanity of The Streetfighter. Fortunately, "dialling down" in this context still leaves us with a movie where even an alcoholic surgeon (usually seen with a large parrot on his shoulder, so I suppose he's a pirate surgeon) is an expert martial artists, where bad guy fighting techniques contain things like hypnotic sai sounds that let heroines see double, where there's a throw-away ninja attack just ten minutes in and where the final strikes of the final fight are exchanged while the combatants are flying. So, while it's not as batshit, organ-ripping insane as it could be, Hanging By A Thread still prefers the ridiculously awesome to the realistic.

And, as it goes with movies that do this, it's incredibly fun to watch.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,martial arts,etsuko shihomi,kazuhiko yamaguchi,reviews

Sister Street Fighter (1974)

The Hong Kong police has lost contact with one of their undercover agents who was trying to get the goods on the up and coming drug trading organization of a man named Kakuzaki (Bin Amatsu).

The best way to find out what happened is obviously to send their agent Mansei's (Hiroshi Miyauchi) sister Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi) to Yokohama where he was last seen. She is after all a martial arts expert and half Japanese with an uncle and cousins in Yokohama and therefore the perfect choice to catch drug dealers. It certainly isn't a job for the police.

The only actual information the HK cops give Koryu is a way to meet Fanshin (Xiu-Rong Xie), their other agent in on the project.

It doesn't take much time after her arrival in Japan until Koryu has to violently deal with the first of Kakuzaki's cronies. That's not too difficult for her, but getting actually helpful information or just keeping Fanshin alive are much more difficult prospects.

At least, Koryu has the help of her brother's former martial arts school, which includes the help of Emi Hayakawa and the gut-ripping talents of a guy named Hibiki (Sonny Chiba in a long-ish guest role).

Koryu will need the reinforcements, too, because Kakuzaki owns a private zoo of martial artists (that's his description, not mine), and also secretly has his grip on the fighter's uncle. Of course, in the long run there's no problem that can't be solved by persistence and hitting people in the face.

After the success of The Street Fighter with Sonny Chiba and some other films in that style, it must have looked like a good idea to Toei studios to make as many martial arts films in as short a time as possible. Chiba was certainly game for anything, always willing to do his duty as a guest star, at least in films that made use of the members of his Japan Action Club like Sister Street Fighter's Etsuko Shihomi. And what studio would resist a group of young, athletic, well-trained actors like that? Toei certainly didn't.

Etsuko Shihomi is one of my favourites among these protégés of Chiba, with her easy confidence and the determined professionalism she shows in her fights. The Toei school of exploitational martial arts cinema lived or died on that sort of charisma. With scripts that usually didn't leave much room for the finer aspects of acting or anything amounting to subtlety, acting in these films often became a thing of people dressing up in outrageous outfits, doing athletics and showing physical presence, even more so than in other martial arts films.

This works out nicely for Sister Street Fighter and also fits the rather unsubtle yet from time to time manically interesting directorial style of its director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi. He would have slaughtered any slow and ponderous scene anyway. Yamaguchi's work here is fine if not exactly inspired. It's the usual assortment of close-ups of eyes and pained expressions, peculiar camera angles and some really fine semi-psychedelic lighting (especially in the pre-finale). The set design, on the other hand, is full-blown Japanese mid-70s eccentricity with some very strange ideas about interior decoration of hidden lairs and will surely affect anyone's mind - for better or worse.

Compared to the Street Fighter films, the action here doesn't start out as insane, but slowly and surely increases from friendly punching and kicking matches into the bone-crunching, blood-spattering style of non-realist martial arts Toei films were good at.

In comparison to Hong Kong or Taiwanese productions of the time, the fight choreography in Japanese martial arts films was always less complex and less acrobatic, but the Japanese films tended to make up for their lack in these aspects by ramping up the blood and the violent effects. Sister Street Fighter's highpoints of silly brutality are both in the grand finale, with Chiba ripping out someone's guts with his bare hands and Shihomi re-orienting another guy's head rather dubiously. So that's alright.

When it comes to weirdness, Sister Street Fighter again loses out against the Chiba film, but it doesn't feel right to complain about a film not being weird enough when it contains drug smugglers transporting their heroin in the form of wigs ("Save the wigs!"), a blowgun assassin with a mohawk or an evil former priest in full preacher garb who murders his victims with a harpoon gun (or is it a bolt pistol?). So that's alright, too.

What distinguishes Sister Street Fighter (and many of Toei's films of the era) is a singular mixture of exploitational values (in this case only one pair of breasts - not Shihomi's -, some drug withdrawal fun and a not too gruesome rape scene), weird yet typical-for-the-era visual obsessions, martial arts fully concentrated one the bone-crunching and the blood-spattering and a wild and often uncontrolled imagination. That combination is more than alright for me.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,martial arts,etsuko shihomi,sonny chiba,reviews,kazuhiko yamaguchi