Sister Street Fighter: Fifth Level Fist (1976)

FIFTH LEVEL FIST is the fourth and final installment in the SISTER STREET FIGHTER film series starring Japan Action Club member Etsuko Shihomi as a crime-fighting kempo practitioner. With new direction, a loss of the series’ trademark excesses, and less money to spend, this one ends up being the weakest of the bunch.

Taking over direction from Kazehiko Yamaguchi, who helmed the three previous films, is STREET FIGHTER director Shigehiro Ozawa. One might think this would be an asset seeing as how that film remains a highlight of Sonny Chiba’s action film career. It is, but only to a small degree. Ozawa ditches some of the SISTER series’ most enjoyable elements such as the campy villains and costumes to put Shihomi in more of a real-world setting. But what could have been a realistic karate actioner ends up being one that is just as implausible as all the rest but also a lot less fun.

A fundamental problem is the vast reduction of quality action scenes in favor of poorly conceived drama. Shihomi is recast as Kiku, the daughter of a kimono dealer. Unbeknownst to her traditional mother who is always trying to arrange a marriage for her daughter, Kiku is a free-spirited karate instructor. She eventually ends up in a fight with drug smugglers who are using a local film studio as a front. But it takes a long time to get there.

The bulk of the plot revolves around Kiku’s pupil and close friend Michi (Mitchi Love) and her brother Jim (Ken Wallace). When drug agents, including yakuza genre actor Tsunehiko Watase as Takagi, start getting too close to uncovering a smuggling operation, the criminals have a hired killer take out the lead agent. It turns out that the killer is Jim. He has been working for the smugglers to help pay for a restaurant he hopes to open in Okinawa with Michi. Following the murder, a race begins between law enforcement agents and the smugglers trying to get Jim, either before he’s killed or rats out his employers. It ends with Jim shot dead and Michi and Kiku vowing revenge, with or without the help of Takagi.

The film spends too much time trying to build up the drama surrounding the relationship between Michi and Jim. It’s horribly overdone and sunk completely by bad acting. At one point we’re forced to witness the childhood memories, in black and white, of a grieving Michi as she recalls how Jim stood up for her as the two grew up without parents and were subjected to extreme poverty and racism. The twist here is that the two share the same Japanese mother but different fathers, one white and one black. The whole thing looks silly within the context of this film.

It takes almost an hour for anything that martial arts movie fans would enjoy to kick in. Ken Wallace is about the only one doing any action up to this point and it’s not good. He was apparently an experienced instructor of Northern internal kung fu arts including Tai Chi who was lucky enough to be the only foreigner accepted as a member of Sonny Chiba’s Japan Action Club. But little of any real skills he had show up on screen. Much of the blame should probably go to director Ozawa and whoever choreographed the action scenes for framing him so poorly.

Wallace isn’t the only one to suffer at the hands of bad direction. Shihomi still looks and moves great, but ends up performing in some of the worst fights of the series. The choreography is uneven with it ranging from messy brawling in tight quarters to unreal super moves. After fighting her way through the narrow walkways behind a studio lot, Shihomi emerges into an open area and with unintentional humor performs an aerial flip that instantly sheds the jidai geki garb she had been disguised in while infiltrating the smuggler’s hideout.

After all this fighting with thugs, including an actor dressed as a samurai, Shihomi gets caught when a Caucasian baddie pulls a gun on her. In a painfully clichéd scene that makes no sense whatsoever, she ends up strapped to a log that’s about to be cut in half by a saw. Watase performs some generic fighting moves to free her and the two go on to quickly finish the movie, but not quick enough for me.

FIFTH LEVEL FIST is short, but I still couldn’t wait for it to end. It’s a cheap production that looks like it was finished in a week just to squeeze a little more money out of the franchise before it was abandoned. Everything is poorly done. The cinematography is ugly, the editing lazy and the soundtrack has some awful mixing. I could forgive these flaws with decent action, but that’s where the film suffers the most. Shihomi gets a few good group-fighting moves in during the opening credits and towards the end and that’s it.