Movie Review: The Streetfighter
“Gekitotsu! Satsujin ken”
Perhaps the most violent martial arts movie ever made.
Intro
Perhaps you’ve never heard of Sonny Chiba. Perhaps your only knowledge of “The Streetfighter” relates to the 90′s arcade game featuring Ryu, Ken and Guile.
But Sonny Chiba does exist, and so does his 1974 masterpiece of violence, “Gekitotsu! Satsujin ken”, or “The Streetfighter”. This is a bad film. A very bad film, but don’t get me wrong, it’s bad in a good way. There’s no particularly coherent story to speak of and the dialogue at times appears to make little sense. But that’s not really the point of this film. The point of this film is that Sonny Chiba is a very hard man who likes to bust heads.
Story
Takuma Tsurugi is a tough, mercenary, master of martial arts. When an important business magnate dies, leaving billions to his daughter, the Mafia and Yakuza try to hire Tsurugi to kidnap the daughter. When they refuse to meet his exorbitant price, then try to kill him to conceal their secret plans, he promptly offers his services to protect her. Much ultra-violent martial-arts fighting action, as expected, ensues. This also includes a subplot of a family’s bloodfeud with Tsurugi over a disputed debt.
To give you an idea of how badass this guy is, at the start of the film Tsurugi rescues a guy from prison by faking his death using his ninja move of “delayed asphyxia”. When the convict’s brother and sister (who paid Tsurugi to do the deed”, can’t pay up, he throws the brother out the window so his head explodes, then sells the sister into sex slavery for 3 million yen!
5.0/10
Action
Lets get one thing straight. This is the only category in which Streetfighter excels. Fuck it, this is the only category in which any of the movies I review excel! When I watch a DVD I want to see Guns, I want Kung Fu, Car Chases, Ninjas and stupid dialogue. I also want inventive deaths.
Chiba rips a guy’s balls off!
In this film you get all that and more!
Perhaps 80% of the budget was spent of fake blood and it sure doesn’t go to waste. If anyone falls more than three feet their heads explode. Noses break, people vomit blood when their kicked, gunshots spray the red stuff over walls and wounds pour out blood following crazy ninja death moves!
This is just before Chiba throws the dude out the window. “No ticket Motherfucker!”
Most of the action is in the way of fist-fights, but not just average fist-fights. Where Sonny Chiba excels is in crazy ninja death moves, like ripping people’s necks or sticking fingers in their eyes, shit, he even crushes a guy’s skull and we get to see an x-ray camera angle of it happening.
He doesn’t just kick people, like Lee or Van Damme would, he kicks them against walls and holds them there until they start coughing blood or drop dead. Noone escapes the on-screen carnage even if they beg for mercy, heck the ones that beg get it even worse!
ACTION OF THE HIGHEST GRADE!
9.0/10
Acting
Clearly a bit shit. But Chiba makes some cool ninja noises with his mouth. Kinda like “huuushaaaa” and shit like that.
2.0/10
Overall
If I add the scores in each category then divide by three we’d get 5.3, not a great score for Sonny Chiba’s action extravaganza. But I mean c’mon, he actually ripped the guys balls off!
8.5/10