It was going to happen eventually. A kung fu movie
was going to pop up in here no matter what. They’re
kinda hard to review, if you ask me, but we’ll get to
that later. If you’re gonna watch some kung fu,
there’s absolutely no reason that the guy doing the
fu-ing shouldn’t be Sonny Chiba. For those
unfortunate few of you unfamiliar with the master of
the skull-exploding karate punch, you know all that
stuff on that website about how awesome Chuck Norris
is? It’s all stuff Sonny Chiba actually did, and they
watered it the fuck down.
Tonight’s movie was a bargain dollar bin find by my
buddy Bob (who also brought you Invasion of the Bee
Girls). As such, it has the sound and picture quality
of a DVD that was mastered and printed so cheaply that
selling it for a dollar would still turn a profit. To
this end, I didn’t catch all of what was going on, so
the rundown is gonna be a little sketchy. I really
don’t think that matters very much, though. Kung fu
movies are like kaiju movies - you don’t watch them
for the story or the characters, you watch them for
shit being destroyed in spectacular fashion.
Sonny Chiba (I have no idea what his character’s name
is, but it doesn’t matter, it’s Sonny fuckin’ Chiba)
arrives in town just as two brothers who run warring
gangs are trying to call a truce. Some third party
has made off with about a million dollars worth of
heroin, and they want to work together to find him.
Sonny takes a job with one of the gangs, hoping to
find the heroin and get rich.
A swordsman known as The Samurai is cutting his way
through both gangs, trying to destroy the truce (I
think…he destroys the truce, but he may have been
working for the gang that Sonny was fighting, who
knows). Sonny befriends his young son, not realizing
who the boy is. One of the gang dudes finds out about
the boy and kidnaps him, luring The Samurai to a seedy
strip club and threatening his son’s life, surrounding
the swordsman with thugs. Sonny intervenes and allows
The Samurai to escape with his son. For his
treachery, Sonny is hung by his wrists in a freezer
and beaten by the gang boss.
He and The Samurai wind up pitted against each other,
and Sonny is victorious. He takes on the boy as his
foster son, and Sonny Chibas the holy living fuck out
of both gangs as well as the one-eyed creep who stole
the heroin and started the whole thing. The boy,
mistaking the recovered drugs for the ashes of his
father, spreads a million dollars worth of horse
across Tokyo Bay, and Sonny returns him to his mother.
Sonny Chiba, from the five or six of his movies that
I’ve seen, tends to play pretty much the same
character every time. He’s always a morally vague
anti-hero for hire, who starts out working for the bad
guys, but either through being double crossed or
simply realizing the error of his ways, winds up
destroying an entire crime syndicate single-handedly.
Clearly the role the man was born to play, and
honestly, he doesn’t need a lot of depth of character,
because he’s so unspeakably badass.
There’s always that moment in a Sonny Chiba movie
that’s like that moment in every Godzilla movie, where
Godzilla fixes his enemy with a soul-withering glare
from under the bony ridge of his eyebrows and his
spinal fins light up, and you know that whoever’s on
the receiving end of that glare is fucked like no one
has ever been fucked before. Well, like the glare and
the glow of Godzilla, there’s a certain face that
Sonny Chiba makes. I can’t really describe it, but
when you see it you’ll know, and when he makes that
face, everyone within striking distance is going to be
lying in a bloody heap on the floor very soon.
And while we’re making generalizations, remember
earlier when I said that kung fu movies are hard to
review? A few of them would be easy enough, but it
would be very difficult to do nothing but kung fu.
They all have to be based on the quality of fighting,
because the stories are all so similar that they don’t
even matter. There are two basic kinds of kung fu
movies. There are the contemporary ones, like Karate
Warriors, which are set in present day, and almost
exclusively have a plot involving warring crime
syndicates and drugs. The hero is often one like
Sonny Chiba’s characters, working for a gang and
toeing some kind of moral line. Then there are the
period pieces, which I greatly prefer because I like
the costumes. These usually take place in feudal
times, and involve a pure, conventional hero either
avenging the death of a father/instructor, or trying
to keep the bad guys from closing down an honorable
kung fu school.
Getting back to the subject at hand, Karate Warriors
is a blast. It’s not as testicle-explodingly awesome
as Street Fighter (or the even more awesome Return of
the Street Fighter), but it’s a damn fine way to spend
an evening. Although it’s a contemporary flick
instead of a period piece, I think Sonny’s particular
brand of bone-shattering badassery lends itself better
to a modern setting, where it can be shown that even
an army of mobsters with guns and swords are no match
for Sonny Chiba when he makes that face.
There’s a cool editing trick used during some of the
fight scenes, where the punches are slowed down until
just a couple of seconds before contact, when the film
resumes normal speed, making the blow look even more
devastating.
Even the character stuff manages to be a bit above par
at the end, when Sonny takes in the son of The Samurai
as his own. It’s just too bad the kid was dubbed by a
65-year-old chain smoker from Brooklyn.
There’s something inherently entertaining about even
the weakest of kung fu movies (although let it never
be said that a Sonny Chiba movie is weak), that I
think I’d have more fun watching one of them than
almost anything else. 70’s exploitation and gore will
always be closest to the blackened turd I call my
heart, but for breezy entertainment and a guaranteed
good time, it’s Sonny Chiba all the way.
The Moral of the Story: If you’re ever in a room with
Sonny Chiba, and he makes that face, I recommend that
you find the quickest possible way to put the greatest
possible distance between you and the fists that will
hit you so fucking hard your eyeballs fall out of your
head and your skull collapses. Unless he’s on your
side. Then you have nothing to worry about, except
possibly the underwear cleaning bill from your enemy.
If this review has seemed somewhat hyperbolic to you,
then you need to see a Sonny Chiba movie pronto. All
will become clear. Really, I guess the moral of the
story is that Sonny Chiba movies are better than you.
FEEDBACK
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