Re: Born (2016)

Re: Born (2016) Original Title: RE:BORN リボーン Translation: Re:Born

Starring: Tak Sakaguchi, Yura Kondo, Takumi Saitô, Hitomi Hasebe, Mariko Shinoda, Masanori Mimoto, Hiroko Yashiki, Makoto Sakaguchi, Orson Mochizuki, Kenta, Yoshitaka Inagawa, Akio Ôtsuka

Director: Yuji Shimomura

Action Director: Yoshitaka Inagawa

Zero Range Combat. This is a martial arts style founded in the early-mid 2000s by Japanese martial artist Yoshitaka Inagawa. The general idea of Zero Range Combat is to develop a system of close-quarters combat that could be taught to military operatives and law enforcement officers. The emphasis is on weapons, especially knives, but extends to objects like batons, flashlights, and even swords. The style is a synthesis of elements from Japanese Kobudo (or weapons), Muay Boran, Sambo, the Russian military art of Systema, Filipino Escrima, and Jieitaikakutōjutsu, which is the knife and bayonet system of fighting taught in the Japanese Self-Defense Force.

Re:Born was meant to be Tak Sakaguchi’s swan song from the action movie genre, after having worked in it for more than a decade, starting with the cult favorite Versus. Actually, his retirement started in 2013 following the completion of Sion Sono’s ode to guerilla filmmaking, Why Don’t You Play in Hell? However, so many people reacted with sadness to Sakaguchi’s departure from cinema that Tak decided to do one more action movie in hopes of making his fans happy. The resulting film was Re:Born, which may have started life as a Sion Sono script for a film called Kenkichi. The resulting film covers no new ground from a plot perspective, but tries to do for Zero Range Combat what Ong Bak did for Muay Thai, or Merantau and The Raid did for Silat.

The plot of the film draws heavily from films like Broken Path (2007) and Black Mask (1996), and is similar to that same year’s Headshot (2016) and the Shaw Brothers classic Avenging Eagle (1978). Tak Sakaguchi plays Toshiro, a quiet man who runs a small convenience store and lives with his niece, Sachi (Yura Kondo). Toshiro is actually a former special forces operative and assassin who was once known as “The Ghost.” He left his employer, The Phantom (Akio Otsuda, who voiced Snake in the Japanese version of “Metal Gear Solid” and Batou in the Ghost in the Shell films), after getting tired of the Phantom kidnapping children and training/brainwashing them into becoming assassins. Sachi is not his actual niece, but one of the kids whom he rescued.

Toshiro lives a quiet existence, working and raising Sachi, and occasionally visiting a fellow operative, Kenji (Takumi Saito, of 13 Assassins and Shin Godzilla), who became paraplegic after saving Toshiro’s life. He also finds time to go to a psychologist, Dr. Shizuka Matsumoto (Hitomi Hasebe, of “Ultraman Geed” and RoboGeisha) Toshiro finds himself being stalked by numerous assassins, all of whom he dispatches with lightning quick efficiency. It becomes clear that the Phantom is back and is hunting him and he teams up with a pair of assassins, Max (Orson Mochizuki) and Masaru (Kenta), to rescue Sachi when the Phantom’s assassins kidnap her.

The second half of the film is one long action sequence as Toshiro, Max, and Masaru have to infiltrate the Phantom’s base, located in a Japanese forest. They dispatch platoon and platoon as they work their way up the wooded hill until they finally can enter the base. Toshiro must finally face down with his former comrade Abyss Walker (Yoshitaka Inagawa), who, unlike Toshiro, is an assassin who simply loves to kill. I mean, the movie opens with the Phantom’s men running a combat simulator in hunting down Toshiro, only for Abyss Walker to show up and kill everybody for no reason whatsoever. Abyss Walker is the unreliable wildcard that the Phantom tolerates only because he is only person whose skills come close to matching Toshiro’s.

An alternate title for Re:Born could be Throat Slit: The Motion Picture. The entire purpose of Zero Range Combat appears to be finding the quickest angle and movement to reach the opponent’s throat and slice it. Or stab it. Or perforate it. Or puncture it. It feels like a mixture of a layman’s understanding of Ninjitsu mixed with Special Forces knife fighting. That is certainly how Tak Sakaguchi plays his character in his fights. He sneaks up on an opponent and slits their throat. Or parries an attack and goes for the throat. Or parries an attack, twists a limb, and then slices the throat. His character is also super-fast and can dodge bullets (according to Wikipedia, this is one of the claims that Zero Range Combat makes for its practitioners), which prompts his opponents to switch to knives and close-quarters combat, giving him the opportunity to slit more throats.

Tak Sakaguchi uses mainly knives and fisticuffs in his fights. For the latter, there seems to be a mixture of small two-edged knives, one-edged knives, and intimidating curved blades that look like something you’d see in an Iko Uwais movie. The big weapon that Sakaguchi and Yoshitaka Inagawa use in their action sequences in a curved blade that is perpendicular to the hilt. When those two finally square off at the end, they use a mixture of knife fighting and an open-handed fighting style that my colleague Paul Bramhall described as “drunken capoeira,” although to me it looked like “Spazzed-Out Monkey Fist.” 

Right before the three protagonists start their raid on the Phantom’s compound, there is a scene where they are discussing how Toshiro let Sachi be kidnapped because he could track to her to their base. Max hands him a handgun that Toshiro examines, holds, points in a mock fashion, and then returns to Max. He then takes a knife from Masaru, holds it, and says that it will suffice. I imagined in my mind an alternate scene where Masaru would hold a tray full of knives and bladed weapons—switchblades, bowie knives, butterfly knives, kama (sickles), etc.—and Toshiro would just stock up on bladed weapons that he would be able to cut throats with. Now, imagine my joy after watching Toshiro slaughter dozens of soldiers with regular knives (and a folding shovel) when the second-to-last platoon shows up to stop him, and he randomly whips out a pair of kama and goes to town on them. That made me particularly happy, especially since they had not been established as a weapon in his arsenal before. It almost feels like I willed that scene to happen.

Tak Sakaguchi ended up NOT retiring and was back in the game after two years making movies, including Crazy Samurai Musashi, which is essentially a 70-minute sword fight (without cuts, I believe). He also had a supporting role in Kingdom, where he plays a Qin military officer who uses a “Drunken Chanbara” style of fighting. His most recent film was One Percenter, a meta-esque film about an action actor facing off against a pair of Yakuza gangs who have interrupted the filming of one of his movies. People have called that Re:Born 2. I posted at the Kung Fu Fandom the other day that I would like to see Tak Sakaguchi take on Donnie Yen in the upcoming Flash Point film. Probably will never happen, but a man can dream.

Is Re:Born going to be known the greatest martial arts action film ever made? No. But it does have martial arts action in spades and it’s all well-choreographed, even if a bit repetitive. As a showcase for Tak Sakaguchi’s bad-assery, however, it gets major points. I’m glad that he hasn’t retired yet.

Three Short Seiji Chiba Reviews

Rogue Ninja (2009, d: Seiji Chiba) – original title: Nukenin – C: Mika Hijii, Masayuki Izumi, Kentarô Shimazu.

 

The Iga ninja clan has more than its share of problems. Their rivals, the Koga clan, have allied themselves with the ambitious Nobunaga Oda and are threatening the Iga’s existence. Moreover, the current leadership has implemented a strict regime over its ninja, executing them for the slightest infraction. Finally, certain unknown assassins, probably within the clan itself, are murdering its strongest members one by one.

Ukagami (Mika Hijii) is a kunoichi is one of the strongest ninja in the clan, although she naturally feels looked down upon for being a woman. Compounding that is the fact that her immediate superior is not only more ambitious than the general leadership of the clan, but he’s a psycho rapist-woman murderer on the side, too. To make things worse, he has set his sights on Ukagami. Ukagami and her partner, Kamari, will find themselves caught between the varying internal conflicts that threaten to destroy the Iga from within.

Director Seiji Chiba can be depended upon to deliver in the martial arts action, which he does quite handily. Takahito Ôuchi, who also choreographed the Rurouni Kenshin films, handles the fight choreography here and delivers some solid fight sequences. The best scenes, unfortunately, are the first two fights, including Mika’s introductory scene against some Koga ninja. The other fights are good, but not as good as the openers. Kudos to Chiba for hiring Mika Hijii (whom Western viewers may recognize as Scott Adkins girlfriend/wife in the Isaac Florentine Ninja movies) on account of her martial skills and physicality and not her kawai factor or willingness to disrobe.

As most martial arts films coming out of Japan these days are low-budget affairs, you can expect this one to bear all the hallmarks of such a production: forest setting, lots of talking, limited action sequences, short running time. This movie has all of that. The movie feels like it grinds to a halt whenever the characters stop to spout out exposition. There is a lot that is talked about and not shown, like Nobunaga and the Koga plotting against the Iga, or even the supposed “Iron Grip” that the Iga leaders hold over their own. As far as we know, the only problems that the Iga have are the woman-killing chief and the inside assassins. I think the plot could have been scaled back to something more “intimate” and the non-fighting sequences would have become more compelling.

Alien vs. Ninja (2010, d: Seiji Chiba) – C: Masanori Mimoto, Shûji Kashiwabara, Donpei Tsuchihira, Mika Hijii, Yûki Ogoe, Ben Hiura.

I watched this at the same I watched the kitschy, hyper-gory The Machine Girl. So color me surprised when I actually had fun with this one, despite it having much of the same sensibilities as TMG. This one has more of a sense of humor about itself, and while some of these movies tend to be better when they are pretending that they are not absurd, this one plays well with our expectations and thus makes us laugh out of sheer surprise. My favorite scene is when the Odious Comic Relief finally bites it. The alien (which looks like a xenomorph with dolphin genes) cocks it is claw back, ready to deliver the death blow. It lingers for a few moments, making us think that the other ninjas will suddenly jump in and save him. Nope. His head goes flying off and lands on a decorative shrine, where a bird immediately starts pecking his eyes.

It is hard to explain the difference between this and TMG. The Machine Girl, while absurd and gory, treated the gore like an end in itself and felt like it introduced bizarre situations as an excuse to show more gore. This one is extremely gory, but it also follows a consistent internal logic in how the violence is portrayed and how the characters are affected. Moreover, the end is to be bizarre and fun, and the violence is one of the means to that end. The other means include well-choreographed fights courtesy of Yuji Shimomoura. There are lots of "ultimate ninja antics" and macho ninja posturing, like when a ninja throws a shuriken at the main protagonist from behind, and the latter slightly unsheathes the sword on his back, which deflects the iron star into the former's head. The climatic fight with the ninja zombies (shades of The Hidden here) has the best choreography and should leave most fight fans pleased.

Finally, some moments of subverting genre clichés help achieve a level of fun weirdness. Few people will argue that the facehuggers in the Alien films have a rape-y subtext to them. Future rip-offs like Galaxy of Terror and the Shaw Brothers' Inseminoid transformed that subtext into real text. So this movie subverts that by having a fight between the resident kunoichi (who's pretty hawt in her skin-tight ninja garb) and one of the aliens, who desperately wants to grope her boobs. The entire fight revolves around the girl using acrobatics and fisticuffs to avoid that scenario, ending with her defeating her attacker by stabbing it in the crotch. Ouch!

Kunoichi: Ninja Girl (2011, d: Seiji Chiba) – original title: Kunoichi – C: Rina Takeda, Mickey Koga, Masanori Mimoto, Yûichi Satô, Mayu Onomura, Shiho Fujisawa, Kotono.

No-budget ninja tomfoolery from Seiji Chiba, one of the few directors in Japan who still takes martial arts seriously. Sadly, this 64-minute potboiler has little to recommend it beyond Rina Takeda’s natural cuteness and a good fight sequence at the end. Three Koga ninja kidnap four girls with the intention of making them sex slaves for their clan. One of them is Kisaragi (Takeda), a female ninja (of the Iga Clan?) who escapes and fights off her captors, one by one.

The Kunoichi is mainly talk, talk, talk, occasionally broken up by a quick fight scene or torture sequence. In one scene, a sex slave is sodomized by the Sengoku Period equivalent to “The Gimp” from Pulp Fiction. The movie barely makes it to feature length and even then, it pads out the opening credits—which are set to synth music appropriate for a late 70s Italian horror film--just to cross the finish line.

The only saving grace is when Takeda faces off with one of the ninja, played by Mickey Koga. Koga has a strong action pedigree in Japan, having shown up in films like Ichi; Hard Revenge Milly; and the title character in the “Kamen Rider Kabuto” series. Godzilla fans will remember him as that asshole Akiba in Godzilla: Tokyo SOS. Anyway, their fight is the only sustained one in the film—there are two previous dust-ups that are rather quick. Under the action direction of Kensuke Sonomura (The Machine Girl; Hydra; the Gantz movies), the two have complex exchange of punches, blocks, joint locks, and throws. Takeda even does some muay thai-inspired clinching and knee smashes. In the second of the fight, the two have an elaborately choreographed sword fight, Hong Kong-style. The choreography here is top drawer, and it’s a shame that it’s the only moment in this movie that the filmmakers’ intentions are somewhat realized.

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Gothic Lolita Battle Bear (2014)

Gothic Lolita Battle Bear (2014)
Aka: Nuigulumar Z
Japanese Title: ヌイグルマーZ
Translation: Nuigurumar[1] Z

 

Starring: Shoko Nakagawa, Rina Takeda, Mao Ichimichi, Hiroshi Neko, Sadawo Abe, Koto Takagi, Chieiko Imaizumi, Ai Yahata, Risa Takada, Arisa Sakamoto, Kami Hiraiwa
Director: Noboru Iguchi
Action Director: Takeshi Miyazaki

Noboru Iguchi has been in the game since the 1990s. A glance at the IMDB suggests that he started his career in porn and then moved up to horror, and then to more bizarre concoctions that mix extreme gore with general WTF. He helped usher in the “ohataku fan-wank” genre with Machine Girl (2008) and then made one of its most outlandish efforts, Robogeisha. Yeah, the movie where the protagonist has a katana blade that comes out of her butt. Apparently, Iguchi is an ass fetishist, with films like Zombie Ass: Toilet of the Dead and shorts like Bad Butt and “F” is for “Fart” (from the anthology ABCs of Death) serving as exhibits A, B and C.

Even considering his already questionable filmography, Gothic Lolita Battle Bear is a bit of a head-scratcher. It has all the hallmarks of an “ohtaku fan-wank” movie—lots of pretty girls, zombies, Japanese popular culture strip-mined for everything a director thinks is cool—but apparently this was made for local audiences, as opposed to Westerners who just want a hard-on from Japanese girls in cute outfits drenched in extreme gore.

The movie begins with a family—a man, woman and child—celebrating the little girl’s birthday. Daddy has gotten his daughter a teddy bear for a present. Before she can blow out the candles, however, a hand shoots up from the cake and zombies attack the household! The little girl gets away and meets up with Yumeko (Singer and voice actress Shoko Nakagawa), a lady dressed in Lolita attire (substyle: “Sweet” or “Hime”). Yumeko takes the teddy bear and hugs it, thus transforming into a pink teddy bear tokusatsu heroine Nuigulumar (Rina Takeda) and beats up the zombies with her karate skills and laser-beam sewing threads. After dispatching the zombies, Yumeko tells the girl her origin story.

Once upon a time in another galaxy, the planet Domoho exploded. Its inhabitants escaped, many of whom fled to Earth in the form of ethereal cotton balls. Most of them sorta disappeared upon arrival. One of them, however, merged his life force with that of a teddy bear. That was Dumava (voiced by Sadawo Abe, of The Lady Shogun and her Men), a great warrior. The teddy bear is a present that a divorced mother (Kami Hiraiwa) is making as a birthday present for her daughter, the perpetually pissed-off Kyoko. Nonetheless, Dumava takes it as his mission to always protect Kyoko, whom he calls “the Princess.”

Kyoko gets mad at her mother for not finishing the teddy bear, whom she calls Punchy, on time (“Why didn’t you make more time for your daughter?”) and discards the stuffed animal. Enter Yumeko, Kyoko’s Lolita-dressed auntie who is moving in following the death of her parents. Kyoko immediately takes a disliking to her aunt, whom she sees as a threat to her quality time with mom. Yumeko tries to help, including finishing the sewing on Punchy, but Kyoko is too angry at the world to care.

Meanwhile, a second survivor of the planet Domoho has arrived on Earth and taken up residence inside a black teddy bear. The bear belongs to a diminutive loser named Takeshi (Hiroshi Neko, of Death Yankee 2 and Dragon Yankee), who has spent all of his life getting pushed around be everybody, including his uncle. When Takeshi hugs his alien-possessed teddy bear, he transforms into a tokusatsu villain named Knitted Vengeance Warrior Charlie. Charlie transforms a random cosplay model into a zombie, who causes an small zombie outbreak in the city.

The zombies shows up at a restaurant where Kyoko, her mother and Yumeko are having lunch. Although Punchy does his best to fight off the zombies, he can’t save Kyoko’s mother from being shot to death by the zombified cosplay model. The zombies chase after Kyoko until she finds herself face to face with Knitted Vengeance Warrior Charlie and his two henchmen: Kill Billy (Rina Takeda in drag) and Lolita (Koto Takagi, of Bushido Sixteen), a gothic lolita with a machine gun for an arm. Yumeko and Punchy show up to help, but she’s injured by Billy’s projectile spoons. Just before she dies, Yumeko and Punchy fuse and transform into a superheroine called Nuigulumar. Nuigulumar defeats the zombies, but Charlie and his entourage go into hiding.

Several years later, Yumeko is Kyoko’s (now played by tokusatsu actress Mao Ichimichi) guardian, supporting the family as a bicycle delivery woman. Kyoko is now a rebellious rocker and hates Yumeko just as much as she did years before. One day, Kyoko is invited by another rocker friend to attend a seminar at a big company. Said company turns out to be a front for Knitted Vengeance Warrior Charlie’s nefarious activities. He transforms all of the attendees into zombies and thus initiates a new zombie outbreak, while simultaneously forcing Yumeko to marry him. Then things start to get weird.

Gothic Lolita Battle Bear is the Japanese equivalent to one of those Sharknado sequels from last decade. It is full of special effects, but none of them are very realistic. And yet, that’s sort of the point. It is meant to be kitschy, trying to give the viewer as much randomness as possible despite knowing that it doesn’t have the budget to do so convincingly. Each successive scene is meant to make the viewer’s jaw drop even lower. Think about the climax of Sharknado 3, which has a sharknado, and then the hero goes to space, and then the sharknado goes to space (despite the absence of any atmosphere), and the hero finds a light saber chainsaw, and then hero returns to the earth in the belly of a shark…NOT BURNING UP in the Earth’s atmosphere, and then we learn that the heroine gave birth to a baby in the belly of a shark while she was entering the Earth’s atmosphere, too. That’s the sort of bizarre mentality that dictates the events of Gothic Lolita Battle Bear.

The fact that a race of cotton ball aliens are actually powerful warriors that possess teddy bears and make them talk is really just the tip of the iceberg. You can hug the bears and transform into a tokusatsu character. And the villain transforms people into zombies using “happy gas.” Plus he has a doomsday weapon that looks like an ordinary straw dispenser. And one of the villainesses drips soy sauce on her boobs so as to sexually excite a terrorist brainwashed into thinking he’s a baby, which causes him to push THE RED BUTTON and release the zombies into the city. Wait, what? And much of the climax involves a quartet of Lolita’s (substyle: Classic) going topless and firing colored lasers from their breasts to destroy the city! Your reaction to this paragraph will determine whether or not you want to watch this movie.

Despite Rina Takeda having dual roles, she does not have a serious showcase for her karate skills in this movie. Stick with High Kick Girl! and KG: Karate Girl instead. There is a fair amount of tokusatsu action, courtesy of Kamen Rider stunt coordinator Takeshi Miyazaki. It’s the sort of fighting you’d see in a typical episode of a Kamen Rider or Super Sentai series. Takeda does some pretty decent bootwork, but she never really faces any real opponent in a seriously-choreographed one-on-one. Think of the Power Rangers just sort of kicking the Putties around. Takeda doesn’t do much handwork, since one of her hands (in superhero form) is a giant plush bear claw, which does laser slashes for killing zombies. Cutesy idol Shoko Nakagawa generally doesn’t fight, although at one point, she picks up a pair of plush nunchaku and wields them like Bruce Lee would. Yes, it’s kinda weird that pink-furred nunchaku would even be a thing, but then again, weird is name of the game here.

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[1] - The title is a play on the Japanese word for “stuffed animal” - nuigurumi

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High Kick Girl (2009)

High Kick Girl (2009)
Japanese Title: ハイキック・ガール！
Translation: High Kick Girl

 

Starring: Rina Takeda, Tatsuya Naka, Ryuki Takahashi
Director: Fuyuhiko Nishi
Action Director: Fuyuhiko Nishi

 

High-Kick Girl is a sad case. It’s one of those movies that I’d really like to recommend, but I just can’t bring myself to do so. After all, the lead actress, Rina Takeda, is the successor to Fist of Legend’s Shinobu Nakayama in terms of sheer adorable. You know, the type of girl whom you just want to give a giant bear hug and pinch her cheeks until the cows come home. She also is an honest-to-mergatroy martial artist, and not some AV Idol who trained for a few weeks with the fight choreographer after coming home from the set of some movie with a title like Spit-Swap Seduction. Moreover, Tatsuya Naka seems to be a real martial artist as well and sells his karate and fight philosophy quite well throughout the film. This is good.

But then you get to everything else about the movie and it all goes to hell. Production values, plotting and script, photography, editing…there’s nothing about this movie that works beyond the cuteness of the actress and her inspired ability to kick a**.

The story goes like this. Takeda plays Kei Tsuchiya (no relation to actor Yoshio Tsuchiya, who always played a bad guy in old sci-fi films—just claiming my film geek prize here), a brown belt in karate who’s upset that her sensei refuses to give her a black belt. In order to prove to him and to herself that she’s strong enough for a black belt, she goes around challenging other black belts to fights, which she handily wins. However, her sensei is more of a kata, or forms, person. He feels that mastering the forms is the best way to understand the essence of karate, and constantly points out that Kei’s forms work isn’t up to snuff.

So what does Kei do? She tries to join a band of martial arts assassins known as the Destroyers. What she doesn’t know is that their leader (or one of them—the film fails to explain the hierarchy of this organization) has just gotten out of jail after 15 years and wants revenge against Kei’s teacher, who practically took down the organization back in the day. The Destroyers—who are a bunch of a losers, considering that they couldn’t find the guy in 15 years, despite the fact that he’s training a regular high school girl and a bunch of other students—use Kei’s initiation fight as a way to get the sensei’s attention. Things are ripe for a final confrontation.

The movie runs about 76 minutes, although I’m sure that there’s probably barely over an hour of actual footage, but we’ll talk about that in a moment. The premise of the movie is pretty dumb, but as a fan of martial arts movies, I’m used to that. But the execution of said premise…that where things really get sticky. As I mentioned before, the characters constantly hint at something that happened 15 years before, but we never find out exactly what happened. What brought the sensei into conflict with the Destroyers? Who’s actually in charge—the big guy who’s always talking, or the guy with a goatee who just got out of prison? Does it actually matter? None of it makes much sense.

Nor can we make much of sense out of Kei’s involvement with the Destroyers. These people are walking around beating people to death with their bare hands, including innocent bystanders, but where are the police. Moreover, how does Kei get a hold of them in the first place? Do they advertise on the internet? And how could she possibly think that joining a team of karate assassins is a good way of proving herself to her master? Participating in an underground martial arts tournament, I could at least imagine that. But karate killers? Uh…yeah. And there’s that part at the end where it seems like the leader of the Destroyers is trying to egg on Kei’s sensei by telling him that his dear pupil has joined the Dark Side, but Kei’s lying face down on the ground with a Destroyer’s foot planted on the base of her neck, ready to break it. I think a smarter script would actually had Kei perform a few hits for the Destroyers before being tricked into facing her master, instead of “You passed the test to join us, but actually it’s a ruse. Hey sensei, look, this girl we’re about to kill joined us!”

So that really just leaves the action to salvage the film. For the most part, the fighting doesn’t disappoint. Rina Takeda looks excellent in her several fight scenes and the girl can kick. She doesn’t quite get as flashy in her moves as, say, the girl who plays her sister in KG:Karate Girl, but I don’t think that’s the point. Her kicks are high, fast and crisp and that’s all that matters. Her best fight is her initiation duel, which pits her against a bunch of female assassins in navy blue sailor suits and some other random thugs. My only complaint about Takeda’s performance is that she takes a back seat for a good part of the finale, leaving the fight in the hands of her sensei, played by Tatsuya Naka. It would’ve been cool if they had Takeda throwing down with that female Destroyer, Choka, who showed up in an earlier fight sequence, tearing a** with her front flip heel smashes. Sadly, Choka disappears from the movie after that neat fight.

The editing is what undermines the action. About 85% of the action on display gets an instant replay, either in slow motion, from another camera angle, or both. And we’re not talking just the flashier aerial kicks and stuff like that. We’re talking entire patches of choreography, which gets really distracting. Takeda will take out two or three opponents, and then a fourth opponent attacks her, and suddenly we’re back to where she fought the previous three lackeys. It’s jarring and gets old very, very quickly. Instant replays are good for “money moves” like whirlwind kicks and Legendary Superkicker Hwang Jang Lee’s signature moves, especially when you have a good editor behind the camera. Look at the whirlwind kick that Jackie Chan (or Yuen Biao or Chin Kar-Lok) performs at the end of Dragons Forever. It’s shown in slow motion and immediately again at normal speed. It’s edited in a way that it looks like the greatest kick ever delivered in cinema and packs a punch almost 30 years later. But to do entire sequences of hits, kicks and blocks on instant replay feels like unnecessary padding.

In the end, your ability to filter out plot holes the size of Amy Yip’s chest, look past the static camera work and limited sets that suggest that the filmmakers had one or two dojos and a high school after hours to film in, and generosity regarding abused editing techniques during the fighting will determine how much you’ll get out of the admittedly strong action sequences. Takeda does great for a freshman effort, but this feels like a freshman effort for everybody behind the camera, which really shows. KG: Karate Girl, this film’s follow up, felt more like a real movie, even if the production values were still a little low. That said, I praise the filmmakers for their sincerity: they honestly want to make an entertaining martial arts movie for fans, and not a cynical cash-grab to serve as sleazy fan service for Western otakus. Perhaps that alone should be enough for many besides the action itself.

KG: Karate Girl (2011)

KG: Karate Girl (2011)
Japanese Title: KG: カラテガール
Translation: KG: Karate Girl

 

Starring: Rina Takeda, Hina Tobimatsu, Tatsuya Naka, Kazutoshi Yokoyama, Richard Heselton
Director: Yoshikatsu Kimura
Action Director: Fuyuhiko Nishi

 

In 2011, there was movie released in Hong Kong called Choy Lee Fut. The movie was, in my eyes, an attempt to cash in on the success of the Ip Man films in that it tried to glorify a Southern Chinese kung fu style, namely choy lee fut. The film was a colossal failure in doing so. For starters, there wasn’t a whole lot of action in the film, and what action there was consisted of very little authentic choy lee fut. Bad move. That meant that in order to glorify this particular kung fu style, the characters ended up saying “Choy lee fut” every few lines, as if doing so was the equivalent to Donnie Yen beating up a whole bunch of black belts in less than three minutes. The movie also set itself in that strange alternate universe where huge corporations have nothing better to do than to harass small kung fu schools and set up tournaments with the intent of forcing said schools to sell out to THE MAN. Other than a good non-choy lee fut fight involving Kane Kosugi and a guy calling himself “X-Man,” the film is largely a waste of time.

I bring that up because the Japanese production KG: Karate Girl is in many respects the spiritual sibling to Choy Lee Fut. Its budget is even lower than the change spent on Choy Lee Fut, but at least it spent it on people who really know karate. Like it’s Hong Kong counterpart, KG spends a lot of time glorifying karate by having the characters say “karate” every few lines, but at least it gives the actors ample opportunities to show that they know it. The movie also sets itself in some strange alternate universe where evil rich villain types have nothing better to do with their time than to harass small dojos and steal their black belts and kidnap the sensei’s children. But at least it has an ultra-cute Rina Takeda (High Kick Girl and Kunoichi: Ninja Girl…does anyone sense a pattern here?) in a schoolgirl outfit beating people up.

The plot is simplicity itself: An evil guy shows up at a dojo and sends his goons to beat up the sensei and take his daughters. Although the sensei is largely able to defend himself, he does take a few katana whacks to the back and ends up expiring there on the floor, while the villain makes off with the youngest daughter, Natsuki, and the black belt. Years later, the older daughter, Ayaka (Takeda), is a grown-up karate expert working a movie theater. One day she fights off a pair of purse snatchers and becomes an online sensation.

This gets the attention of the evil guy, who’s now in a wheelchair after the beating Ayaka’s dad gave him, who had recently discovered that the black belt he stole wasn’t the one he was looking for. Evil guy sends Ayaka’s brainwashed sister (Hina Tobimatsu) and another fighter to go to Ayaka’s dojo and challenge her. The two beat up all the students before Ayaka steps in and sends them packing with a few simple moves. Natsuki goes back and challenges Ayaka again. Ayaka notices a striking similarity in their fighting styles and comes to the conclusion that it’s her long lost sister.

By this time, evil guy’s gang is beginning to tire of Natsuki, so they have one of their number challenge her. He loses, but the little girl is still taken hostage. Ayaka is forced to don her fan service schoolgirl outfit, waltz into the villain’s hideout, and beat everybody to a pulp in order to rescue her sister and restore honor to the family karate style.

So yeah, there’s not a whole lot of plot here. The script, as I mentioned before, is pretty dumb. The film was obviously made on the cheap, with sets and locations used quite sparingly (abandoned warehouse, gym, movie theater, top of building). There aren’t many special FX, save the opening animation that talks about Ayaka’s family karate style. There apparently wasn’t any money available for stunts, so nobody gets kicked through furniture like they would be in a Hong Kong film of a similar budget. The direction is bland overall; Yoshikatsu Kimura really should have told his editor to shorten a number of talking scenes, which go on far too long—I’m thinking of the first scene with the bad guys set in the present day. The movie is less than 90 minutes, but it could’ve come closer to 80 and not lost a lot.

A movie like this lives or dies on its fighting and thankfully the action is good enough to warrant a rental. The karate here is portrayed in a similar manner to most chambara films, in that one or two hits are generally enough to incapacitate an enemy for good. That’s keeping with the spirit of karate, although the fact that it’s two girls, one of whom is barely a teenager, delivering such hits to men with a lot more muscle mass, may make it a little hard to swallow. The action lacks the rhythmic exchange of punches and kicks that defines Hong Kong kickboxing choreography, and its one-at-a-time approach to group fighting is more conspicuous than many other martial arts films. My brother-in-law, who routinely watches fight scenes from diverse films at my request, thought the scenes were good, but noticeably slower than your typical Hong Kong film. It’s not that the techniques themselves were slow, but the rhythm of the fight scenes themselves was a notch down on the velocity scale. On the upside, there are few (if any) camera tricks on display, as there is no wire-work and less replays than this film’s predecessor, High Kick Girl, apparently had.

The movie really belongs to leads Rina Takeda and Hina Tobimatsu, who are a pair of extremely talented female martial artists. Hina Tobimatsu is the young Japanese Hwang Jang Lee of the new generation, which is a truly empowering compliment. Her first big fight, where she beats up almost everybody in Ayaka’s dojo, is one of the most fantastic displays of non-wire kicking I’ve seen since Dan Chupong dished it out in Born to Fight. Rina’s kicking isn’t quite so flashy, but she’s more powerful and (I suspect) used more authentic karate—some of the flashier kicks that Tobimatsu uses look more like tae kwon do than karate. Rina’s fights channel the spirit of karate a lot better than Hina’s do, since she uses basic ridge hand, reverse punches, and elbows to great effect, even blocking a hit with a hit and taking down her opponent thus. Rina’s fight against the goons at the end as some great flying kicks, plus Takeda going buck on the nunchaku, which is always fun.

This makes a good party movie for fans of action and martial arts. Whenever somebody isn’t beating the tar out of their neighbor, you and your fans can chat up a storm. But when the action starts, you can all join each other in fawning over the greatness that is the female cast.