Cinematic Quarantine 3 - The Street Fighter (Script)

The 70s saw the meteoric rise in popularity of martial arts movies, with the explosion of kung fu glory across grindhouse screens. This effectively took traditional Chinese martial arts out of the shrouded mysticism of the past, and instead made them a different sort of mystical, with layers of incredible, unbelievable, absolutely wonderful celluloid horseshit. But Japanese martial arts? Maybe not so much, at least not at first.

But then came a man, and that man was a human locus of lunatic charisma. His name? Shinichi “Sonny” Chiba. His talent? Maniac violence, performed with a wolflike smile, shocking the moviegoing public with delightful splatters of absurdly red fake blood, sent spurting while he crushes lesser men into stains of greasy anonymity. He’s sorta like a ninja, who can really wear the hell out of a suit, and whose face does stuff like this. Often as he kills people, in really hilariously violent ways. Follow along, viewer, as Sonny Chiba leads us into a lurid underworld of grimy neon skeeviness and ruthless karate murder, in The Street Fighter. Buckle in, folks, because this one is gonna get a little intense.

[TITLECARD]

What you’re looking at, is Sonny Chiba’s first starring role: as Space Chief, in Invasion of the Neptune Men. I know, it’s hard to believe right? Guy was the star of that movie that made Mystery Science Theater 3000 wistfully sentimental about Prince of Space. What’s significant, though, is that while this film is an utter garbage fire of boring and trite, it was the first time in a movie that Chiba would use the karate he had been learning from founder of the Kyokushin Style, Mas Oyama. And yes, this wasn’t the first time Sonny had been in front of a camera showing his stuff, just the first movie and, like, fuck it, don’t at me, the important part here: this is the early defining of what Sonny Chiba was going to bring to the forefront of his films- Kyokushin Karate.

Kyokushin was a style that Sonny Chiba hadn’t actually come to until more recently in his life. See, when he was in college, Chiba was in training for the Olympics, as a gymnast. Unfortunately, he was sidelined with a back injury, to which he took up Karate to rehabilitate, and in the process, changed the arc of his career dramatically. In addition to starting a school for stunt performers called the Japan Action Club so that he could start training others with his pretty dynamic skillset, he became the one of the faces of the Japanese toughguy in 70s cinema, starring in the Battles Without Honor or Humanity series of films, as well as The Bodyguard.

[AND IIIIIIIII]

Not that one.

1973’s Bodyguard Kiba had Chiba in the role of a protagonistic asskicker, one who breaks ribs and legs for the right reason. It’s a violent and unflinching film, but it’s one where you can pretty easily read the hero’s moral compass as pointing in a sensible direction. So where to go from there?

How about 1974’s The Street Fighter, a movie where the protagonist starts in the absolute sub-basement of human morality, ascends to a level of basic decency that’s more or less ‘oh good, he cares about his friends after all and is willing to do the right thing in the end’, but still ends with him ripping a dude’s throat out in an honor duel fought in the pouring rain. That’s the kind of movie we’re watching today people, that’s our hero, Takuma Tsurugi, Terry in the dub: a man who was chewed up and spit out by life from age five onwards, whose only recourse was to ball up his fist, punch life in the face, and make it clear out and give him some space. Unfortunately for life itself, Terry’s got him some killin’ hands, not to mention THIS FACE.

[Any given Sonny Chiba inhale face]

So Life keeps its distance around our protagonist, got it. He’s also the sort of guy that other people pay to make life clear the fuck out where it’s needed, and he typically does this with his fists. This guy is a hired operator, and he’s known for not needing anything other than his own hands; we are deep in some vintage Men’s Adventure shit already, people. Where things start to get extreme is in Tsurugi’s capabilities and tendencies. See, here we have the opening scene, where Terry-slash-Takuma has been commissioned to bust this guy:

[Junjo in the Dub / Tateki Shikenbaru in the OG]

Out of death row on the day of his hanging. How does he do so? By exploiting the fact that the condemned must be deemed healthy enough to die. How does he do that? By telling the guy to swing. And then hitting him in the chest with an OXYGEN COMA PUNCH.

[“An oxygen coma punch??”]

Yeah, a goddamned oxygen coma punch. Homeboy keels over on his way to the noose, cue Terry and his sidekick Ratnose jumping the EMTs, applying the boots to them in a light coating, then absconding with the ambulance. So yeah, our hero is capable of some real extreme-style karate mayhem.

He’s also extremely an antihero in this film, a dude who will grow a sense of morality as time goes on, but effectively begins so deep beneath the basement of human ethics, he’s feeling the heat from the Earth’s core. I submit exhibit A: Terry is not paid sufficiently much for his oxygen coma application and prison breaking services, by the family of the aforementioned Karate Killer on death row. In order to receive full compensation, he decides to take the sister and sell her off to the local pimp. When brother objects with Karate, Terry responds largely by humiliating him. This doesn’t stop brother from committing to a daring all or nothing attack, resulting in him fatally defenestrating himself via his own sweet dragon kick. Terry is so shocked by the resulting splatter of vibrantly crimson not-blood that he pauses for like 5 seconds, before continuing on with the whole human trafficking thing.

Yaiiii. I warned you bro, about the stairs, as well as the sort of ethics on display by our protagonist. While this character manages to scrape together something of a ruthless sense of nobility as time goes on, this is where we begin: Prison breakage via highly esoteric assault, murder and slavery. If the men’s adventure level we were previously at was James Bond, we have now obviously descended deeper; we are now in the company of none other than Mack Bolan, The Executioner.

The plot that launches from this seeminess can be roughly described as a game of bodyguard hot potato with the heiress of an oil company, whose dad recently carked it and is now the new shakedown target of functionally every organized crime group on the Japanese mainland. Heiress Sarai is begins in the protection of her uncle Kendo Masuoka, who is more or less just blatantly supposed to be Mas Oyama. You know, reduced a bull to beef with a knifehand strike, that guy, I mentioned him earlier. After Terry is initially approached by a yakuza group to extract Sarai from Masuoka’s dojo- by the way, listen to how the dub explains what the yakuza is to a 70s American audience, it’s adorable [INSERT CLIP HERE] -he decides they aren’t willing to pay him enough for the work and bails. They make the mistake of trying to silence Terry for what he knows, after walking out on the plan; it does not go well for them, as basically the entire rest of the movie demonstrates.

The book report ends here, with Terry Tsurugi’s final act as a shitheel by introducing himself to Sarai as an extremely off model Pepe Lepew cosplayer, thus enraging an entire dojo full of men. The reason for the more open format of this episode is this: Unlike Starcrash, which is a film I believe needed the Farraday Cage-like containment of my narrative, lest its own ephemeral self just disperse into the background radiation of cinema, The Street Fighter is not really that hard to follow. It makes sense: man makes fist, makes lesser man die; next threat, please and thank you. It’s not like there isn’t character development or deeper elements to this film, because we do get some answers. We do, in fact, learn why Terry is such a malignant asshole, yet why he also exhibits the capacity for valiance. 

It’s just that, for every minute of that, there’s two of this:

[Sonny Chiba beats the shit out of people in montage form; end it on intense karate breathing and a Chibaface zoom-in]

So with the content warning going forward with this film has multiple instances of the sort of exploitative sexual violence you can expect from something you’d see in a film of this sort, from this era- because for as much as we are about jokes on this channel, we’re also about the important stuff too -we’ll now instead proceed into reasons why you, yes, you, should watch Sonny Chiba in The Street Fighter.

Number One - You Can’t Not Look at Sonny Chiba

People like to call Sonny Chiba the Bruce Lee of Japan, but this short changes the guy to just a brutal degree. For one, poor Bruce had a rash of actual pale imitators after his death, and Sonny Chiba really should not be lumped in with them. And then secondly, when it comes to screen presence and fighting style, the two are night and day. Bruce Lee is the picture of human focus, the laser-form of what our strength, agility and perception can do when they work in tandem, whose movements are equal in their disciplined precision and explosivity.

But Sonny Chiba? Sonny Chiba is a goddamned lunatic. Yes, he is handsome like a men’s suit model, but it’s hard to notice this when he’s emoting to this degree. This man does not chew scenery as much as he emits radiation that causes the scenery to disintegrate and turn into an airborne particulate, which he then inhales via his intense karate breathing techniques. He conveys annoyance by turning bright red, and he conveys anger by murdering lesser men. In contrast to Bruce Lee’s refined intensity, Sonny Chiba is a slavering wild animal, a feral karate death machine who makes it very clear he has no real interest in his movements being crisp, as long as they look naaaaaaaaaaaaaasty. The result? Every time he hits someone, your brain just wants to go “oh hey, that guy’s dead” “that guy’s dead” “that guy died” “that guy? Definitely dead” “wow, not only did that guy die, he suffered first”.

Parcel this into the unique fashion sense of Takuma-slash-Terry, a man who matches black dress shoes and slacks with a black gi jacket, shinobi bracers and whatever the hell sort of proto-disco lunacy this belt is. Despite almost a complete lack of colour in his ensemble, I still want to call this Human Danger Colour Behavior. When your vibe is “I am dressed to get into a karate fight anywhere I please, plus you can’t confirm I don’t have shuriken on me,” you aren’t not making a statement to everyone you meet. When Sonny Chiba is the one making that statement, it translates to the general public as “hey everyone, you wanna see some real crazy shit?”

Number Two - The Dub is a Precious Gem of Shlock

I have no takes on the matter of subs versus dubs, because really I think it’s best to have both if you can manage it. For one, some folks don’t read and process images simultaneous very well. And then there’s the matter of the different sort of experience from having a localization and a translation cast perform the material from the viewpoint of a different culture. 

For better or worse. [NOW BEAR MY ARCTIC BLAST]

A subtitled Street Fighter experience gives you a clearer and far more coherent picture of the plot, which has more going on than the average grindhouse action film. But I still suggest that you start with the dub for a first viewing, and the reason for that is simple: it’s dumb as shit in the best ways and it will make you laugh constantly. Yes, this detracts from the film’s more dramatic elements. As a tradeoff, it makes everything that much more absurd. Amidst unbridled turbomurder administered in hand to hand combat, you get to be serenaded by dubbed line reads like these:

[Isn’t that just MEAN and NASTYYYY?]

[LAST OF THE TRUE OKINAWAN FIGHTERS]

[he too old, boss]

[YOU KNOW THE PRICE FOR COWARDICE]

[that’s a load of sukiyaki!]

[LLLLLLLLLISTEN, MY SON!]

[But I won’t use my Blue Dragon…]

Jinsao… Jinsao, that sword is red. That colour is red. Jinsao, your Dragon is Red. It’s a Red Dragon. 

Red.

Jinsao is an idiot in the dub.

Number 3 - They Threw the Violence Lever Over to Maximum, Then Broke It Off

The Street Fighter is the first film in history to portray the destruction of a human body, internally, at a skeletal level. See, in this scene, after first indulging the audience in the acted splintering of a yakuza goon’s forearm, Tsurugi measures his comrade in the purple suit, before delivering a devastating twelve-to-six closed fist to the dome, instantly transforming him to a foam rubber skull being shot with a gel filter. As the skull is deformed by the force of the blow, our x-ray view ceases, and the goon expels what is presumably the contents of his brain case as an aerosol of strawberry kiwi Kool-Aid from his mouth. His soulless husk drops vertically from the frame, its work on Earth, to be crushed and further condition Tsurugi’s assassination fists, completed. Yes, this sequence is ridiculous. And I love every second of it. I will rewind this, over and over. Because how could I not. I’m not the only person who thinks this scene is amazing, either, because Shout Factory made it the cover of the remastered BluRay collection.

Now, here’s the thing: this is not the only shot of graphic skull destruction in this film. It is not even half the shots of graphic skull destruction in this film. It is merely the only one that occurs in x-ray. That really says something. I’m not sure what, but it doesn’t stop me from being entertained when someone’s pumpkin gets smashed.

Pea soup was the secret ingredient to the projectile vomit scene from The Exorcist. The Street Fighter understood that realistic projectile vomit could also be achieved with canned soup, except in its case, the evil force driving the expectoration wasn’t any demon, but Terry Tsurugi’s fist. Which is also known as the demon of the skeletal-muscular world. 

As I mentioned before, The Street Fighter is a movie that doesn’t mind capitalizing off of misery for shock, a thing that’s unpleasantly par for the course in grindhouse. What’s less common is when the reprisal for a scene of such misery is so immediate and so all in as what The Street Fighter has for us all here:

[Sonny Chiba Rips a Man’s Balls Off, to Death]

I believe under the Tsurugi-ryu fighting system, that technique is entitled “Low Blow, Form 666: Testes Nullification Fist.”

And the hits just keep on coming, and the blood just keeps on flying, and this movie keeps finding ways to have Terry-slash-Takuma brutalize the Tokyo underworld. You think you’ve seen all the movie had for you, but it finds some new method of death. And then, right at the end, just when you think you couldn’t be shocked by the content in this movie any more, it hits you with a chilling glimpse of the future of graphic ultraviolence in media:

Dadaism. [That One Chibaface in particular, which he basically kills a guy with]

Number 4 - The Crossroads of Karate and Chaos

You can get enjoyment out of underwhelming martial arts movies, it’s true. Watching Don “The Dragon” Wilson struggle to convey an emotion can be a good laugh in the right mood. Same with watching Michael Dudikoff lightly tap Trevor the Whisper Thin Ninja here on the shin in American Ninja 2, taking him out instantly and entirely.

The Street Fighter is not an underwhelming martial arts movie. Underwhelming is a word that is not allowed to walk through The Street Fighter’s neighborhood. It is a martial arts film that is fully committed to its own brand of madness, and that starts with how sure it is of its own protagonist as a concept. See, even Bruce Lee in his own films acknowledged the overwhelming threat of firearms against martial artists, that’s why he either worked them into his films as legitimately fatal threats, or he found a way to take them out of the plot’s equation. This is where he and Sonny Chiba differed in their philosophy of martial arts filmmaking, because in The Street Fighter, MAN, FUCK GUNS. The only time guns get the drop on Terry-slash-Takuma’s shuriken is when they’re already drawn and on him. Give him cover and time to go up his sleeve though? All your weak revolver is, is a means to turn your vulnerable handparts into a target for a flying blade. Love the pain, weakling.

Then there’s the concept of Tsurugi, the Number One Man

[BECOME A NUMBER ONE MAN]

The guy who is a one man karate murder-death-killer who is the equal to an entire underworld death squad. He literally beats up this legion of dipshits as part of his workout. Oil Heiress Sarai is initially found with her uncle Kendo in the Masuoka Dojo, and I gotta say, while there are more secure places in the world than a Gold’s Gym-sized 24/7 karate dojo that’s headed by a legitimate grandmaster, it’s also not a bad place to hole up either. But if guns don’t stop Tsurugi, these chumpstain mere-blackbelts can eat shoeleather and call it jerky. Y’know, once they regain the ability to speak coherent words. The movie wants you to know we aren’t in the realm of mortals, even if this is a criminal underworld, because if we were in mere mortal criminal territory, there wouldn’t be hitman ogres and blind assassins with caneswords.

No, The Street Fighter prefers comic book verisimilitude to cinematic reality. In its universe, a secret technique of sufficient strength can easily overpower terminal ballistics, karate breathing can rescue both yourself and others from a high fall, and one man in a black gi is the equal to a dozen yakuza. It’s John Wick, in 70s Japan, with fists instead of pistols, and funk instead of EDM, except there’s no puppy; just an implied payday and a chance to for the protag to indulge his Red Mist addiction. It’s sleazy, just slathered in grime, moral ambiguity and gore. Best of all, it’s in the public domain, so if you could go for some of this:

[assorted facepunching]

[NOTORIOUS HONG KONG KILLERS]

[additional facepunching]

[suuuuu-kiiiiiiii-yaaaaaaa-kiiiiiiiiiii]

[ball rip, freeze frame; zoom in on Chiba’s bloody fist]

Here’s a link. 

[Link appears over fist with a *ding*]

[Credits]