Tag: Yoshio Nakajima

Sister Street Fighter: Hanging by a Thread (女必殺拳　危機一, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

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Li Koryu (Etsuko Shihomi) returns to fight crime in Japan in the second in the Sister Street Fighter series, Hanging by a Thread (女必殺拳　危機一, Onna hissatsu ken: Kiki ippatsu). The first film apparently tested so well so that studio execs ordered a second one right away to fill a big New Year slot. That might in one sense explain why the film is pretty much the same in terms of narrative, yet this one does go a little further while swapping the drugs subplot for diamonds.

Koryu comes to the aid of a man being attacked by thugs in a Hong Kong marketplace and is somehow completely unfazed when he plucks out his false eye with instructions to give it to Professor Enmei (Hideaki Nagai) who is also known to Koryu because he’s the father of her old school friend, Birei (Hisako Tanaka). Unfortunately, the false eye contains microfilm that suggests Birei has been kidnapped by vicious Japanese gangsters. The professor therefore sends her to Tokyo on a rescue mission and we discover that she also has an older sister, Byakuren (Kanya Tsukasa), who was never mentioned in the earlier film, who is living in Japan having chased her dream of becoming a jewellery designer.

This time around, it’s diamonds not drugs, but the gangsters still haven’t cracked this smuggling business and have come up with the very weird idea of hiding them in the bum cheeks of attractive young women. Meanwhile, they also force the women into sex work. Osone’s (Hideo Murota) female business partner Mayumi, played by Madam Joy, a drag queen who starred in several Toei films in the mid-70s, films them from a distant window to get material for blackmail. Nevertheless, she only cares about the diamonds, unlike the boss and several of the gang which once again includes a rival martial arts outfit who have in it for the Shorinji temple. 

Shinichi Chiba does not appear in the film, but Koryu does gain a kind of sidekick in the form of Tsubaki (Yasuaki Kurata), a sleazy-looking guy whose intentions are permanently unclear. The film goes a little bit further with its awkward orientalism opening in a Hong Kong marketplace with some offensively stereotypical music and a bunch of fire crackers, even if once again in trends in the opposite direction from most films of the time in that the crooks are all Japanese and it’s a half-Chinese woman who’s coming to sort them all out. The gangsters have apparently been trafficking the women abroad for sex work, then bringing them back with the diamonds in their bums which seems like a plan with a lot of potential problems even if they hadn’t made the huge mistake of kidnapping a friend of Koryu and then later her sister. 

But then again, Koryu’s cases seem to be fairly isolated. Once she takes out these bad guys, that’s it. There’s no wider conspiracy save a general sense that the world itself is corrupt and indifferent to human suffering. Osone has a strange love of taking people’s eyes, which might be a way to stop them seeing who he really is. He has, after all, already taken the stars from Byakuren’s along with her dreams of a new life in Japan finally becoming the jewellery designer she always dreamed of being. Despite her determination to save her sister, Byakuren soon realises that Osone is most definitely not a man of his word. His curiously old-fashioned outfits and demeanour suggest he’s seeking a place with the elites of an earlier time while indulging in some fairly odd behaviour. 

Once again, Koryu squares off against his equally weird henchmen who start attacking her the moment she lands in Japan, and eventually ends up stabbing someone with the severed arm of another enemy still holding his knife. Still, the tone is generally cheerful and upbeat despite the strangeness of the tale and series of losses Koryu experiences including a challenge to her pride when she’s bested by one of the martial arts goons. In this continually uncertain and increasingly surreal world, Koryu’s fists, it seems, are one of the few things that can absolutely be relied upon along with evil smugglers and their bizarre new plans for circumventing the law of the land out of nothing other than lust and greed.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Sister Street Fighter (女必殺拳, Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

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As the Japanese cinema industry continued to decline in the face of competition from television, there was perhaps paradoxically more space available for small-scale genre films. Shinichi Chiba had ushered in a new age of unarmed combat with his Bodyguard Kiba karate movies. The Street Fighter series followed hot on its heels and was enough of a hit for the studio to take notice. They suggested a new spin-off line that would feature a female action star with Chiba appearing in a supporting role and so Sister Street Fighter (女必殺拳, Onna hissatsu ken) was born.

Producers apparently first wanted Taiwanese-born Hong Kong actress Angela Mao who had starred with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon by which the film is clearly influenced. Angela Mao was, however, unavailable, which is what led them to take a chance on Chiba’s then 18-year-old protégé Etsuko Shihomi. Shihomi had joined his Japan Action Club out of high school to study stunts, martial arts, and gymnastics and had only limited acting experience but soon proved up to the challenge of carrying a movie as a female action lead. 

Koryu is the sister of a martial arts champion who has gone missing in Japan. She then finds out from his boss that he was actually an undercover narcotics agent trying to break a Japanese drug ring. As Koryu’s mother was Japanese and she still has family in Yokohama, the police inspector thinks she’d be a perfect fit to head out there, find out what’s happened to her brother Mansei (Hiroshi Miyauchi), and maybe take out the drug dealers too. 

In some ways, it’s an interesting subversion of the Sinophobia often found in Japanese films of this era that this time it’s a half-Chinese woman squaring off against Japanese drug dealers. Her brother was apparently so upset about not being able to stop the drugs flooding Japan that he decided to do something reckless that directly led to his disappearance. The Hong Kong police also have a second operative, a woman, working inside the gang but have lost contact with her. In contrast to Koryu, Fang Shing (Xie Xiu-rong) has been sent in as a classic honey trap to use her femininity as a weapon by becoming the boss’ mistress to get the lowdown on the gang. But as a consequence, Fang Shing has also become addicted to drugs which the boss uses as a means to control her. 

Koryu, by contrast, immediately stands up against male patriarchal control by beating up a bunch of guys that were trying to hassle her in a bar. Nevertheless, Mansei’s martial arts master says that her brother was hoping she’d get married and have a “normal life”, which does seem like quite a chauvinistic thing to say and especially to the martial arts-obsessed Koryu. Even so, he introduces her to another young woman, Emi, who got into Shorinji Kempo when Mansei saved her from being raped. These skills do after all give them the means to defend themselves against an often hostile and violent society along with granting them a greater independence than they might otherwise have.

Still, there are a selection of strange villains on show with death by blowgun and ex-priests along with the Amazon Seven team of Thai kickboxers and “Eva Parrish”, apparently the karate champion of the Southern Hemisphere. The action is quite obviously influenced by Hong Kong kung fu films and most particularly Enter the Dragon, though to a lesser extent Shaw Brothers in the warring schools subplot that sees the Shorinji Kempo love is power philosophy challenged by the gang’s very own martial artist, who feels he must wipe them out to overcome his humiliation in being defeated. Nevertheless, Koryu effortlessly takes out the bad guys as she battles her way towards saving her brother, whom the gang have started experimenting on in an effort to acquire more complex data about tolerance and safe levels for consumption of drugs. The bad guys have a full on lab in their basement where they’ve come up with an innovative solution to the smuggling issue by using wigs! It’s all quite surreal and cartoonish even when it starts getting grim, but rest assured Koryu is here to sort it all out, and sort it out she will.

Original trailer (English subtitles)

Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Yukio Noda, 1974)

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“Your sense of duty is too strong! The world isn’t a pretty place,” barks an irate policeman, scolding a female officer with a tendency to take things, in his view at least, too far. Yukio Noda’s kidnap drama Zero Woman: Red Handcuffs (０課の女　赤い手錠, Zeroka no onna: Akai Tejo) is on the extreme end of pinky violence and soaked in the political concerns of the 1970s along with all their concurrent paranoia but nevertheless positions its fearless avenger as a lone arbiter of justice in an incredibly unjust world. 

We know this from the start as we see Zero (Miki Sugimoto) almost date raped by an apparent serial killer who has his own torture suitcase and apparently killed her friend. Knowing that he is a diplomat and therefore has diplomatic immunity, she simply shoots him in the balls in the film’s extraordinary opening sequence. But even though it could be argued what she did was self-defence, Zero is kicked off the force and thrown into a woman’s prison for an indefinite period of detention to keep the lid on any possible scandal. Zero is only reprieved when the daughter of a politician is kidnapped by thugs and, wanting to keep things quiet, they need someone to rescue her and also wipe out all of the kidnappers to ensure no one ever finds out.

Kyoko (Hiromi Kishi), the politician’s daughter, claims that her father will do “anything” to ingratiate himself with the prime minister and has in fact already arranged her marriage to his son. Kyoko, however, already has a boyfriend who, inconveniently, is quite obviously a student protestor given his yellow construction hat and other paraphernalia. The pair are accosted while sitting in a car near an old American base, and as Kyoko is gang raped, firstly by the gang leader Nakahara (Eiji Go) who is wearing a hoodie with the words US Navy printed on the back, US planes fly over her as if she were being raped by America in an obvious metaphor for the legacy of the occupation. 

Indeed, the flashbacks later experienced by Nakahara are of his mother whom he describes as a sex worker who worked at the base suggesting a very literal allusion to the corrupting influence of American servicemen. The gang operate out of a bar called “Manhattan” which is surrounded by other similar bars with Western names in a neon-lit area, while they constantly run across various signs written in English in fact peeing directly on a no peeing sign outside a largely disused residential area on the edge of the base where they later take hostage some kind of amateur dramatics / English-language class currently in the middle of a production of Romeo and Juliet. 

Yet the big bad turns out to be essentially homegrown in the form of the corrupt lackey policeman Osaka, and the politician Nagumo (Tetsuro Tanba), who is more concerned with his political capital than his daughter’s safety keen that the police keep everything out of the papers otherwise the wedding will be called off and he’ll have a problem with the prime minister. Seeing a very pale Kyoko, her clothes torn, barely conscious having been drugged by the gang, he says he no longer cares to think of her as his daughter and perhaps it would be better if she simply passed away in an “accident”, instructing Osaka to care of loose ends like Zero too. 

It’s very clear that women’s lives have little currency in this very patriarchal world, something Zero seems to know all too well even if at the beginning of the film she was content to work for the oppressive organisation of the police force though she later tears up her warrant card in disgust. The fact that division zero, operating like a secret police force on the behalf of an authoritarian government, exists at all is a clear indication that this is already a police state though one subverted by Zero who uses her red handcuffs to deliver ironic justice to all those who deserve it. Then again, unlike other pinky violence films there’s precious little solidarity that arises between herself and Kyoko whom she later describes as nothing more her mission objective seemingly caring little for her as a fellow human being. Noda cuts back between the Diet building and police HQ as if actively critiquing the latent authoritarianism of the early 70s society but even if Nagumo gets a kind of comeuppance it’s abundantly clear that nothing really will change and Zero stands alone wilfully freeing herself of the handcuffs of a controlling society.