KILL BILL star Sonny Chiba is without a doubt Japan’s top open-handed fighting film star. To say that there is hardly anyone to challenge this claim may be true, but doesn’t do the man justice. Luckily, his films do that on their own. Shorinji Kenpo follows the exploitation vibe of The Street Fighter (1974) with gratuitous violence and Chiba as an anti-hero based very loosely on the life of Doshin Soh (or Doshin So), the founder of Shorinji Kenpo (or Shorinji Kempo). Admittedly, the film has trouble balancing moments of sappy drama with extreme destruction and Chiba is a conflicted warrior without even knowing it. But to watch him as he unleashes a bloody hurricane of Kenpo fury is a thing of great beauty.

Doshin Soh (Sonny Chiba) is a Japanese secret service agent fighting Chinese behind enemy lines during World War II. He reports to his superiors with vital intelligence following a bloody skirmish only to discover that his country has surrendered. On his way home from Manchuria, he rescues a Japanese beauty named Kiku (Yutaka Nakajima) from being forced to provide sexual favors and then settles into Osaka. As the populace struggles amid post-war poverty, oppression from foreigners and rampant crime, Soh comes to the defense of orphans and prostitutes near a Black Market sector. After reuniting with Kiku, he’s jailed for crippling two American servicemen in a brawl. Thanks to a sympathetic police chief, he’s released and relocates to a small town to open up a dojo that becomes home to a number of troubled men. As Soh mentors his students in Shorinji Kenpo and life lessons, he finds himself in an escalating conflict with a local yakuza gang.

Director Noribumi Suzuki turns his mastery of fiendish sexploitation on the action genre with impressive results. The story has its share of faults, but the movie is a visual feast of slow-motion flying bodies, cracking limbs and blood-spattering punches. It’s all shot with great enthusiasm and matches the best of Hong Kong’s kinetic action movies of the ’70s and ’80s. Chiba, nor the art of Kenpo have ever looked so good on screen.

Unlike straight Japanese karate, Shorinji Kenpo is more of a well-rounded fighting system based heavily on various kung fu styles that the real Doshin Soh picked up during his seventeen years in China, particularly from Shaolin Temple. The combined action choreography and camera work are outstanding in crafting high-impact action from this art that is brutal, stylized and simply jaw-dropping. You will see Shorinji Kenpo in all its exaggerated-for-film glory with great artistic flair; throws, locks, flying kicks, limb breaks, and severe dislocation. The film opens with a disclaimer that the events shown do not represent real life and that should also apply to the martial art as the movie fails to reveal its spiritual side in favor of exploiting it for its most violent potential. Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a scene where a man’s testicles are cut off with scissors and fed to a dog. An arm is graphically cut off with a samurai sword and Chiba’s fists pound his less fortunate adversaries into mush. When the film opens with Chiba turning a machinegun on his own officers in a furious killing rampage, you know you’re in for heavy-duty violence. Thankfully, Suzuki veers away from a rape scene before it gets too uncomfortable. If it weren’t for the quality lensing and elaborate choreography, this would just be another series of wild exploitation scenes. Some viewers may still object to the extremes, but for old school martial arts fans it’s great stuff; hard-hitting, fun and uncompromising. How can anyone not enjoy seeing Chiba kick his heavy geta, or wooden sandals into the faces of his enemies with painful-looking results?

If only the story could have been as consistently good. It’s better than your standard kung fu revenger, but doesn’t make a lot of sense. There’s little reason for Chiba to be associated with Kiku, a woman he cares for, but never shows any affection to. Only after it’s too late does he consider in childlike thoughts that he has strength, but lacks love. I half expected this to be a turning point where he might become a Japanese-fighting Gandhi who chooses to turn the other cheek, but alas the stage is already set for Chiba to kill and main some more. The whole historical setting of struggling, angst-ridden people in a post-war Japan as a backdrop for the life of Doshin Soh is really just a thin disguise for a cinematic playground for Chiba to play in by his rules.

On the surface, Chiba’s tough stand against Chinese, Koreans and Americans right after Japan’s Imperialist grab for land that left hundreds of thousands of innocent people dead or scarred for life may seem offensive. But Chiba isn’t fighting for the Emperor, but for justice, whether it be to stop Koreans from roughing up Japanese citizens, to floor American soldiers who performed a hit-and-run on a small boy in their Jeep, or to maim and kill Japanese thugs who take advantage of the post-war chaos to exploit the people. Justice in an unjust world is the justification for violence, but really it’s just about whooping ass and that’s what the intensely charismatic and talented Sonny Chiba does best as the Shorinji Kenpo-fighting “Killing Machine.”

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