Karate Wars (1978)

Karate Wars (1978)
Japanese Title: 空手大戦争
Translation: Great Karate War

 

Starring: Hisao Maki, Hideji Ôtaki, Yôko Natsuki, Nobuo Kaneko, Tôru Abe, Bing-Bing Pai, Charlie Chen Yao-Lin, Arihiro Fujimura, Darm Dasakorn 
Director: Hideo Nanbu
Action Director: Hisao Maki

 

"Mr. Maki, I've met Sonny Chiba, and you sir, are no Sonny Chiba."

 

So, Hisao Maki, a karate expert, is a promising karate fighter named Tatsu who drops off the map after killing a Mexican luchador(!) in a fight. Some time later, a group of businessmen approach Maki's master proposing that he send his best fighter to Hong Kong and Thailand to challenge their best, in order to promote karate and Japanese business interests abroad. The master's daughter finds Maki and he agrees to the duels.

 

By sheer coincidence, Chinese nightclub singer in Tokyo isn’t happy that Japan is going to (try to) throw Chinese martial arts under the bus. She arranges for Maki to fight her brother, White Dragon (some viewers will recognize as Charlie Chan). She also arranges for scores of thugs to ambush Maki, just to be on the safe side. Look for hung gar grand master Chiu Chi-Ling (the tailor from Kung Fu Hustle) as a thug who gets beat in one punch, thus depriving us of hung gar vs. karate duel.

 

Maki kills White Dragon in their duel (was a falling knee smash to the chest really necessary? Really?) and moves on to Thailand, where he must prepare to fight the reigning Muay Thai champion, an alcoholic has-been named King Cobra.

Sadly, the 70s Karate Cycle in Japan goes out with a whimper rather than a bang. The problem is that although Shochiku wanted a piece of the Street Fighter pie (or whatever crumbs were still in the pan), director Hideo Nanbu and Hisao Maki were either uninterested in the project, or really had no idea what they were doing. The direction is flat, as is the acting and fight choreography.

 

Despite his suave pompadour hairstyle, Maki, for all I know, was not so much an actor but a statue of a man sculpted from a block of mahogany that the gods breathed life into, but who still retained the inability to express emotion in any form. His facial expression never changes, even when his master's pretty daughter is undressing in front of him near the end in a bid to get him to call off the duel. The uncouth brute gets what's coming to him in the end for that. 

 

Sadly, Shochiku's filmmakers frequently demonstrate that they had no idea how to photograph these fights, frequently shooting from angles and distances that obscure what the players are doing. The editing is also very blah, further robbing the fights of their impact. Moreover, Maki’s punches are often slow and weak, making it unintentionally funnny when his opponents double over as if they’d been struck by Bruce Lee’s one-inch punch. I understand that there’s a difference between speed in real life and speed in front of the camera, but Maki Sensei obviously didn’t understand the latter, which is why he looks more like he’s giving a “choreographed demonstration” instead of screen fighting.

 

There's an interesting fight between Maki and some Chinese wall-jumping martial artists in a cramped hotel room, but that's obscured by bad lighting. The fight with Charlie Chan should be the ultimate showdown between Japanese karate and Chinese kung fu. This is especially true since the brief scene of Charlie Chan training before the duel shows that unlike Hisao Maki, he knew how to project speed and power in front of the camera. In the end, the fight we get consists of Chan getting in one good kick and missing with several others, after which Maki takes him out with the aforementioned knee smash. DisaPPOINTING!

 

Speaking of Chinese kung fu, Karate Wars sort of plays like an ethnic inversion of Angela Mao’s The Tournament, and it is rather weird to see the characterizations of Chinese and Japanese martial artists reversed after watching so many anti-Japanese films come out of Hong Kong and Taiwan. But beyond that novelty, there is no reason to watch Karate Wars.