It was 1974 and Japan’s popular cinema of the day had become a frenzied madhouse of topless vigilante babes, limb-cleaving samurai and despicable yakuza thugs. Rising to the top of the action genre was Sonny Chiba, who karate-chopped and disemboweled his way through the year’s box office, beginning with The Street Fighter and ending with The Executioner 2: Karate Inferno.

This film is a direct sequel to The Executioner, one of the most vile and tasteless martial arts actioners ever released and this is every bit as vile and tasteless as the original. Loaded with sleazy sexual situations, ultra-violence, gore, and base humor that frequently references bodily functions, this is a definitive grind house movie experience that proudly relishes in its own filth. Viewers may either dismiss it as repulsive trash or the holy grail of extreme action cinema in the grand tradition of The Story of Ricky and Kill Bill.

Sonny Chiba returns as Ryuichi Koga, a gruff ninjitsu expert with a direct martial lineage to the Koga ninja clan, who is hired once again by a secret government agency represented by Arashiyama (Ryo Ikebe) and his attractive associate Emi (Yutaka Nakajima). Ryuichi is teamed up with his old partners, professional hitman Takeshi Hayabusa (Makoto Sato) and the crazed logistics expert Ichiro Sakura (Eiji Go). Their mission is to return the kidnapped daughter of Sabine, a wealthy wheelchair-bound dignitary and her stolen pendent that’s worth millions. They succeed in getting her daughter back after a daring confrontation with Japanese associates of the Chicago mafia, but fail to retrieve the pendent. After Sabine pays a ransom to have the pendent returned, it turns out to be a fake and Ryuichi leads his team in infiltrating the mob’s high-rise headquarters to steal the pendent back.

The only purpose of this plot is to provide a loose framework for Chiba and his costars to recklessly careen through a series of bawdy comic and action scenarios. Teruo Ishii’s direction is extremely colorful and stylish, which lends the crude filling of frequent flatulence, lactating breasts engaged in sexual activity and eyeballs popping out of heads a very thin veneer of New Wave polish.

Chiba is indeed a karate inferno as the English title suggests as he kicks and punches out mob thugs left and right with his usual rough-edged flair. His onscreen partners Makota Sato and Eiji Go are around mostly for laughs. Sato ends up making like a World War II fighter ace who can’t fly a Cessna that the trio must use to parachute from. Eiji Go has his hand glued to a kitchen table by Chiba midway through and spends the rest of the movie forced to have a a section of the table stuck to his left hand. He gets worse treatment though when his attempt to help Chiba carry stolen money past a death trap in the mob’s headquarters sets him on fire.

There’s a lot of improbable nonsense going on that makes the movie look like live-action anime, something along the lines of a very crass version of Lupin the Third. The special agent trio is a pack of nutcases set loose to cause as much mayhem as possible, which is their specialty. I’d still like to know what happened to the pilotless Cessna that Sato jumps out of. Chiba isn’t content to simply knock out the mob bosses, but must crush their skulls, tear out their hearts and rotate their heads 360 degrees. The best moment though comes when he effortlessly leaps over a high chain fence and a glaring shot of the trampoline used to assist him is shown. There’s another blatant gaffe shown earlier when Chiba is battling a thug while hanging from an aerial billboard supposedly suspended from a weather balloon. As the billboard passes a building, the large shadow of a moving crane can be seen. But somehow, these mistakes just seem part of the “fun” and really don’t take away from the movie.

In a sign of future movie trends, there is very gratuitous product placement for Orient brand wrist watches. Practically everyone in the movie is shown wearing a different model. Just when I’d had about enough of this force-fed marketing ploy, pursuing thugs are seen pausing in front of advertisements depicting Sonny Chiba, the actor, modeling another one of these infernal watches. It’s thankfully made into an acknowledging joke, but one that was probably a lot funnier at the time of the movie’s release. Personally, I think the producers should have added a superglue manufacturer to the list of sponsors. Chiba uses the fastest-drying version of superglue ever seen with a belt full of wooden handles to scale buildings and crawl along ceilings in an rather inconceivable modern ninja trick.

Etsuko Shihomi pulls another one of her late entry appearances as a female karate-fighting agent. She was one of Chiba’s proteges who often seemed unnaturally plugged into his early films in small roles, almost solely to show off her training. What’s funny about her appearance this time is that she looks like she stepped right out of a video game like Street Fighter or Tekken. I will say her night fight alongside Chiba is entertaining, if short. The camera movement is wildly erratic, but really accentuates their bold fighting moves. It’s a shame that both of their karate fighting isn’t a little more plentiful, but this is typical of Chiba’s urban exploitation actioners. Also, I found myself missing martial arts star Yasuaki Kurata, who battled alongside Chiba in the original film. Another unfortunate omission is any type of main fighting opponent for Chiba to contend with. All the villains are forgettable, except for how Chiba dispatches with them. Speaking of, there is a hilarious scene where Chiba tosses half a dozen thugs off a high rise. Imagine watching a bunch of dummies hitting the street as each thug up top almost willingly lines up to be the next one down.

Karate Inferno (I love that title) is not great action filmmaking. For one thing, there’s more cheap comedy than screen fighting. But Ishii and Chiba seem well aware of this. They’re not trying to blow the audience away with the best karate combat and stunt work. This is just a mad, Japanese-style rollercoaster ride through ’70s exploitation cinema, complete with funky theme music. Chiba is often striking cool poses between dishing out knuckle sandwiches, but isn’t above making a complete fool of himself by copping looks up skirts, urinating on his burning buddy to put out a fire or farting in his face and stating that he should “smell the gas and wake up.” Actually, I think that statement would have made an appropriate tagline for this movie.

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