Blood on the Sun

The Japanese have taken over China (well, this part of China at least) and are throwing their weight about the place, making the locals none too happy (except for the locals who side with them). It's up to our hero and his female sidekick and their teacher, and some other guys (one of which is a young man in an old man mask - don't ask) to sort them out.

However, the Japenese ain't daft and set up a fighting tournament so that their best guys can waste any good fighters in town, therefore eliminating any threats to them. So you get kung fu versus karate, sumo and judo, which isn't something you encounter often in martial arse films.

There's not much story but plenty of fighting, and a good few mega-massacres to keep you going. Our hero is also a bit handy with a sword so that gets the bodies piling right up too. Very violent, even for a kung fu film.

There's never a dull minute in this one and it was a nice surprise for me to pull a film out at random and have it turn out to be this good.

By four minutes in the Japanese have murdered a child. Based on that, it is obvious this is the "evil Japanese" martial arts movie plot. That's all you need to think about and the rest is just fighting. The run time is too long with too many scenes of actors just walking across the set or dialog explaining things or repeating what's already known.

My copy is a computer file that plays on a HDTV as a square video. Because of the cropping to fit the widescreen motion picture into the old 4:3 format of televisions back in the VHS days most of the fights seem to be filmed too close up. It is dubbed in English and the voices overly dramatic but otherwise passable.

I often complain that guns have no place in martial arts movies. This movie takes place around World War 2 so guns certainly exist. The guns are dealt with by using the "slow on the trigger" or the "I'll use my bayonet instead of shooting" solutions. The fights are mostly hand to hand or brawls. The fight choreography is punch after punch and never gets fancier than slug, jab, block, or duck. The exception to that is the martial arts tournament. The tournament is actually the high point of the movie but keep in mind the rest is at sea level.

This movie would only draw the attention of hard core fans of martial arts movies of the golden age from 1967 to 1984. I watched it once to say I did and I doubt I will ever watch it again. Other fans will likely agree with that.

This movie was decent only because it maintains a steady flow of action.

There's a pretty generic plot of a town being subjugated by a corrupt ruler, in this case it's the Japanese army during World War II. Of course our hero is an amazing fighter but is reluctant to enter a battle.

My version was horrendously dubbed to the point where at times I didn't really understand what was going on. But I'm not hard to please and the film delivers plenty of kung fu fighting.

There's nothing funny in the plot, but there were several instances of campy dialogue and general poor production that were unintentionally hilarious.

If you have 90 minutes to kill and you like kung fu movies, you can do a lot worse.

This film is set during the Japanese occupation of China circa WWII. In it, the Japanese occupiers (and the Chinese Quislings who work for them) are portrayed as total monsters who kill children and rape all women. The heroes are resistance fighters who oppose the occupation.

My transfer of this film is not of very good quality, and the pan and scan is terrible, cutting out a lot of the action. The dubbing, however, is better tan most films of this type.

The acting and character development are remarkably good, despite the dubbing. The fight scenes are well done, and feature some interesting weapons work (in one scene, the female lead uses a cloak lined with sharp discs as a weapon). The tournament that fills the last 30 minutes of the film has some interesting contrasts in styles, pitting Chinese Boxers against judo, karate, and sumo stylists.

All in all, this is a passable feature, and will please fans of the genre, especially if your copy is of better quality than mine.

Set during World War II in Japanese occupied China, a group of resistance fighters hit back at the invading oppressors and their Chinese collaborators.

This is another in the long line of martial arts action movies that came out of south-east Asia in the 70's. There is nothing truthfully especially good about this one and it follows the well-worn formula of good guys against evil rulers. If there was one angle that this one had that was a little distinctive though, it is the fact that it features a fighting competition which is set up by the Japanese with nefarious motives in mind, where various characters combat each other using different martial arts styles. To that end we have judo, karate, sumo and kung-fu all used against each other. Look out too for another common feature of this sub-genre where we have bits of famous music from big American films simply spliced into the flow. In this case it was the remarkably unsuitable pioneering synth music from A Clockwork Orange (1971) that finds itself scoring a bit of the action.