The Street Fighter

Hey gang.  I'm back.  After the major SNAFU with the notebook, my folks were kind and thoughtful enough to loan me a laptop for better writing capabilities.  Today we are talking about a Japanese karate film.  Now if the martial arts movies are not your cup of tea, you will be disappointed with this write up.  If in fact you do enjoy this sort of thing, I must warn the women folk there are some disturbing context in this particular film.   Okay now that has been cleared up, I am on about one of cinema's finer martial artist bad asses, Sonny Chiba.  This is Street Fighter.

 Ming-Na Wen made an awesome Chun Li in spite of giving her a completely different backstory.

That is the face of a man with the most conflicting boner.

Okay don't abandon ship.  This is the 1974 action film not the unfortunate live-action film of 1994 with Van Damme.  That being said,

Our story begins with Terry Tsurugi (Sonny Chiba of Bullet Train, Karate Warriors, Doberman Cop, Sister Street Fighter, The Assassin and Golgo 13: Assignment Kowloon),  a man for hire with exceptional Karate and Hapkido mixture.   Faking the death of a prisoner Junjo and sneaking him away from the cops, a pair of siblings that hired Terry are pleased with the news but uh oh they can't afford his prices.  Terry is unmoved by their pleas and tells them he'll just sell the sister to the sex trade.  Her brother attempts to combat Terry only to go flying out a window of about 5 stories and the girl is pawned off.   Our hero!  Okay that was actually all the real disturbing portion.

I make the same face when I am popping my back.

 














Later a young daughter of a recently deceased oil tycoon stands to inherit millions so the Yakuza (Japanese mafia for you lousy gajin.) decides to hire Terry to kidnap the girl and force her to sign over all her deeds to them.  Terry pitches them a price they refuse to agree to pay and opt to killing him for the knowledge of their plans.  Bad call but they are a collective of butter heads so I wasn't surprised.

Terry comes to the idea of hiring out his services to the girl Sairi (Yutaka Nakajima of Code Name Black Cat o oe, Kyotaro Nishimura's Travel Mystery 13, Kyotaro Nishimura's Travel Mystery 15, Nanmim Rodo, Hotel Doctor and Red Dead Wagon 5: Gorgeous Mistakes) as her protector.  She is currently being guarded by her uncle Kendo Masaoka in his dojo.   Terry with all the sympathy he can muster tells Kendo that his students couldn't stop a housefly and yup, you guessed it.  More fight scenes.  Terry proceeds to smack the monkey crap out of Kendo's students until he challenges Terry.   Kendo recognizes the fighting style to a man that years ago was executed for mixing his blood with a Chinese woman, a punishment of death.  Before he dies, he tells young Terry to improve his skills and always be a number one man.

You gawking at me, cameraman?

Kendo agrees that Terry can watch over Sairi and the Yakuza realizing their own people are getting slaughtered to tackle Terry recruit Junjo to deal with him.  Hmm, didn't you sell off his sister, Terry?  Looks like that came to bite you in the ass after all.

Can Terry foil the Yakuza?  Will Junjo be the superior fighter?

Now given you have a lesser villain as our protagonist, the bloody fighting styles, the complete contempt of women, this film got an X rating in 1974 and has at least 3 different cuts of it.   Ranging from a tamer 75 R rated minute film, to 87 with English subtitles and Japanese release to the unvarnished 91 X rated version,  I'd point out it was the violence that gave it such a rating.  You aren't seeing women being plowed like the back 40, it was simply a factor the film was so dicey for some they did not know how to catalog it.

Chiba is a muscle bound but lean, fast moving bad ass and kudos to the cameramen about to keep up with him and keep each other out of frame.   This film also spawned two sequels and yes we will have at those as well.

Sonny Chiba was deemed Bruce Lee's competition and yet most of his characters ranged from villain, anti-hero to noble warrior while Bruce always seemed to play a good guy, with the exception of his thug in Marlowe starring James Garner.  
The action is sound, the scenes impressive and the story is simplistic but gripping.  It is now in the public domain so give it a download or find it on a streaming site.

Hi. We wanted to talk to you about our lord and savior, Gorjira.