Karate Wars (1978)

Tatsuya (Hisao Maki) used to be the top Karate-ist in Japan, but a stint in prison for murder sent him into exile.  When former sensei Tetsugen is offered the opportunity to prove the worth of Japanese Karate in Hong Kong and Thailand, his former student takes up the mission.

Hideo Nanbu’s Karate Wars (aka Karate Daisenso aka Karate Great War) features Maki as the most stoic martial artist in the history of cinema.  Nothing surprises the man, and he is forthright in his undertaking.  One has to believe that this approach comes, at least in part, from Maki the person.  Before his death in 2012, Maki was known for three things, his manga work (he was the creator of WARU and co-writer of the Futari no Joe anime, amongst other titles), his devotion to Karate (he opened his own dojo), and the rumors that he was a yakuza.  Two of these things can be definitively proven, but the third seems to influence this film most of all.  Tatsuya betrays no emotion.  He is there not just to beat the champions in the other countries but to kill them.  He swaggers with every step he takes, and the vast majority of his reactions to danger is an icy sneer.  This plays into the film’s concept of honor (something which, some would say, yakuza are only tangentially concerned with, but which is intrinsic to Japanese culture).  Tatsuya went into hiding because he had lost face in the eyes of the Karate world.  He was no longer worthy of being public about his artform.  It doesn’t matter that the murder he committed was not only accidental (and against a luchador, no less) but also was done out of love for his sensei’s daughter Reiko (Yoko Natsuki) and his urge to protect her (that Tatsuya wants to kill his adversaries in foreign lands is antithetical to the whole reason he left the martial arts world in the first place, but never mind).  Tetsugen falls for the line of the Karate Association, as headed by bent politician Soma (Nobuo Kaneko), that they want to claim honor for Karate outside of Japan, but he’s not so gormless as to not be suspicious.  

In Hong Kong and Thailand, the opponents that Tetsuya faces do so out of honor, though they are not necessarily honorable people.  Chinese Kung Fu master White Dragon (Yao Lin Chen) knows that Tatsuya must be defeated in order to save face and his own Kung Fu school.  Yet, he doesn’t want to confront the Karate man himself.  He sends lackies like his wife Chin (who does a great disco/Kung Fu floor show in a Japanese club) and an assortment of Kung Fu goons to surprise attack Tatsuya at every turn.  He meets Tatsuya in bars and chats with him as if he were sympathetic.  It’s only when White Dragon’s legacy is directly threatened that he finally challenges Tatsuya to mortal combat.  In Thailand, Tatsuya is jumped again at several points, but their current Thai Boxing champion doesn’t command people to do so.  They attack because Tatsuya is a direct threat to the honor of Thai Boxing.  The former Thai champ, King Cobra (Darm Dasakorn), has fallen on hard times.  Like Tatsuya, he has recently been released from prison for an accidental murder.  Unlike Tatsuya, King Cobra has become a layabout and a drunk.  He sponges off his girlfriend and refuses to get a job.  Only when he sees that a Karate master defeated the Thai Boxing champ does King Cobra decide to contest Tatsuya and regain honor for his country.  It’s this same sense of honor and the ineffable drive that it sparks inside the martial arts masters that proves their undoing.  They cannot and will not back down.  Ever.  The pleas of their loved ones mean nothing in the face of possible dishonor.  Honor requires not only victory but also the death of an opponent.  On the one hand, the sense of honor in Karate Wars is virtuous, but, on the other hand, it’s also ultimately destructive.

Likewise, the film is nationalistic.  The plot is sparked by the Japanese characters’ sense of superiority as represented by Karate.  They want to show the world that Karate is the best and expand its influence outside of Japan.  Soma even states that Karate’s triumphs will appeal to the Japanese people’s sense of nationalism.  When Tatsuya leaves Japan, he becomes a stranger in a strange land, so to speak, though he behaves exactly the same as he did in his home country (i.e. like he owns the place).  All of the non-Japanese characters are prejudiced against the Japanese in general (the use of the pejorative “Jap” is ubiquitous in their dialogue) and Tatsuya in particular.  Though he is befriended by a Thai man who becomes his guide and translator, this man also becomes an outcast due to their relationship.  When he lived in Japan, he was similarly ostracized for his ethnicity, something about which Tatsuya does not give one shit, and he would likely eschew this guy if he didn’t need him.  Tatsuya is even kicked out of his hotel for no reason other than his presence in Thailand and what that means as a menace to the Thai identity.  What’s interesting in the film is that Tatsuya is similarly nationalistic, and this, in combination with his slavish devotion to honor, is his fatal flaw.  The two characters who care the least about any nationalistic ideals are Tetsugen and his daughter Reiko.  Instead, they are motivated by love; Tetsugen’s love of Karate and Reiko’s (inexplicable) love of Tatsuya.  Because their love is unselfish it surpasses the self-absorbed nationalism that motivates all of the other characters.

Nanbu’s film is simple in its story and repetitive in its structure.  The characters outside of the three main fighters are nigh-inconsequential except for illustrating the self-destructiveness of these men.  The plan of Soma’s cabal never develops beyond being a motive to get Tatsuya back into Karate-ing.  Where Karate Wars excels is in the subtext of its story and in the style Nanbu brings to the table.  At various moments, the picture fades to black and white or becomes solarized.  The sound drops out except for the natural noise of the environment.  Nanbu isolates the minds of the fighters in these ways, giving the audience an idea of the focus and viewpoint of these martial devotees.  The director also makes extensive use of slow motion, long takes, and wide shots in the fight scenes.  The fight choreography appears to be, by and large, genuine, not stylized to a superhuman degree but idealized for what a human is capable of through the martial arts.  So, while the story is mechanical, the film satisfies as a showcase for Karate and a study of the pros and cons of honor.

MVT:  Maki, Dasakorn, and Chen all impress with their skills.

Make or Break:  The finale is a great summation of the film’s thematic elements and an enjoyable rumble.

Score:  6.75/10

Bruce Kung Fu Girls (1975)

One may be the loneliest number, but five (and three, and seven, and thirteen; all odd prime numbers, funny enough) has a nice ring to it, too, and good things tend to come in that number.  For example, we have five fingers (and toes) and senses.  There was The Jackson Five and The Dave Clark Five.  Five Alive was a fruit juice/punch concoction I craved in my youth and very rarely got.  In the world of cinema, you have Devil Times Five, Fast Five, Slaughterhouse-Five, Five Easy Pieces, and Five Deadly Venoms, to name but five.  It’s that last one that relates to this week’s film, Shut Dik’s (what a great name!) Bruce Kung Fu Girls (aka Five Pretty Young Ladies aka Wu Jiao Wa).  Now, this film has about as much to do with Chang Cheh’s classic martial arts masterpiece as it does with Bruce Lee (whom do you think the Bruce in the title refers to?), but it does actually have five young women who can handle themselves in a fight, and we all know that things that come in fives have to be good, right (especially when they’re doing Kung Fu dressed in garish costumes)?

The Invisible Thief terrorizes Taiwan, robbing from the rich and giving to himself.  The Police Superintendent (Lui Ming) is flummoxed.  Luckily, his five nieces, who operate a Kung Fu gym/spa, volunteer their services in catching the bandit.  But will Ku Lin’s (Polly Shang Kwan) feelings for the hapless scientist Lu conflict with her devotion to justice?

Bruce Kung Fu Girls is as much of a Bruceploitation film as Schindler’s List is a buddy cop film.  It’s deliberately mistitled to lure fans of Lee into the theater.  Don’t misunderstand, I didn’t expect this movie to have anything whatsoever to do with the man, a la something like The Dragon Lives Again, but you have to admit, it’s fairly brazen to slap even an allusion to his name on a film like this.  I admire that spunk.  What this film does, like The Dragon, is creates a science fiction influenced superhero world.  Key to this is the idea of “technology.”  The Invisible Thief uses super science to fuel his super powers.  He has a cheap little laboratory and a shiny, silver suit, and it’s all very kitschy while also being just enough for the audience to buy it.  The police, who normally have enough on their hands with the likes of thugs under the command of Mistress Pei Pei Chow (Chang Chi-Ping), now have to contend with robbers whom they cannot see.  Despite the fact that this guy calls his shots, the cops just can’t seem to get their shit together (why does no one think to throw a bucket of paint in the proximity of the floating gun?), the Superintendent and his boss lament their own Stone Age techniques (“Technology is all around us.  We’re getting left behind”).  The Girls must be used because they are “modern,” though not necessarily tech savvy.  What they are, however, is clever, and they wear black leather uniforms, complete with hot pants, thus making them a superhero team of sorts.

The Girls have a seemingly fierce feminist streak in them.  They use a girls-only swimming pool.  They run a girls-only gym.  They have no compunction about throwing down with bad guys, and the bad guys (I suppose being equally feminist) have no compunction about striking back.  For all their independence, however, the Girls all behave like school children.  This is spurred on by the appearance of Lu, in a quasi-interesting reversal of the cliched “damsel in distress” syndrome.  They save his sad ass, and each woman suddenly thinks he’s the cat’s meow.  This is illustrated in a rather drawn out sequence.  Lu visits the gym and gives each of his rescuers a gift (I fantasize it was Pet Rocks for all).  That night, each of them makes an excuse to call Lu and go out to meet him (let’s just never mind that he doesn’t accept any of their invitations that we are aware of).  While waiting, each of them hallucinates that they see Lu with another woman, and they react violently.  They are, in effect, Boy Crazy.  But Lu only truly has eyes for Ku Lin, of course.  For all of the individual freedoms for which the Girls fight, they are, in the end, just young girls who get swept away by the wave of puppy love that Lu instigates in them.

Bruce Kung Fu Girls has a certain easy charm to it.  It is purely lite, dumb fun, and it knows this.  Yet, it missteps in two very distinct ways.  First, it is overly concerned with the act of frolicking.  The Girls jaunt off to the park and toss a large ball around.  They throw a birthday party for Chao Ping, the youngest of the quintet (we know she’s the youngest because she always wears her hair in pigtails and acts even more childish than the other four).  They go camping with some pals, but not before they waltz all through the forest, chuckling and acting up (or acting up as much as they ever will).  The camping trip also includes a full song sung by Ku Lin (you can almost smell the record tie-in, can’t you?).  Dik wisely spices up these long sequences by having the bad guys randomly appear and cause a ruckus, just not much of one.  The birthday party winds up turning into a cake-smashing party, and the villains appear to be having as much fun as the attendees (and far, far more than the viewers).  Second, the plot, such as it is, meanders and forgets that it exists at all for long stretches.  Further, the crime aspect of the film doesn’t do much original and repeats itself once or twice too often.  The finale is sufficiently ridiculous (Mistress Pei Pei Chow seriously did not think this thing through), and it all ends up as harmlessly as a television cop show.  The thing is that the film doesn’t give itself over to its more unique aspects enough to make it fully satisfying.  It’s like the frozen pizza of Taiwanese pulp cinema which, every now and then, is innocuous enough to get you by.

MVT:  The leather outfits.  Well, I liked them, anyway.

Make or Break:  The scene at the museum is the most distinctive one in the film, and displays what the movie should have trafficked in more.  Plus, it has lots of the Girls in their leather costumes.

Score:  5.5/10      

Curse of the Undead: Yoma (1998)

“In the age of wars, innocent civilians’ blood sank into the earth.”  Ninja Hikage (Kenyu Horiuchi) and Marou (Kaneto Shiozawa) stand on a desolate battlefield as men strip the arrows from the scattered corpses.  Marou has a bit of an episode and runs off after smooshing the sodden ground between his fingers.  Shortly thereafter, the leader of their clan is murdered, and Hikage is dispatched to track down Marou, who may or may not have had something to do with it.  Meanwhile, all manner of demons (read: yoma) are appearing, feasting on human beings and trying to take over the world.  More or less.

Takashi Anno’s Curse of the Undead: Yoma (aka Blood Reign: Curse of the Yoma) is a two episode OVA (Original Video Animation) based on a manga by Kei Kusunoki (presented outwardly as one film for its video release [at least in America], though it’s really just the two programs [including opening and closing credits] shown back to back, but since I watched it, I’m counting it as one).  Consequently, I would bet my bottom dollar that this anime is a massive abbreviation of the original story (one of the things I always found fascinating about adaptations of manga, one of the most decompressed storytelling styles in the world, is whether they leave out large chunks of the story [usually things like exposition] or if they just go off in a direction inspired by the original; for example, Osamu Tezuka’s Akira manga is over two thousand pages long, while the anime is a little over two hours, but it’s still a superlative adaptation [it doesn’t hurt any that the original artist was also the film’s director]; I’m hard-pressed to say which version I prefer).  Marou is introduced with nary a word spoken, and from the way he acts at the opening, we might be led to think that he’s the protagonist.  Instead, he’s the villain, but even this isn’t made clear until much further down the road, even though it’s not treated like a big reveal.  We’re given glimpses of Marou and Hikage playing as children, but it’s always the same scene, and nothing of any consequence happens in it to either move the story forward or provide any insight.  This is especially confounding, because this scene is in heavy rotation in the film.  The anime leaps forward in chunks of time (hours, days, years), occasionally making light attempts at some sort of characterization, very little of which has any tangible impact.

The film is ostensibly about the bonds of friendship and how they are torn asunder.  Nevertheless, the relationship between Hikage and Marou has no substance to it; only hints at subtext.  As a result, it makes it difficult to invest any sort of emotion in the proceedings.  It doesn’t really help any that these two characters never have any meaty interactions after the chase is on, so outside of the constant flashbacks to the pair as kids, the only sense of weight in regards to their friendship comes in the form of Hikage’s obsession with finding Marou.  He is single-minded to the point of disobeying his boss, in fact.  Simultaneously, the relationship between Hikage and Aya (played by Hiromi Tsuru and Mina Tomunaga) is meant to bestow some alternative to the platonic love between Hikage and Marou.  I should state here (and you may have picked up the hint from the actor credits) that Aya is, technically, two characters.  The first is a simple villager with a death wish.  The second is a fellow (novice) ninja who follows along on Hikage’s journey (perhaps a death wish of another kind).  Both love Hikage in an immediate sense that never rang true for me, but when time is of the essence, best to cut to the chase, as it were.  Hikage is injured from an earlier fight with his friend, causing him to wear a bandage over his right eye for part of the story.  Likewise, the first Aya’s face is disfigured on the left side.  There is a circularity to this visual distinction that I quite like, but I won’t get into details for fear of spoiling anything.  The point is, everyone in the film is damaged (including Marou) by the war-ravaged world they inhabit, and the struggle to connect with another person is, not only the most important thing in their lives, but also the most damning.  That’s not to say there isn’t a kind of happy ending to the story, but it is more a silver cloud with a grey lining than the opposite.

This anime, to absolutely no one’s surprise, is loaded with elements of body horror.  Corpses are found disemboweled.  Throats are slit with a gush of arterial spray that would make Tomisaburo Wakayama green with envy.  Innards are shredded via oral application of Hikage’s nifty, Wolverine-esque claw gauntlet.  Yoma erupt through the flesh of their human forms to showcase the corrupt monstrosities hidden within.  And this is, pardon the pun, the real meat of the film.  The Japanese absolutely love showcasing grotesque, slimy, hirsute things tearing through and transmogrifying humanity down to its core, and this speaks of a commentary (intentional or not) on the perverting of human beings by the world they inhabit (which, by extension, we read as our world).  Very rarely are the protagonists in horror anime left unscathed by this condition, and Curse of the Undead: Yoma is no exception.  Here the criticism is on war and what it does to both the participants and the bystanders.  The war between humans becomes a war with yoma.  Still, the humans continue their own conflicts, even drawing the yoma into it directly, further degrading situations and characters already at base levels.  This theme is certainly nothing new in anime (or film in general), but it neither adds to nor detracts from this particular narrative.

Ultimately, and despite my criticisms, I found myself enjoying Curse of the Undead: Yoma.  It moves along at a nice enough clip, the creature designs are interesting if somewhat uninspired, and there’s action enough to spice up the basic story the filmmakers seem to go to great lengths to ignore.  This wouldn’t be a very good introduction to anime for some people, because it does have some of the more impenetrable anime elements non-Japanese viewers may find a bit too demanding.  That said, I found myself going with the flow, and the runtime passed by breezily.  I can think of worse ways to curse a film than damning it with faint praise (see what I did there?).

MVT:  There is a foreboding atmosphere at work in the film that maintains interest through the audience’s curiosity as to who will fall the hardest and how far they will drop?

Make or Break:  When the first big boss monster shows up and tells Hikage what the plot is (which is just as subject to change as a pair of socks), you’ll know whether the trip has been worth it for you or not.

Score: 6.5/10