RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER (1974)

The legendary Sonny Chiba returns as Takuma Tsurugi, once more facing off against rat bastard mafia scumbags. (Not that Tsurugi is himself any kind of a nice guy, but whatever...)

The international plague of COVID-19 continues its inexorable march, and just the other day it took one of the legends of martial arts cinema. Yes, COVID-19 felled the mighty Sonny Chiba at age 82, and now the legendary Street Fighter fights no more. Upon hearing the news, I was devastated, so, in Chiba's honor, I watched a triple-feature of the Street Fighter series as an impromptu wake for the martial artist/actor who had so thoroughly entertained me for nearly forty years. My thoughts on THE STREET FIGHTER, the landmark 1974 Japanese answer to ENTER THE DRAGON that was reportedly the first film to be award an X-rating for violence rather than sexual content when released in the United States, can be found here, so let's go over the first of its sequels.

Released a swift three months after its predecessor, RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER, though better than I usually give it credit for, is a tepid confection indeed when stacked against the masterpiece that preceded it. The plots beats are virtually the same as those in the first film — Takuma Tsurugi engages in assorted violent mayhem before being hired for a Mafia job his code of honor will not let him accept, so he fucks over those who hired him and spends the rest of the movie decimating those they send against him in retaliation for his betrayal. We also get a montage of Tsurugi's rigorous training, and he's stuck with a goofy Okinawan sidekick (Yoko Ichiji), only this time the sidekick is a young woman, with the proceedings padded out with reuse of the flashback about his father's execution during WWII (along with his father's memorable advice to him as a child) and bits of business from the previous film's Seikubon dojo sequence and fight against Grandmaster Masaoka (Masafumi Suzuki). And though he was quite decisively killed by having his throat manually and gorily ripped out by Tsurugi at the end of THE STREET FIGHTER, vengeance-seeking Masashi Ishibashi as Shikenbaru ("Junjo" in the U.s. dub of both THE STREET FIGHTER and this sequel) returns (complete with flashback footage of their last encounter at the previous film's climax, further padding things out), seemingly from the dead, to once more engage with Tsurugi, only this time somehow equipped with bionic vocal chords. Oooookaaaay... (Shikenbaru notably ends up suffering the same electrified fate as Oddjob in the 1964 James Bond classic, GOLDFINGER.)

Having seen the classic original, watching RETURN OF THE STREET FIGHTER is a textbook case of the filmmakers playing it safe and just more or less giving the audience the same film again, only this time with the gore and flagrant brutality considerably neutered. Though there are plenty of fun karate fights throughout, they are neither as lively nor as creative as those found in the first film, and the climax is very much a rehash of the first film's, with Tsurugi making mulch of dozens of opponets, though this time in a building instead of on a rain-swept oil tanker. That said, there is a memorable bit where Tsurugi inexplicably finds himself atop a snowy ski slope where he is attacked by two weapons-wielding assailants that he makes short work of, with the coup de grace being him slugging a guy so hard in the back of the head that he knocks the bastard's eyeballs out of their sockets. 

                                                             An eye-popping encounter.

That moment lives up to the glory of the initial installment, but it's a diamond found in one's truck stop sushi. Nonetheless, an acceptable and entertaining way to spend 85 minutes.

Extra points for the superb foley work. The numerous slaps, crunches, and squish noises greatly enhance the fight scenes.

Poster for the Japanese theatrical release.

Poster for the U.S. theatrical release.