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 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. Meanwhile, a Chinese kung fu expert/nightclub singer arranges for Maki to fight her brother, White Dragon (some viewers will recognize as Charlie Chan, of Secret Rivals II). She also arranges for scores of thugs to ambush Maki, just to be on the safe side. Look for hung gar expert 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 most prepare to fight the reigning Muay Thai champion, an alcoholic lout named King Cobra.

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. That brute mother-(shut yo mouth) gets what's coming to him in the end for that. 

The fights are also substandard. Shochiku's filmmakers frequently demonstrate that they had no idea how to photograph these fights, with lots of unnecessary close-ups and other angles that obscure what the actors (heh) are doing. 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, which should be the ultimate showdown between Japanese karate and Chinese kung fu, consists of Chan getting in one good kick, missing with several other kicks, Maki taking him down, and then the aforementioned knee smash. Even Bruce Lee reserved his fatal blow against O'Hara for when the latter attacked him with a broken bottle. What the heck is Maki's problem? Some of the fights in Thailand are OK, but become kind of funny when Maki gets in a quick, short reverse punch on some guys that has no power whatsoever, but the guys drop to the ground as if he had hit them with a trademark Bruce Lee one-inch punch. Silly stuff, really. In the end, the film is for Japanese karate completists  only.