Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

After having spent only a couple of years behind bars for his role in the climax of the first movie, Bunta Sugawara now roams Japan in this second movie of the street peddling focussed ninkyo eiga series to keep out of Tokyo trouble.

As will surprise nobody who ever watched a ninkyo eiga or two, Bunta soon falls in with group of deeply honourable street peddling yakuza who control an important festival site, but are beleaguered by the intrigues and occasional casual violence of a gang of proper baddy yakuza who want to get at that turf and its riches by any means necessary.

This sequel was again directed by Norifumi Suzuki, who spent a lot of his time in the ninkyo realm before he found his true calling in pinky violence and dubious comedy.

Here we find the director pulling his preferred comedy shenanigans back for much of the film beyond a couple of comical interludes. Instead he concentrates on melodrama and bad yakuza nastiness (even in the less extreme ninkyo eiga variant of the yakuza movie, things could get a bit unpleasant at this point in time, as long as only the villains were doing the really bad stuff). Despite some inelegant shuffling out of and into the movie of characters – some actors probably shot another movie for Toei in parallel, or ten – the film is rather more focussed than its predecessor. This provides Suzuki with opportunity to put more effort into creating more complex character relations and go deeper into the politics of the street peddler world. All this is then used to make the melodrama more intense once the shit hits the fan, until everything culminates in the expected beautiful bloodbath.

That climax isn’t quite as wonderfully done as the one in the first Kanto Street Peddlers, though Suzuki still puts a lot of effort into creating an energetic fight that doesn’t use the standard by the book camera set-ups or blocking of such scenes. In general, Suzuki appears very interested in using all kinds of tricks to make the genre standards Seiko Shimura’s script goes through visually memorable and through this emotionally involving. This works rather well for the movie, and also demonstrates a side of the directors that’s easy to overlook when he’s throwing naked female wrestlers and pratfalls at the camera: he’s genuinely good at the quiet emotional moments, and knows how to provide the Toei stable of thespians with openings to really strut their stuff. As it usually goes when a director does this, they repay him with giving a little extra.

Three Films Make A Post: Getting in is hard, getting out is hell.

Do Not Enter (2026): A group of YouTube Urban Explorers get in over their heads when they enter an old abandoned hotel where they’ll not only have to cope with a violent group of rivals led by an ex-colleague but also a mysterious murdering monster (Javier Botet doing his usual shtick).

Surprisingly enough, director Marc Klasfeld doesn’t stage this as a piece of POV horror – there’s only very little footage of the sort in here – but shoots it like a “proper movie”. Which seems like a curious decision, given the set-up, but then, this is not a film demonstrating too many sensible behind the camera decisions. All changes to the clockwork-tight David Morell novel this is based on are either superficial modernizations the movie then does nothing of use with, or feel made to slow things down and make them less interesting. The sets are pretty nice, and if you’re into heart-based gore, there’s something for your specific kink in here, but otherwise, this is such a generic piece of cinema, one might just as well not bother with it.

Kanto Street Peddlers aka Kantô Tekiya ikka (1969): At their height, even the more mediocre and generic outings of Japanese studios like this contemporary ninkyo eiga about battling street peddlers produced by Toei and directed by Norifumi Suzuki, were impossibly entertaining.

This does waver sometimes awkwardly between earnest, leftist, ninkyo and the kind of goofy nonsense comedy Suzuki loved so much to drag into every single one of his films, but also contains a bunch of Toei house actors – Bunta Sugwara is our hero, Minoru Oki is actually playing a good guy; Bin Amatsu at least is still evil – I can’t help but love to watch even in lesser material, and looks and feels so much of its time and place it is fascinating even when it isn’t exactly good and a bit slow. Plus, this ends on a fantastic climax that hits all the ninkyo clichés – our hero strutting manly through the rain to the final slaughter while he sings terribly on the soundtrack – which it presents with much verve, imagination – the POV shot start to the battle alone is worth the whole movie – and all the blood one could wish for.

Bored Hatamoto – The Mansion of Intrigue aka Riddle of the Snake Princess’ Mansion (1957): This is still the earliest (between the 22nd and the 25th, depending on source) in the long-running series of jidai-geki pulp detective films starring Utaemon Ichikawa as the titular hero with the moon-shaped scar you can find with English subtitles.

It’s not one of my particular favourites of the series – three comic relief characters plus a teen sidekick are a bit much for me even though we get a really good seppuku joke late in proceedings – but there’s still a lot to like here. Director Yasushi Sasaki stages some fine battles (we’re still in the bloodless and noiseless stage of screen fighting in Japan here), there are Japanese actors in whiteface pretending to be Dutch, and there’s a wonderful pulpy energy to proceedings, all dominated by Ichikawa’s commanding presence. Plus, as if this were a 70s Bollywood masala, our hero infiltrates the main villain’s lair by taking part in a sweet dance number.

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 Killing Machine (1975)

During World War II, martial arts expert Doshin So (Sonny Chiba in a role supposedly based on events in the life of the founder of the Shorinji Kempo style of martial arts) works as a secret agent in Manchuria for the Japanese, and is with his concept of honor and duty probably as much of a pain in the ass for his superiors as for the Chinese. So doesn't take too well to the Japanese capitulation, shooting up his superior's office with a machine gun and shouting stuff like "Japan may have surrendered, I never will".

He's not as completely a nationalist tool as he sounds, though, and acts mostly as a protector of the weak and downtrodden, regardless of their nationality.

After his return to Japan, he's trying to make ends meet in the ruins of Osaka, but his overstrained sense of justice and the mustache-twirling evilness of the local Yakuza don't make for a pleasurable life. While he's protecting the local war orphans and saving women from prostitution So gets into trouble that could possibly get him hanged when he breaks some (of course evil, child-harming) American bones, but a suddenly materializing Tetsuro Tanba saves him and sends him to Shochiku to make himself a new - and hopefully more peaceful - life.

There he somehow manages to scrounge together enough money to found a martial arts school whose teachings are based on the things So had learned from the Shaolin Temple in China. His dojo effectively works as a way to keep other male war survivors (although we will see some women at his school, too) from getting in trouble and killing themselves one way or the other.

But So just can't keep his head down when confronted with the local Yakuza gang who make people's lives even harder than they already are. At first, there's just a little friendly brawling, but when the Yakuza rape a schoolgirl, So grabs himself a pair of scissors and does some amateur surgery on the main perpetrator. This isn't something the gangsters will just let sit, and soon the situation escalates.

A film directed by 70s exploitation god/madman Norifumi Suzuki with the glorious Sonny Chiba playing its hero sounds like a surefire winner to me. Alas, The Killing Machine is far from being as good as I had hoped for.

Mostly, it's just a mess of a movie, cursed with a script that can't decide what the film is actually about (a man finding a more peaceful self? The state of mind of post-war Japan? Sonny hitting people?) or to which genre it belongs. While title and cast promise your typical "Sonny Chiba plays a real life martial artist in an outrageous interpretation of said martial artist's life" film, The Killing Machine mostly turns out to be an incredibly overwrought melodrama, trying to do for post-war Japan what Gone With The Wind did for the American South. And it succeeds - it is nearly as hypocritical as its American model, and even a bit more confused about its own political position. Which isn't to say that I don't understand the mixed emotions the post-war years produced in the Japanese cinema of the 70s or the very real suffering many Japanese people had to go through - the problem is that the film's melodramatic vein so overstates the case that it spits into the face of the real suffering, making it seem trite and trivial. Karate Bullfighter looks downright balanced in comparison.

The film's loose, episodic structure doesn't do much to improve this impression. Nothing here really hangs together in any meaningful sense, character development is as disjointed as the film is confused about its own themes.

Still, even this mess has its good sides. Chiba is as scenery-chewingly good as he always is, the small amount of action scenes is competently choreographed and while you can't say that Suzuki does anything that helps the film hold together, he still wastes a number of beautiful shots on scenes that just don't deserve it.

As disappointing as The Killing Machine is, it at least should encourage you to seek out better films about the same themes, say Karate Bullfighter or Karate Bearfighter to see the Killing Machine done right, or Kinji Fukasaku's Battles Without Honor And Humanity (and its sequels) as a much more complex and honest analysis of Japanese post-war society.

 

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