Karate Kill (2016)

Karate Kill (2016)

Japanese Title: KARATE KILL カラテ・キル

Translation: Karate Kill

Starring: Hayate Matsuzaki, Mana Sakura, Asami, Kirk Geiger, Katarina Severen, Tom Voss, Miki Kawawa, Noriaki Kamata

Director: Kurando Mitsutake

Action Director: Keiya Tabuchi, Hayate

I spent the last week watching horror movies in celebration of Halloween (2024). I caught Halloween 3 and 4; Resident Evil 1, 5 and 6; and the 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. That last one was the goriest of the lot, but even then the gut-munching was kept to a minimum and most of the violence—the film got an 18+ rating in Brazil, reserved for hard “R” and “NC-17” films—was in the form of (admittedly) bloody head shots. The Resident Evil films are some of the most sanitized zombie flicks around in terms of graphic violence, which is hard to believe, considering that Paul W.S. Anderson also did Event Horizon. And the two 1980s films are almost quaint when it comes to onscreen violence.

I say this because martial arts movies in the past 15 years have start attaining levels of onscreen graphic violence usually reserved for horror movies. I mean, you had Japanese chanbara films in the 1970s and stuff like Kill Bill Vol 1 which were full of blood geysers. Tom Yung Goong had that scene where Tony Jaa breaks the collective limbs of about 40 people in a single fight. But around the time of The Raid: Redemption, there was an extra level of visceral gore added to martial arts movies, especially those coming out of Indonesia. Headshot was mean-spirited to the point it was starting to get hard to watch. The Night Comes for Us was worse. Now I hear that Shadow Strays manages to be even gorier than that film.

I bring this up because on the week of Halloween, in which I watch six horror films in three days, the most violent film I watched was a martial arts movie: Karate Kill.

The movie opens in the desert with a man (Hayate) in a karate stance facing down a woman (Asami, of Gun Woman and The Machine Girl) pointing a gun at him. As we cut to another scene, we hear a gunshot.

The next scene opens with the large, healthy rump of a woman wearing a thong (AV actress Tia, of Milk the Maid) just a few inches from the camera. We then meet our main character, Kenji (the guy from the first scene), as he goes about his life from one part time job to another. He works at a warehouse, as a waiter at a small restaurant, at a construction site, and at a strip bar (hence the scene with Tia). All of his proceeds go to support his sister, Mayumi (AV actress Mana Sakura, of STAR-604). Mayumi has gone to Southern California to study acting in hopes of becoming an actress. Recently, Mayumi has stopped answering her phone and sending messages to Kenji. Thankfully, the manager of the strip bar (Takashi Nishina, of GMK: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack and Gamera III: The Awakening of Irys) is a benevolent fellow. He gives Kenji some money to purchase a plane ticket and go to California to look for Mayumi.

Once in Los Angeles, Kenji finds her studio apartment: a run-down dump whose windows are mostly boarded up. Once in her room, he finds it occupied by a Japanese guy (Akihiro Kitamura, of CATnip) tossing the salad of a naked girl wearing a nun’s habit…what the heck, people? After some karate persuasion, Kenji learns that his sister was last scene working at a hostess club in Little Tokyo called “Secret Treasure.”

Kenji heads over to the hostess bar, which is run by a homo (or bi-)sexual dude with a comb-over (Noriaki Kamata, of Gun Woman and Samurai Avenger: The Blind Wolf). Kenji beats up every body in the establishment, including the bokken-wielding bar manager. Faced with the real possibility that Kenji will irreparably re-arrange his face, the manager comes clean. Mayumi did indeed work at the hostess club for a spell. However, the manager owed some money to a cult known as Capital Messiah, who funds their activities by showing snuff films over the dark web. When the manager couldn’t pay his debts to the cult, they showed up at his establishment and kidnapped a pair of girls, Mayumi and Kelly (Lion-Girl’s Miki Kawawa), as payment.

The cult compound is located in Texas and Kenji must fly there and find his sister before she gets killed, brainwashed, or both. Joining him for his hunt is Keiko, the only person to successfully escape from Capital Messiah’s clutches.

There is not much of a plot here. There are a few twists here and there, but the story is straight forward: Mayumi disappears, Kenji beats people up until he finds out where she is, then he has to beat more people up. End of story. There are a few moments where you think the film is gearing up for a climax, only to throw a (light) curve ball, but most viewers will know where this film is going.

What Karate Kill is is an exploitation film through and through. It is an updating of the 1970s Sonny Chiba karate movie, but with the over-the-top sensibilities of those late 2000s ôtaku-wank films that Nikkatsu and Sushi Typhoon were making at the time. This film plays those elements completely straight and you have the feeling that director Kurando Mitsutake really had a vision for this sort of thing. There are movies like Zombie Strippers where it’s clear both the actors and the filmmakers are in on the joke. Then you have movies like The Machine Girl, where the actors take it seriously, but you feel the people behind the camera are in on the joke. In Karate Kill, you almost feel as if there is no joke.

There may be no joke, but there is no shortage of sleaze. From that second scene two minutes in—followed shortly by Tia’s complete routine—to the finale, where one actress’s top has conveniently ripped in the right place, there is no shortage of female nudity. Some of it is consensual, like a sex scene between Hayate and Asami. You know how a lot of sex scenes in movies often cut to a close-up of the performers’ fingers interlocking to show union and affection? This film has him interlocking his fingers with the hook that has replaced her hand, which is blackly amusing. There is some sexual assault that occurs, mainly when bad b**** Simona (pro wrestler Katarina Severen) is groping Mana Sakura while the latter is being crucified. 

In addition to that sort of action, there is a fair amount of karate and gunplay, too. The action sequences were staged by Keiya Tabuchi, who had worked with director Mitsutake on Gun Woman. Tabuchi most recently staged the action sequences in the Netflix series “House of the Ninja,” so it’s good that he’s getting work still. The fight scenes are well choreographed. Hayate, who served as the film’s martial arts consultant, fights mainly with his fists. Fans of fancy bootwork may be disappointed with this movie. But he sells his fights well and really comes across as a Sonny Chiba for the new millenium.  His big fight is set inside of a truck container and pits him against a swordsman (David Sakurai, “Iron Fist” and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald). That fight is pretty cool, mixing solid choreography with the sort of pauses and strategizing that is typical of Japanese samurai movies.

The action is good, but there are no fights for the ages in this. What most people will remember from this movie is the gore. There is a lot of it. When Kenji goes into the hostess bar, some guy attacks him with a Bruce Lee impression. Kenji responds by simply ripping the guy’s ear off and throwing it into a cup of liquor. Interesting enough, my old karate sensei once told us about how you only needed four pounds (or so) of force to rip an ear off, so that scene gave me flashbacks to my old karate days. How appropriate. This film also has eye gougings, broken bones exposed through the skin, slit throats shown in loving detail, and nice long takes of people with their heads blown off. The only thing in which the gore falters is the CGI blood during the Keiko’s shootout with the cult members. The blood just disappears into the air (and the muzzle flashes feel incongruent with the angle of the gun and sound effect of the gunshot). 

Exploitation fans will probably take to Karate Kill quite handily. It is nothing but sex and violence, but with little of the wink-wink “We know we’re making crap” attitude that accompanies a lot of these sorts of films today. I personally find the film a bit too unpleasant to be able to enjoy, but fans of blood n’ boobs will certainly have fun with it.