Infernal Street (1973)

Infernal Street (1973)
Aka: Return of the Dragon
Chinese Title: 奇男子
English Translation: Odd Man

Starring: Yu Tien-Lung, Cho Kin, Wong Ging-Ping, Mao Tian, Suen Yuet, Seung Fung, Si Sin-Dai, Woo Gwong
Director: Chiang Shen
Action Director: Yu Tien-Lung

Those EVIL Japanese villains are at it again, causing trouble in China. This time, we have a bunch of evil Japanese karate fighters under the direction of “The Chairman” (Mao Tian, A Gathering of Heroes and Dragon and Tiger) who have decided to cause trouble by using a local casino as a distribution center for morphine and opium, thus enslaving the local population, mainly the males, and causing them to sell their female folk into prostitution and whatnot. A local doctor (Cho Kin, Dragon Gate Inn and A Touch of Zen) is opposed to all of this, but instead of facing the Japanese and the corrupt casino owner (Woo Gwong, Seven Grandmasters and Ten Brothers of Shaolin), he simply declares that he’ll offer free treatment to the addicts that come to his clinic seeking help.

The bad guys find out about it and send one of their number to the clinic to pose as a patient  son (Yu Tien-Lung, Ways of Kung Fu and Eagle Claw and Butterfly Palm) and the doctor’s daughter (Wong Ging-Ping, Seven Man Army and 18 Shaolin Disciples). The former is the son of a former drug addict who died from complications caused by the drug use and whose mother killed herself after her husband died. Thus, the guy already has a chip on his shoulder with regards to drug dealing that is reaching Bruce Lee intensity. At first he tries to hold it in, but soon he finds himself unable to just stand there and finally starts to act.

After a brief scuffle with some of the casino men at the clinic, hero-boy goes down to the casino itself to stir up trouble. Not surprisingly, his fight at the casino will result in the Japanese getting involved and will bring in more trouble for the doctor. Despite the doctor telling hero-boy to knock it off, things nonetheless start getting progressively worse. First the Japanese, led by skinny Tojo guy (Seung Fung, Na Cha and the Seven Devils and Flagrant Flower vs. Noxious Grass), try to ambush our hero. That leads to a fight that our hero not only wins, but punishes the Japanese involved, including Tojo guy, by hacking off their ears with a katana. Determining that they won’t be able to beat hero-boy by fighting him, they decide to lay a trap: a local addict (Suen Yuet, Chinese Kung Fu and Acupuncture and Bruce Takes Dragon Town) has a debt with the casino owner and a wife (Si Sin-Dai, Woman Guerilla with Two Guns and Chase Step by Step) who’s the owner’s mistress. If she can seduce him or at least put in a situation where she has a plausible cause to accuse him of trying to rape her, the authorities, who are working for the Japanese, can arrest hero-boy and hand him over to the Japanese.

There you go. The rest of the movie is just one fight after another until everybody is dead (except our heroes, of course). There’s not a whole lot to distinguish this movie from any other, the plot about drugs notwithstanding. The whole opium den storyline was a hoary cliché by the 1990s, but I guess in 1973, it still held some appeal. The acting and dubbing is what you’d expect for a low-budget film like this. Sleaze-wise, we get a glimpse of Si Sin-Dai’s butt, but nothing more (although I’m sure if you checked out the other movies she did, you might see a little more at one point). I’m not sure if this movie was made before or after Bruce Lee died, but his presence is felt in Yu Tien-Lung’s acting. Yu does his best to imitate the looks of simmering anger that Bruce Lee uses in Fist of Fury when the Japanese bring the “Sick Men of Asia” sign into the school early on. Also, when Yu goes into the casino to start trouble, he has a goofy look on his face that recalls Bruce Lee dressing like a telephone repairman in the same movie and or playing a hick in Way of the Dragon. You can’t miss it, although I hesitate to call this movie a full-blown Brucesploitation film simply because Yu, for better or worse, has his own fighting style.

About said fighting style…Yu Tien-Lung, who also choreographed the action, too, is something a second-tier figure in Taiwanese cinema. He worked on a lot of movies as actor/action director, many of them with known actors, but none of which were real classics of the genre. According to the HKMDB, Yu had been choreographing movies as early as 1969, with this film being one of later efforts. The action makes you think he was cutting his teeth on the film rather than executing a job that he had been doing for several years by that point. It’s all your basic arm-flailing chopsockey, with very little creativity to make things looks interesting. Yu looks like he has potential, but his hand techniques lack crispness, his throws are sloppy, and his kicks are often too low and lack power. He throws a lot of crescent kicks and, had he a better action director, he’d look quite imposing. In fact, the best fight in the movie is arguably the one where Yu’s hero-boy character is chained up and he starts kicking everybody around because they left his legs free. But nothing he or the other performers do, including Wong Ging-Ping, who gets to throw a few punches here and there, looks like it has any weight to it.