| Plot: Two rival gangs, both leaders beings brothers, are ripping apart the entire city in search of a fortune's worth of heroin. Meanwhile, a mysterious fighter enters town looking for work with one of the gangs. Soon enough, he finds himself the target of both gangs and a samurai he had befriended. When the going gets tough, the tough get Chiba! Review: As to why I bothered to rent this, let alone watch it remains a mystery to me. Was it an impulse? Temporary insanity? Beats the hell outta me, but in any case, here we are. I suppose this is one of the more obscure Sonny Chiba movies, but then again I'm not much of a Chiba fan. One thing I do know is that he will always be playing the mysterious badass, and Karate Warriors doesn't stray away too far from that formula. Karate Warriors has more character development than the usual martial arts flick, even if the story isn't that complex. I dare anyone to watch the scenes with Chiba and that kid and not go "aww" at least once. So there's a lot of interaction going on between the characters, which is good because it made me care who lives and who gets taken out of commission. Granted there aren't that many characters, but at least they were interesting enough. Strangely enough, there really isn't that much karate, it was more about sword-fighting. Now I do like sword-fighting, but this is supposed to be a mostly martial arts flick, I demand more shots of Sonny kicking ass! There just wasn't enough. It was like a slash-fest at the end of the film, how did Sonny learn to fight with a sword so fast? The sequences where Sonny fought were cool enough (even though they were in short supply) and during the fights the camera would slow down and then speed up. A cool effect, but a little bit over-used. Speaking of cameras, Karate Warriors has a serious problem with that. Saying the video quality is poor would be an understatement, more like in the neighborhood of being god-awful shitty. Even for a low-budget mid-70s movie, it looks terrible. Colors were smeared over the screen to where I couldn't see a character's face entirely, the movie was way too gritty, and the camera shook to where I didn't know what the hell was going on. The crappy camerawork got on my nerves, but at least it didn't make the movie unwatchable. Acting is the usual Chiba fare. Sonny is the usual cigar-chomping badass, (with a cool retro theme song to boot) but the one samurai in my opinion out-shined him. Seriously, the samurai was cooler than Sonny in this movie, probably because he killed a lot more people. And the kid, well, was just the kid. Getting any more indepth about the film would be pretty much useless since it's such a by-the-number martial arts movie. Sonny Chiba kicks some ass, that's all I can really say. The problem is that it just doesn't have enough action to keep most moviegoers interesting. You're probably better off to stick with the Streetfighter series to get your action fix. Karate Warriors is a decent enough flick that it is watchable, but there just isn't enough to recommend a viewing right away. Better luck next time, Sonny. |
| Review by Jim |
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| Rating: ** |