#7
Post
by feihong » Sun May 07, 2023 2:23 am
These pictures are kind of the heart and soul of import grindhouse fun. They are very repetitive, excessively macho, aggressive, bloody, and everything else about them is either hard-boiled or surprisingly disconnected. I don't want to spoil the surprise, so I'll just say that the first movie offers up a very unusual and disorienting shakeup of some traditional genre tropes––and then at the end Chiba does some violence which is genuinely indelible, shocking even to this day. The other movies offer more traditional genre rewards, with almost exactly the same stylistic formula (same music, same cinematography, same editing, same approach to choreography). The joys of watching all three become the micro-sized variations in approach between the different episodes.
The films are exceptionally proficiently made. They're slick and incisive. They don't seem to mean anything, because they present a world that is pure fantasy, completely abstracted from the world they purport to exist within––and the value of a human being within the tiny, faberge-egg fantasy world of the movies is so remarkably far from the value of a human experience within our own world. They are fun as violence movies (calling them action movies might imply any kind of storytelling strategy to the films varied action scenes, but these are almost all karate fights of one stripe or another, and not scenes with unique objectives, which call for innovative solutions which advance narrative goals), and they are neat, funky time capsules of their era, blissfully sans the kind of lusty yakuza-worship most other Toei films of the era drool over. Sonny Chiba's particular brand of machismo doesn't seem terribly chauvinistic or off-putting––his "street fighter" proves himself the strongest bull in a room full of steers, not for any reason beyond being the greatest. I don't think they have the same kind of cultural value as the Shaw Brothers pictures, because they're too self-contained a fantasy. But they are gritty 70s fun.
And the first movie is relatively striking. To me all the Toei movies look some degree of sweaty and self-conscious, but these are perhaps the least-so of all. Still, the really odd and entertaining movie to come out of the Chiba karate cannon is a later picture called Roaring Fire, which stars Chiba's protege, Hiroyuki "Duke" Sanada (who goes on to appear in an endless stream of movies all over, from In the Line of Duty in Hong Kong to Mortal Combat in the U.S.), as a pair of identical twins separated at birth. Sanada mostly plays the twin that gets kidnapped and sent to America, where he becomes a texan cowboy with a pet monkey. After his brother is killed in an interpol fracas in Hong Kong, he journeys to Japan to claim his birthright. Midway into the film, a ventriloquist's dummy at a dinner show reveals to Sanada and the entire dinner show audience that "Duke" is actually trapped in the plot of Hamlet. Then the nazis show up. Sonny Chiba shambles elegantly in the background as the ventriloquist, "Mr. Magic." The ninja chase on bicycles, the horse-vs-helicopter battle...these are the stuff of legend. The film is flabbergastingly tasteless, and always mutating into some more outrageous form––always relying on Sanada's incredible agility to steer it back to something cool. It's giddy and slapdash in a way that the other Chiba movies aren't, and that gives it enormous charm. Right now, the film only seems to be available as a bootleg, or on Youtube without subtitles, but for my money it's worth all these other movies combined.
Personally, I'm not planning to replace my Shout Factory discs with these Arrow ones. Money is tighter than it was for me, and I prefer both Roaring Fire (also called Hoero! Tekken) and the Sister Street Fighter movies, and even the Bodyguard Kiba pictures to these ones. The first one is interesting, because of things I can't really mention (otherwise they might not really retain their interest), but if you haven't seen any of Sonny Chiba's karate movies (which include the Streetfighter series, the Sister Streetfighter series, the Executioner series, Roaring Fire, a whole bunch of black magic ninja/samurai films in the 80s, Karate Bullfighter and Karate Bearfighter, the Bodyguard Kiba films, Chiba's sadly one-note Golgo 13 film, and some of disciple Sue Shiomi's quasi-Sister Streetfighter movies like Dragon Princess, Fifth Level Fist, 13 Steps of Maki: The Young Aristocrats, and The Great Chase), then this set is decently priced and the first movie at least is good value.
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