Sister Street Fighter (1974)

When it comes to pushing the limits of exploitation entertainment, nobody does it better than Japanese filmmakers, especially during the karate exploitation boom of the early 1970s. One film soars high among theses ranks. It may be a low budget, cheese fest of bizarrely-clad criminals, excessive bloodletting, and bare-chested ladies but SISTER STREET FIGHTER does it with style! Much of its success can be credited to the impressive performance of its angel-faced leading lady, but that’s a story in of itself.

Faced with a floundering film industry in Japan and a voracious global appetite for kung fu movies, Toei set out to build on the foundation of Sonny Chiba’s STREET FIGHTER films with a spin off series featuring a female lead. No doubt this also had something to do with the popularity of Japan’s female-driven exploitation and pink films. The only problem was that their first choice was Hong Kong kung fu actress Angela Mao and she wasn’t available. Pulled from the ranks of Chiba’s Japan Action Club and sent through an intensive course in Shorinji Kempo was the virtually unknown Etsuko Shihomi. At first glance, this wholesome-looking beauty is the last person you’d think would wind up driving a sai through someone’s skull or rearranging faces with nunchaku onscreen. Think again.

From the very beginning we know she means business. Shihomi is wielding nunchaku, Bruce Lee’s weapon of choice, with relative ease in an opening credits exhibition. As the film gets under way, she is soon flooring foes with high kicks, low punches and fierce determination. Her enemies take a painful beating and she doesn’t let up for an instant. Shihomi revisits her nunchaku several times, along with the twirling use of sais to remind us that her skill in Okinawan and Japanese weapons is no fluke.

In one of the films finest stunt scenes, Shihomi effortlessly shimmies up a narrow gap between two buildings, which is something rarely seen outside of a Jackie Chan movie. In what looks like a single motion, she bounds up on to the roof of one building and delivers a painful kick to a pursuer who has unwisely chosen to follow her up. This is the kind of scene that separates the action stars from action star posers and Shihomi triumphantly declares which camp she belongs to.

Shihomi doesn’t have the raw power of her mentor Sonny Chiba, as we eventually see when he gets in on the action, but with a respectability that raises her above the film’s exploitive tones and a willingness to perform all her own stunts, she proves once and for all that Japanese gals do it just as good as China’s famous martial arts starlets from Cheng Pei-pei to Michelle Yeoh and beyond.

SISTER STREET FIGHTER certainly isn’t all about introducing Shihomi as Japan’s leading female action star. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi more or less found his calling after going from sexploitation to this, his first of many karate movies over the next few years. He takes a wacky script by Masahiro Kakefuda and Norifumi Suzuki and intentionally takes things a little bit further over the edge. The result is one of the most gratuitously entertaining and downright bizarre B-grade martial arts movies around.

Betraying the producer’s original intention of casting Mao for the lead, the story begins in Hong Kong where Chinese-Japanese kempo competitor and special agent Koryu Lee (Shihomi) is instructed to head to Japan in order to investigate the disappearance of her brother Mansei. As a drug agent on assignment in Yokohama, his mission was to uncover a heroin operation run by local crime boss Kakuzaki. As Koryu begins her search with the help of a few friends and family, she discovers that Mansei has been taken prisoner and is being held in Kakuzaki’s dungeon basement where he’s being injected with near-lethal doses of heroin. She soon finds herself up against an army of Kakuzaki’s oddball martial arts fighters, each possessing a wide array of killing techniques. Her main ally in this perilous fight is ex-karate club captain, ex-racer, ex-bodyguard, and active tough guy extraordinaire Hibiki (Chiba in a role unrelated to his STREET FIGHTER character).

There are numerous elements pulled from ENTER THE DRAGON, most notably the main villain Kakuzaki, a slightly aged villain who relishes his collection of martial arts peons, performs drug experiments in an underground lair and wields clawed fist weapons. What sets him apart is the ridiculousness of his minions. As each is introduced, the screen freezes to post up their name and martial arts styles. They range from Tettoso with his tribal shield and Takasagoryu Blowgun technique and a cadre of leopard-skinned female Thai boxers collectively known as the Amazon Seven to a former priest with a nasty spear gun and a pudgy strong man.

Masashi Ishibashi, who repeatedly had his anatomy rearranged as Chiba’s arch-nemesis in the STREET FIGHTER series is present as Kakuzaki’s right-hand man, a karate fighter who never shows up without a posse of basket hat-wearing goons covering his back. Not surprisingly, he meets once again with a painful end.

By far the most notable aspect of SISTER STREET FIGHTER is the gruesome brutality of the martial arts violence. It rivals the extremities of Hong Kong’s comic book splatter actioner THE STORY OF RICKY with touches of the FIST OF THE NORTH STAR anime feature. Yamaguchi merely turns up the violence a notch or two from the already violent STREET FIGHTER films. Instead of simply impaling a rotund fighter with his fingers, Chiba’s lethal blow causes the fellow’s intestines to graphically spew out as he falls to the floor. One of the zaniest scenes has Shihomi rotating an assailant’s head 180 degrees. But why stop there, when you can have the poor sod attempt to walk around backwards before he dies? And not to be outdone by any chambara movie, the blood in this film flows freely in pressurized flares of red mist… onto Shihomi’s immaculate white kung fu suit and the camera lens itself.

Bringing all this nonsense together into a cohesive visual and audible stew is the frequent off-kilter camera framing made popular by gritty yakuza brawlers of the era, Toei’s colorful art direction that makes the most of a tight budget and a suitably energetic and at times exploitive soundtrack. The Hong Kong “theme music” is about as stereotypical and arguably racist as any music can get.

As for props, there is a beige super button worth mentioning that appears just about anywhere for the villains to push and cause just about anything to happen, such as opening hidden doors or turning on surveillance cameras. It’s no doubt the same button with adhesive backing used over and over again. I dare anyone to suppress a laugh when they first see it slapped onto the side of a mattress.

SISTER STREET FIGHTER is first and foremost exploitation cinema and secondly a martial arts movie. But Chiba doesn’t skimp on the karate action and he definitely picks a winning female representative to carry the series. Yet too often Chiba and Yamaguchi satisfy themselves with camp over quality action and by martial arts movie standards this is a big disappointment. Almost all of the villains offer nothing but cheap gimmicks to match their cheap costumes. On top of that, Chiba occasionally threatens to upstage his starlet with his own faster and more colorful moves. But surprisingly Shihomi doesn’t let these setbacks get the better of her. By thoroughly embracing the absurdity of the script and direction while staying slightly above it and giving a very energetic and skilled screen fighting performance of her own, Shihomi instead carries the film and sets the pace for a wonderfully wild and unique series of karate movies.