Sister Street Fighter (1974)

Sister Street Fighter (1974)
Japanese Title: 女必殺拳
Translation: Woman Deadly Fist

 

Starring: Etsuko Shihomi, Shin'ichi Chiba, Asao Uchida, Sanae Ôhori, Bin Amatsu, Hiroshi Kondô, Emi Hayakawa, Takashi Hio, Masashi Ishibashi, Tatsuya Kameyama
Director: Kazuhiko Yamaguchi
Action Director: Takashi Hio

 

If the local success of Enter the Dragon helped bring The Street Fighter into existence, then Angela Mao’s brief cameo in that movie led to Sister Street Fighter’s conception. The script for Sister Street Fighter was written for Angela Mao, who had originally agreed to show up in the film. She ended up dropping out at the last moment, possibly because she had been offered a leading role in Golden Harvest’s big-budget production Stoner. Sonny Chiba recommended the lead role to Etsuko Shihomi, a member of Chiba’s Japan Action Club. Shihomi had had small parts in The Street Fighter; The Street Fighter’s Last Revenge; and Bodyguard Chiba 2, so Sonny was well aware of her talents as both a fighter and an actress. In the end, the gambit paid off and Shihomi starred in a string of Sister Street Fighter films, among others.

Etsuko Shihomi plays Li Koryu (Tina Long in the English dub—the fact that she plays a Chinese woman is a reminder of the fact the role was meant for Angela Mao), a martial arts expert living in Hong Kong. Her brother is the leading expert of shorinji kempo and an undercover policeman working in Japan. When his superiors lose contact with him, they ask Li to travel to Japan to find her brother and help him bust open a heroin smuggling ring. She accepts and ends up staying with some relatives in Yokohama. It does not take long before the bad guys discover that Li Koryu is on to them and send their army of martial arts assassins after her. But Li Koryu is one tough cookie. Having the top students of the local kempo school backing you up doesn’t hurt, either.

Sister Street Fighter comes very close to being a pure fight movie. A fight scene is rarely more than five minutes away and this film is set in a world where everybody knows how to fight, even the local ballet instructor! I’m not making that up. Obviously, cramming so much action into an 80-minute run time means that the plot is thin and barely coherent. This is the sort of film where our heroine shows up at a place and a fight breaks out. We don’t know why she’s there or how she decided to go to said place (considering that she’s a fish out of water), but that’s unimportant. The important thing is that she’s there, the bad guys are there, and there’s a fight to be had.

The action duties were handed to actor Takashi Hio, whose action direction credits included the Female Prisoner Scorpion films, favorites among fans of Japanese cult cinema. He had also worked with Sonny Chiba on the first Bodyguard Kiba film, so he had a good idea how to work with karate as an onscreen fighting style. Hio looks to be influenced just as much by Bruce Lee films as he was by the karate films Sonny Chiba had made earlier. The fights feel much more direct, with less of the posturing and strategy that we see in some of the Street Fighter films of that time.

Nineteen-year-old Etsuko Shihomi is a force to be reckoned with here and does everything that her Chinese contemporaries, Angela Mao and Polly Shang Kuan Ling Feng, could do. Etsuko Shihomi certainly had the credentials: training in karate, kenjutsu (swordplay) and shorinji kempo, the latter being a martial art founded by Japanese master who had studied different Chinese styles during the Japanese occupation. Whether it’s weapons—sai and nunchaku—or good ol’ fashioned fisticuffs, Shihomi does it all. The movie even begins in classic Hong Kong style, with Etsuko performing a variety of forms in front of a red background. When she gets in her fight with a couple of bullies at a restaurant, she provokes them by stabbing flies with toothpicks and then flinging them into said ruffians’ mouths. That’s the very definition of badass. She then tops that in the very next fight when she fights a bunch of thugs in an alleyway. Flanked by a couple of karate masters, including one guy who wields a kusari-kama (sickle and chain), she scales the wall by doing the splits and jumping vertically, catches the sickle when the guy throws it at her, throws it back, and hits the guy in the eye!

Sonny Chiba shows up in a supporting role as Hibiki, the top student at the local kempo dojo. He generally shows up whenever someone needs to get beat up. One of the villains is played by Masashi Ishibashi, who played the lead heavy in the first two Street Fighter films. Ishibashi’s karate master character is accompanied by a bunch of karate fighters decked out in gi and wearing wicker baskets on their heads for no reason. In one scene, Ishibashi shows up at the dojo looking for trouble and ends up throwing down with Chiba. The two have a brief rematch at the climax, although Chiba wisely leaves the best moments for the heroine. Nonetheless, Chiba does get to go buck wild on a roomful of henchman during the big finale, so fans should easily be satisfied.

One of the best aspects of the action also turns out to be its biggest flaw. Director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi and Takashi Hio made sure to fill the movie with a plethora of quirky villains for the heroine to fight. Early on in the English dub, the main villain comments to one of his henchmen that he collects fighters. “It’s more fun than a car full of gorillas,” he observes. Said villains include  a contingent of female Muay Thai fighters dressed up as extras from a Flintstones reunion wearing papier-mâché masks, a perpetually-screaming nunchaku expert dressed in red pants and a black mesh shirt, and Reverend Starr. The latter is a former preacher turned “professional speargunner” who looks like the Japanese version of Saturday Night Live’s Father Guido Sarducci. The problem is that there are so many of these villains that their fights with Shihomi tend to end after a few kicks. This is especially obvious in the fight with the so called Amazon 7, where each woman is laid out after a single kick to the head. Considering their exalted status in the villain’s oeuvre, it’s strange that they could handle less punishment than the rest of the regular lackeys.

Exploitation fans should track down the Japanese version, which features a couple of gory deaths that would have otherwise guaranteed the film an “X” rating. In one particularly gruesome (and drawn-out) death, Etsuko kills her opponent by twisting his head a full 180 degrees. The man actually has enough life in him to get up and walk down the stairs before finally keeling over. Sonny Chiba also rips out a man’s intestines during on his skirmishes at the end. There is also a bit of nudity, a woman going through heroin withdrawals and a rape sequence. I almost wish that last scene was not in the film, since it makes an entertaining film a little less fun. But the sheer amount of fights on display make this a must for genre fans.