Past Misdeeds: Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope (1975)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Hard-nosed reporter who never does any reporting Inugami (Sonny Chiba) just happens to be the last of a tribe of werewolves, making him not a ravening beast at the night (and day) of the full moon, but giving him an old-school Wolverine-like self-healing ability as well as superhuman strength and agility on these nights. One non-full moon night, Inugami stumbles over a panicked man running through the city streets screaming something about a tiger and a girl named Miki. Before you can say "Very peculiar, Watson", an invisible force rips the guy to shreds.

That - and the vision of a tiger - is certainly bizarre enough to get Inugami interested. With the help of his journalist colleague and friend Arai, the reporter soon discovers that the victim was once part of a rock band known as the Mobs, four charming guys who raped a singer named Miki Ogata (Nami Etsuko?). They didn't only do the deed for kicks, but also because their yakuza-controlled management asked them to, to "teach Miki a lesson".

Now, Miki is a syphilitic junkie singing in strip bars. She's also not completely sane anymore.

Although he has already had some violent encounters with the yakuza, Inugami feels driven to save Miki, an idea that will cost his friend Arai's life. It looks like there's a connection between what has been done to Miki and the highest strata of Japanese politics, but that turns out to be not very important for the rest of the movie. Unexpectedly, Miki and Inugami are kidnapped by a shady government agency that would very much like to build themselves some super soldiers out of them. Miki is easily controlled through her hatred, but Inugami isn't even to be convinced by a little vivisection.

When the full moon appears in the sky, he's getting rather cross with his captors.

For once, a cult film is nearly as awesome as its title promises. Wolfguy: ER (sorry) is as typical of mid-70s Japanese action cinema as possible, with all the absurdity and sleaze that promises. The film's archetypal Japanese action-cinemaness is not much of a surprise when you realize that it was directed by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, who had started his career by making a few girl boss movies in some of Toei's various series of the genre, and then gone on to become one of the studio's go-to directors for absurd action films with the Chiba-associated Sister Streetfighter movies, and the Karate Bullfighter etc series with Chiba.

Now, Yamaguchi was never the most stylish or most controlled of directors. His films are often more than a little sloppy and are usually held together through the power of the pure outrageousness of the proceedings in them instead of strong plotting or narrative. Whenever his films get serious, Yamaguchi falters. Fortunately, there is not much that is sane or serious about Wolfguy. Here, Yamaguchi's hectic editing, his rather random love for inappropriate camera angles and his sudden bursts of cleverness come together to form a feverish and slightly hallucinatory feeling whole.

This strange, loudly unreal quality of the film is amplified even further by the randomness of a script that is built in the usual "one scene of dialogue is followed by one scene of action is followed by one scene of nakedness" style and does not at all care about how to connect these scenes sensibly. It is a non-structure that would only lead to tears in a more normal movie, but "normal" just isn't in the cards for this one. As the oh so wonderful, repetitive Japan funk that makes up the score will agree.

Wolfguy is the sort of film where the first sex scene contains blood-licking and verbal approval of Chiba's animalness, the next (nearly)sex with a syphilitic to prove how trustworthy Chiba is, and the last finds our hero explaining how sex with his last-minute love-interest reminds him of his mother and being born. No wonder, with the girl being named after Chiba's mother and all. Of course, the film plays all this as if it were the most obvious and banal love scenes, producing additional friction in the audience's (well, my) brains.

The action scenes are set up in a comparable way, and have an equal love for the bizarre and unexplained. Why does our hero throw coins with lethal precision? And, coming to that, why is the government werewolf (who will die of an allergy to his new werewolf blood) so much hairier than Chiba (who never transforms into anything)? So many questions, and of course most of them are never answered at all. How could they when it is quite clear that the film just makes everything up as it goes along?

That's not a criticism in this particular case, mind you. When a film is so perfectly fixated on the bizarre, there's just no need for it to try and explain too much or to try and make sense. If it did, it would just sabotage its mind-blowing effect, throwing away the purity of its strangeness for something as boring as plot logic. I certainly wouldn't want that.

Then there's Sonny. Chiba is in his prime here, yet not doing much of the more subtle acting he always has been capable of when needed, nor going for his beloved grimacing scenery-chewing and heavy breathing. Instead, Chiba coasts on his particular brand of charisma and cool. It shouldn't work, or should at least come over as rather lazy, yet somehow feels like the appropriate way to handle this particular role, as if the wolfman were a centre of sanity in the insane world of humanity.

The whole affair is based on a manga I'd just love to read, and possibly the sequel to 1973's Okami no Monsho aka Crest of the Beast, but information about both films is difficult to come by and does generally not seem trustworthy to me. It's a shame, really, because I could use more of this particular brand of insanity in my life.

Return of the Sister Street Fighter (1975)

Original title: Kaette kita onna hissatsu ken

After her adventures in Japan in Sister Street Fighter and Sister Street Fighter: Hanging By A Thread, everyone's favourite female martial artist Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi) has again returned to her native Hong Kong. To nobody's surprise, she isn't going to stay there long, though. Sho, a private detective friend from Japan (played by Sonny Chiba's decidedly less awesome brother Jiro) comes to tell her that her old friend Shurei (Akane Kawasaki) has disappeared and is probably held captive by the criminal organization of a certain Oh Ryu Mei. For some reason, the detective is also bringing Koryu Shurei's little daughter Rika. The only lead Sho can give Koryu about Shurei's disappearance is the last person Shurei spoke with before she disappeared, a woman named Suzy Wong in Yokohama. Then, it's time for Sho to get killed in the mandatory attack on our heroine's first informant.

Now, there's really not much else for Koryu to do than to pack her bags and Rika and go to Yokohama. As always, the bad guys are starting a series of failed attempts on Koryu's life once she arrives, and as always, she (and in this case Rika) puts her trust into a junkie who is secretly working for the bad guys - in this case Shurei's sister Reika (Miwa Cho). Of course, there are lots of fighting, a little sneaking and crying and a redemptive death or two in Koryu's future, as well as the "surprising" revelation that the least freakish character (Yasuaki Kurata) among Oh Ryu Mei's killers isn't a bad guy at all.

Plotwise, this third and last Sister Street Fighter movie is quite a disappointment. Although the first and second movie were already a bit similar to each other, this one is more or less a remake of Hanging By A Thread, just with an even more ridiculous - and therefore satisfying - gold smuggling plan and a few elements pilfered from the first movie added to the mix. In theory, this sort of recycling is too cynical even for an exploitation movie, and should lead to the sort of movie that puts me into an even more annoyed mood than is my natural state of mind. In practice, I didn't mind the films lack of originality much, because Return - despite everything -still does manage to be a slightly different film from its predecessors.

For one, Return is quite a differently directed movie than the other two parts of the series, with (on the negative side) fewer of the moments of colourful visual excess Kazuhiko Yamaguchi seems to like to put in his movies as often as possible, but (on the positive side) also an even greater emphasis on keeping the action tightly flowing. Yamaguchi always has shown a hand for the latter in his movies, but often seems to prefer the weirdly psychedelic or the full-blown freak-out to the dynamic. That's of course lovely too, yet a script as close to that of a film that was made less than a year before is better served with getting a different treatment, as happens with Return.

And really, I'm not going to complain much about a martial arts movie full of exciting martial arts sequences. That would be rather silly.

Another reason not to complain about Return is the nature of its main villain. Oh Ryu Mei has the most Blofeld-like sense of style of all the main villains in the Sister Street Fighter movies (although he prefers a guy with a ridiculous hair cut who works as a food taster and wheel-chair driver to a cat), a sure way of showing his henchpeople who's boss, a lair that also makes excessively clear who is boss - what with him sitting five meters above his henchies, and an electric fist. Confronted with this kind of evil, I'm utterly helpless.

The rest of the film is as you'd expect: Etsuko Shihomi is awesome and cute (and sort of looking like a friend of mine, actually), the child actress annoying, the evil assassins silly as you could wish, the soundtrack funky as expected in this sort of Toei production, and everything's over and done with an hour before most films made in our century would be. It's a film that never overstays its welcome, and that is as generous with its bits of awesomeness as it is with its fight scenes.

So it's all good.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,reviews,martial arts,etsuko shihomi,kazuhiko yamaguchi

Sister Street Fighter: Hanging By A Thread (1974)

Original title: Onna hissatsu ken: kiki ippatsu

After her adventures in Japan during Sister Street Fighter, Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi), everyone's favourite kicker of evil behinds, has returned to Hong Kong. She has kept her talent for being at the right place at the right time, and so is present when some brutal martial artist thugs are attacking a private eye. Koryu is able to drive off the attackers, but can't prevent the detective from being mortally wounded. At least, before he dies the man is still able to give her his glass eye and beg her to bring it to a certain Doctor Wang, whom Koryu already knows as the father of her old school friend Birei (Hisayo Tanaka).

From Wang, Koryu learns that he had hired the dead detective to find out what happened to Birei, who disappeared. The glass eye - as glass eyes do - contains some photos that make clear the young woman has been kidnapped by a Japanese gang of human traffickers. Birei's father, knowing that Koryu has experience in Japan and is quite good at not getting killed, begs the fighter to travel to Japan and get his daughter back. Of course, Koryu agrees.

About ten seconds after she has arrived in Japan, our heroine is distracted by the first of many attempts of the human traffickers to permanently get rid of her, but Koryu's not the type to get phased by a little violence and solves the problem without too much of an effort, even if she has to fight ninjas on the roof of a moving train.

After that, it's time to visit her sister Hakuran (Tamayo Mitsukawa), who is supposedly working as a designer of jewellery, but is in truth part of the Osone group that is responsible for Koryu's problems. It's not that she has much of a choice in that, mind you, because the Osone group need a talented jeweller like Hakuran too badly not to press her into service through violence and sadism. They're not just human traffickers selling their victims into prostitution, you see, the group also uses an alcoholic surgeon to sew jewels into their victims' asses in a newfangled smuggling ploy. So Koryu has her work - and an obvious source of melodrama - cut out for her.

For her second Sister Street Fighter film, the Toei higher-ups seem to have trusted the abilities of Etsuko Shihomi enough not to put her mentor Sonny Chiba at her side to steal her lamplight. She's getting a bit of male help again, but where Chiba was typically memorable in the first movie, her new sidekick's just there to break a bit of second-string henchman skull and point Koryu into the right direction from time to time. That sidelining of male protagonists is of course a good thing - there are more than enough movies with Chiba and co. strutting their stuff admirably, so there's no need to fill a film with "Sister Street Fighter" in its title with guy cooties too.

By now (and still in the second year of her movie career), Shihomi has really hit her stride and doesn't just show off appropriately photogenic and brutal martial arts skills, but has also mastered the three expressions of emotion most important in this arm of martial arts cinema: the pissed off look, the violently determined look, and the mean stare. That's no small feat with a face that does fulfil all rules and regulations of cuteness afforded that have come down to the Japanese moviemaking culture from their venerable forefathers.

What's best about Shihomi's position in the film, though, is something completely different, and something I'd usually associate with martial arts films from Taiwan and Hong Kong rather than with Japanese films of the 70s. It's how matter-of-factly the film treats its heroine being a female ass-kicker. Koryu's gender does not seem to be a thing even worth mentioning for most of the movie. There's barely a sentence of the usual "but how could a girl beat me?" stuff coming from the bad guys; it's as if the film just doesn't put any importance on it.

While Shihomi effortlessly carries her part of the movie, returning director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi does not seem to be at the top of his game. The cinematic basics are of course realized with the highest level of craftsmanship - this is a Japanese movie of the 70s made by highly knowledgeable professionals, after all - but the creative visual flourishes that elevate a film from good to "what did I just see" levels aren't really forthcoming. When he's not moving his camera around to produce a dynamic feeling, Yamaguchi mostly goes for the overuse of zooms and a high amount of shots from below at a slanted angle that certainly look peculiar, but are not peculiar enough to push the psychedelic buttons I was hoping for seeing pushed going in.

More problematic some viewers could be the perfunctory way the emotional and melodramatic parts are integrated into the storyline, but this just looks to me like a film concentrating on what it does best (brutal violence) and mostly ignoring what it does worst (crying). Owing to that, Hanging By A Thread is not an emotionally complex movie, yet it isn't supposed to be one.

A bit more disappointing to me is that Yamaguchi (or his script writers, veteran director, writer and madman Norifumi Suzuki and Masahiro Kakefuda) dials down the batshit insanity of the proceedings compared to a first movie that in its turn was already dialled down from the insanity of The Streetfighter. Fortunately, "dialling down" in this context still leaves us with a movie where even an alcoholic surgeon (usually seen with a large parrot on his shoulder, so I suppose he's a pirate surgeon) is an expert martial artists, where bad guy fighting techniques contain things like hypnotic sai sounds that let heroines see double, where there's a throw-away ninja attack just ten minutes in and where the final strikes of the final fight are exchanged while the combatants are flying. So, while it's not as batshit, organ-ripping insane as it could be, Hanging By A Thread still prefers the ridiculously awesome to the realistic.

And, as it goes with movies that do this, it's incredibly fun to watch.

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,martial arts,etsuko shihomi,kazuhiko yamaguchi,reviews

Sister Street Fighter (1974)

The Hong Kong police has lost contact with one of their undercover agents who was trying to get the goods on the up and coming drug trading organization of a man named Kakuzaki (Bin Amatsu).

The best way to find out what happened is obviously to send their agent Mansei's (Hiroshi Miyauchi) sister Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi) to Yokohama where he was last seen. She is after all a martial arts expert and half Japanese with an uncle and cousins in Yokohama and therefore the perfect choice to catch drug dealers. It certainly isn't a job for the police.

The only actual information the HK cops give Koryu is a way to meet Fanshin (Xiu-Rong Xie), their other agent in on the project.

It doesn't take much time after her arrival in Japan until Koryu has to violently deal with the first of Kakuzaki's cronies. That's not too difficult for her, but getting actually helpful information or just keeping Fanshin alive are much more difficult prospects.

At least, Koryu has the help of her brother's former martial arts school, which includes the help of Emi Hayakawa and the gut-ripping talents of a guy named Hibiki (Sonny Chiba in a long-ish guest role).

Koryu will need the reinforcements, too, because Kakuzaki owns a private zoo of martial artists (that's his description, not mine), and also secretly has his grip on the fighter's uncle. Of course, in the long run there's no problem that can't be solved by persistence and hitting people in the face.

After the success of The Street Fighter with Sonny Chiba and some other films in that style, it must have looked like a good idea to Toei studios to make as many martial arts films in as short a time as possible. Chiba was certainly game for anything, always willing to do his duty as a guest star, at least in films that made use of the members of his Japan Action Club like Sister Street Fighter's Etsuko Shihomi. And what studio would resist a group of young, athletic, well-trained actors like that? Toei certainly didn't.

Etsuko Shihomi is one of my favourites among these protégés of Chiba, with her easy confidence and the determined professionalism she shows in her fights. The Toei school of exploitational martial arts cinema lived or died on that sort of charisma. With scripts that usually didn't leave much room for the finer aspects of acting or anything amounting to subtlety, acting in these films often became a thing of people dressing up in outrageous outfits, doing athletics and showing physical presence, even more so than in other martial arts films.

This works out nicely for Sister Street Fighter and also fits the rather unsubtle yet from time to time manically interesting directorial style of its director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi. He would have slaughtered any slow and ponderous scene anyway. Yamaguchi's work here is fine if not exactly inspired. It's the usual assortment of close-ups of eyes and pained expressions, peculiar camera angles and some really fine semi-psychedelic lighting (especially in the pre-finale). The set design, on the other hand, is full-blown Japanese mid-70s eccentricity with some very strange ideas about interior decoration of hidden lairs and will surely affect anyone's mind - for better or worse.

Compared to the Street Fighter films, the action here doesn't start out as insane, but slowly and surely increases from friendly punching and kicking matches into the bone-crunching, blood-spattering style of non-realist martial arts Toei films were good at.

In comparison to Hong Kong or Taiwanese productions of the time, the fight choreography in Japanese martial arts films was always less complex and less acrobatic, but the Japanese films tended to make up for their lack in these aspects by ramping up the blood and the violent effects. Sister Street Fighter's highpoints of silly brutality are both in the grand finale, with Chiba ripping out someone's guts with his bare hands and Shihomi re-orienting another guy's head rather dubiously. So that's alright.

When it comes to weirdness, Sister Street Fighter again loses out against the Chiba film, but it doesn't feel right to complain about a film not being weird enough when it contains drug smugglers transporting their heroin in the form of wigs ("Save the wigs!"), a blowgun assassin with a mohawk or an evil former priest in full preacher garb who murders his victims with a harpoon gun (or is it a bolt pistol?). So that's alright, too.

What distinguishes Sister Street Fighter (and many of Toei's films of the era) is a singular mixture of exploitational values (in this case only one pair of breasts - not Shihomi's -, some drug withdrawal fun and a not too gruesome rape scene), weird yet typical-for-the-era visual obsessions, martial arts fully concentrated one the bone-crunching and the blood-spattering and a wild and often uncontrolled imagination. That combination is more than alright for me.

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,martial arts,etsuko shihomi,sonny chiba,reviews,kazuhiko yamaguchi

On WTF: Wolfguy: Enraged Lycanthrope (1975)

If there is anything more awe-inspiring than Sonny Chiba films from the mid-70s, I haven't encountered it until now.

Wolfguy is an especially fine example of its kind, with Chiba as a less whiny wolfman (alright, he's more like Wolverine without his claws), tiger-kinesis and a big ol' government conspiracy. Read more about it in my review on WTF-Film!

 

Technorati-Tags: japanese movies,action,fantasy,sonny chiba,etsuko nami,kazuhiko yamaguchi,reviews