Toei Trailer Theatre # 1: I AM THE WOLF MAN – PROUD AND GENTLE-HEARTED.

We jump here from Nikkatsu’s trailer department to that of their ‘60s rivals/’70s successors for the title of “Japan’s coolest movie studio”, Toei – basically just in order to give me an excuse to write a few words about ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ (Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1975).

I was contemplating a full length review of this remarkable motion picture, but, having revisited it this weekend, I honestly don’t think there is much I can say about the film that will not be made immediately apparent by the act of watching it. (If ever a work of art spoke for itself, etc.)

Essentially I think, ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ represents a kind of platonic ideal of everything a “cult movie” can and should be – all the more-so given that, as with most of Toei’s admirably unpretentious output, it was more than likely knocked out in a couple of weeks for a hypothetical audience of adolescent manga fans and boozed up salarymen, without the slightest notion that it would still be attracting attention over four decades later.

When I first encountered ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ last year, via a slightly iffy fan-subbed download of a Japanese TV broadcast, it blew me away to such an extent that I could barely even take it all in. Returning to it for a second time, I decided to take a slightly more methodical approach and test my initial hypothesis that this is a film in which every single moment of screen time has something awesome happening in it.

Did it pass the test? Well, let's put it like this - there’s a brief scene early in the film, shortly after Sonny Chiba’s character Inugami-san witnesses a member of defunct rock band The Mobs being torn to pieces by an invisible tiger on the streets of Tokyo, when he is taken in for questioning by the police. This scene, which lasts about two minutes, is not especially awesome, although it does attain the level of ‘mildly awesome’ in the fan-subbed version, whose translation has one of the police officers declaring, “A spectral slasher? Seems to be the only explanation!”.

Aside from that, everything else that happens in ‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ is categorically, unreservedly awesome. It puts the pedal to the floor right from the outset, and barely lets up for a second.

By the grace of the international film copyright gods, it is also now available in the US and UK as a blu-ray/DVD combo pack from Arrow, so you have NO EXCUSE for failing to verify these findings for yourself.

‘Wolf Guy: Enraged Lycanthrope’ – watch it, live it, love it.

(Ok, perhaps don’t “live it”.)

VHS Purgatory:Sister Streetfighter(Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1974)

Let’s start this one off with a confession: I’m afraid I’ve never been much into kung-fu movies. I don’t dislike them or anything, but at the same time I’ve never embraced them quite so readily as I have most other exploitation genres.

My stock explanation for this has long been to just to say that I’m not really all that excited by the idea of watching a bunch of guys fighting, but clearly this logic doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. I mean, if you look at things in those reductionist terms, I’m not *particularly* interested in watching people wondering around in the woods looking confused, or bored actresses performing unconvincing softcore sex scenes, or some guy with rubber fangs going around biting people’s necks… but I’m still happy to dedicate thousands of hours to watching films in which all that stuff happens.

No, I think perhaps my disinterest in kung-fu dates back further, to when I was about 12 or 13, and I had this friend who – as wimpy teenage boys are apt to do – had decided he was really into martial arts, and so his dad had bought him a box set of all the pre-‘Enter The Dragon’ Bruce Lee films. What a cool dad! They were all rated 18, and I was totally psyched to watch them. With my childish expectations calibrated according to a mixture of big budget Hollywood action flicks and Mortal Kombat style video games though, it was a brutally disappointing experience.

If I’d seen the slicker, more Westernised ‘Enter The Dragon’, I probably could have dug it, but the appeal of the Hong Kong flicks was entirely lost on me at the time. Not only were they entirely lacking in the kind of skull-crushing, eyeball mangling gore-violence I was anticipating, but, well… what is this shit, y’know? Where are all the explosions, the motorbike chases, the sword-fights? Why is everybody speaking in that weird way where the words don’t match their lips? So he’s just got to protect his buddy’s restaurant from some goons? You mean.. that’s the whole plot? Shouldn’t he be SAVING THE WORLD or some shit? Some fucking hero, this guy. Spiderman would’ve saved a few small businesses from goons before the opening credits. If he’s not gonna pull anyone’s spine out in the next five minutes, I’m outta here.*

I thought it was funny when Bruce Lee punched some guy through a wall and he left an exact outline of his shape, with splayed arms and legs. And I liked the inexplicable comedy bits where he drank loads of soup, or made a kid cry at the airport. But aside from that… well it was just guys slugging each other really, and, not being in a frame of mind that allowed me to appreciate the grace and power of the way in which they were doing the slugging, I was pretty underwhelmed. And, having failed to cultivate the appropriate frame of mind in subsequent years, kung-fu and ‘fight movies’ in general remain a bit of a blindspot for me ever since.

I mean, I’ve seen a few Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung movies and thought they were awesome, and I’ve seen a few of the wackier Shaw Bros flicks with all the magic and special effects and whatnot, and they were great too, but I’ve never really investigated further. My wider interest in Japanese films has at least led me though to check out Sonny Chiba in ‘The Streetfighter’, a quintessentially kick-ass venture that really delivers on the kind of bone-crushing grue my 12 year old self might have appreciated. And that brings us (finally) to the little number pictured above, housed in a sweet 1983 big box from the venerable Video Tape Centre of Suffolk Street, SW1.


I was going to continue with a disclaimer saying something along the lines of “I really enjoyed ‘Sister Streetfighter’, but because I don’t really watch many of these films, I’m perfectly prepared to accept the fact that all the things I thought were weird or noteworthy about it are pretty standard kung-fu topes”. Hopefully that won’t actually be necessary though, because having looked up a few online reviews, it seems it wasn’t just me who got KOed by the film’s general goofiness - in fact the general consensus seems to be that ‘Sister Streetfighter’ really is just totally crazy.

Of particular interest to me is the fact that several key-players from the late ‘60s/early ‘70s heyday of Japanese action/exploitation films are involved in the film (Kazuhiko ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’ Yamaguchi directs, and our old pal Norifumi Suzuki co-wrote the script), but the tone and style is so different from the Toei films I was writing about in my Think Pink feature that you’d never guess in a million years that this movie emerged from the same studio within the same five year period.

Whilst it’s true that popular film industries all over the world went into a catastrophic financial nosedive during the ‘70s, it seems that in Japan the decline took place more quickly and severely than elsewhere, reaching a crunch point as early as 1974, when the relatively lavish action and youth films that had filled the release schedules only a few years earlier started to disappear, replaced by nastier, lower budget sex films and, after the international success of ‘The Streetfighter’, an occasional bit of kung-fu. As such, watching ‘Sister Streetfighter’ feels a bit like watching an Italian film from the early ‘80s, when directors who’d helmed slick, even respectable, productions a decade earlier found themselves jamming econo, going straight for the gore/boobs/blockbuster rip-off jugular and basically blowing whatever reputation they had left out their ass in thoroughly entertaining fashion.

Clearly made with both eyes on the international market, it actually features far less sleaze and nastiness than your average Japanese exploitation flick - the bone-breaking action of ‘The Streetfighter’ has been significantly scaled back, presumably to reflect Etsuko Shihomi’s more genteel fighting style, and, give or take the odd implied rape and a relatively tame torture set-piece during the finale (are these guys actually incapable of making a movie in which no women get tied up and beaten..?), things more or less conform to ‘70s Western notions of good taste.


In most other respects though, it very much shares the spirit of the kind of threadbare, one camera epics that the Italians were trying to foist upon the world market as their film industry collapsed around them. One of the first things you’ll notice about the film is that, in stark contrast to the technical professionalism found in earlier Toei films, the camerawork is completely out to lunch. Whole scenes are weirdly framed and blurred, and the camera rattles around like it’s been mounted on one of those rickety coalmine wagons. Sudden lurching pans and ‘da-da-dah!’ shock zooms happen relentlessly, for no reason, to the point where the constant disorientation is almost headache inducing.

Perhaps seeking to ‘dumb down’ their product to fit the lower expectations of overseas kung-fu audiences, Yamaguchi and co also seem intent on packing the film with as many chop-socky clichés as they can come up - maybe it’s just the English dubbing track that’s to blame, but did they REALLY have to throw in that awful ‘Hong Kong Garden’/’Kung Fu Fighting’ music cue – you know the one - every time the action switches to Hong Kong..? I think most of the characters here are meant to be Chinese, hanging out in the ex-pat community in Yokohama, but for all the English dub cares for such subtleties they could be living on Mars, and with the filmmakers all too happy to throw aside such tired notions as continuity and basic coherence, the result is a flick that often plays more like some crazy-ass, death-or-glory shit from Indonesia or The Philippines than a product of one of the oldest and proudest film industries in the world.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Suzuki’s contribution to the film’s writing, but ‘Sister Streetfighter’ definitely exhibits a certain strain of bewildering, fast-moving craziness that strongly echoes that found in his pinky violence films. Who cares that our heroine is suddenly teleported to a clifftop rope bridge for one showdown, then inexplicably returns from the dead after plummeting to the rocks below, when you’ve got a guy in a feather headdress firing poisoned blowpipe darts hiding round every corner, and a former priest in a black cape leaping out of a wardrobe armed with a prototype spear-gun when you least expect it, all whilst distorted library music blares and the camera blasts around the place like an out of control helicopter..?

Then there’s this whole thing about heroin being smuggled boxes full of wigs, a wild Franco-esque nightclub scene, and even a classic, shrieking rubber bat attack scene at one point, just because, well.. why the hell not? Perhaps compensating for the lack of any serious sex n’ violence, random zaniness amped up to the nth degree seems to have been the intention here, and it's a strategy that certainly works for me.


Much of the film’s entertainment value arises from that fact that the main drug dealer bad guy’s favourite hobby is ‘collecting killers’, surrounding himself with what must surely be one of the most unlikely arrays of eccentric martial artists ever assembled on-screen. “It’s just as much fun as a car full of gorillas”, he enthuses. And, whilst I have to admit that I think a car full of gorillas would be pretty fun, he may have a point. In one wonderful / hilarious sequence, the Big Boss is shown chilling by the pool as his collection of freakish combatants practice around him, the movie helpfully freeze-framing with on-screen captions telling us who they are – “Tessin – The Sickle User!”, “Hachigen Ma - Japanese Cudgel Play!”, “Eva Parrish – Karate Champion of Australia!”, and so on.

Some of these guys we get to see quite a bit of (that annoying bastard in the red robe with the nun-chukas just won’t shut up and die), but others (like poor old Eva) are never heard from again. Playing a particularly prominent role in proceedings is a guy named ‘Hammerhead’, a generic self-regarding demi-boss with his own gang of loyal goons. What I liked about them is that they march about with what appear to be steel wastepaper baskets on their heads, but when engaging in a fight they immediately take them off, presumably realising how unhelpful such ‘armour’ would prove to be in a hand to hand combat situation, but unwilling to fully abandon the enjoyment they gain from parading through the streets with steel buckets on their heads. I also like the fact that the big prize the bad guy has promised him when he kills Shihomi is “a gym you can be proud of”.


Another WTF highlight is the inclusion of the ‘Amazons 7’, a troupe of tiny Thai kick-boxing ladies who wear animal masks and Fred Flintstone style leopard-skin mini-dresses. As with many of the more outlandish baddies on display, Etsuko and Sonny Chiba deal with them in disappointingly double-quick time, but hey, ya pays ya money, ya takes ya choice.

Oh yeah, did I mention that Sonny Chiba is in this movie? The original American advertising certainly did, misleadingly proclaiming him to be the star, when in fact he manages little more than a extended cameo, turning up every now and then to kick some ass (which he does spectacularly, of course) before enigmatically disappearing again. Dunno what it is that keeps tearing him away from this desperate life & death conflict. I guess he’s just a busy man. Bizarrely, the back cover blurb on the UK VHS claims that Chiba’s character has ‘..the power to become invisible!’, which I can only assume is the result of the writer working from a translated plot synopsis that said something like “Chiba keeps vanishing”, and taking it a bit too literally.


Left to carry the film largely on her own, Etsuko Shihomi does a pretty great job if I’m any judge. Presumably pretty young when the movie was made, she’s a charismatic and likable enough screen presence to stand alongside Chiba, a capable actress within the confines of what is admittedly an astoundingly silly movie, and – insofar as a rube like me is able to tell – an extremely impressive karate fighter and physical performer. If Chiba can be taken as a fairly obvious unofficial reference point for Ryu in the Streetfighter video games then Shihomi is a shoe-in for Chun Li, and it’s not surprising that she followed up for success here with ‘The Streetfighter’s Last Revenge’, ‘Return of the Sister Streetfighter’, ‘Sister Streetfighter: Fifth Level Fist’ and a whole raft of other karate movies that, along with some straight acting roles, kept her busy all the way through to the mid ‘80s, including ‘Karate Inerno’ (directed by Teruo Ishii) and the brilliantly named ‘Which is Stronger, Karate or The Tiger?’ (aka ‘Sonny Chiba’s Dragon Princess’).


So, in conclusion: ‘Sister Streetfighter’ makes barely any sense, is jam-packed with craziness, has a cool, ass-kicking cast, and appears to have been thrown together in about a week by a bunch of jittery maniacs with a few domestic camcorders and a hang-glider. Perfect entertainment, in other words. A thing of beauty and a joy forever, as the boy Keats once had it. If I’d seen this back when I was 12 years old, my life might have been very different (and hopefully not just because I’d be running around with a bucket on my head orchestrating ill-advised wig-based smuggling escapades).

Until somebody bothers to issue a takedown notice, ‘Sister Streetfighter’ can be viewed in its fuzzy entirety on Youtube (from whence I took the rough screenshots above). Meanwhile, here’s the US trailer:

If I recall correctly, the VTC tape also has a bonus trailer for some movie in which Chuck Norris and Lee Van Cleef fight the Illuminati. It looked pretty great! Remind me what the title is in the comments box and win, well… a very fleeting sense of self-satisfaction, and possibly an acknowledgment when I edit this post to include a link to the trailer.


* It should be noted that these are my garbled 15+ years ago recollections of the Bruce Lee films, and do not necessarily reflect what actually happens in them, even in the slightest. I haven’t watched them since, but I’m sure they’re all marvellous. Please don’t spam me Bruce fans.

Think Pink:Wandering Ginza Butterfly(Kazuhiko Yamaguchi, 1971)

“For a man I love, I’d give up my life
I cried for all the pain and wounds
But nobody has ever seen my tears

Where will I find myself tomorrow?
I’m a wandering Ginza butterfly”

Recently released from a women’s correctional facility, ace poolhall hustler Nami (Meiko Kaji) takes the train back into Tokyo as the slightly freakbeat-tinged title ballad plays over the opening credits. That sounds like the cue (sorry) for some sort of gag about her being ‘framed up’, but.. oh god, let’s just end this sentence now.

She is heading back to her beloved uncle’s poolhall, situated – like just about every other location in the movie – in the shadows of the city’s sprawling, neon-saturated commercial district. All is not well on the streets of Ginza however, and it soon becomes clear that the pillars of the area’s friendly, long-established underworld – Uncle’s poolhall, the female-run hostess club where Nami seeks employment, and ‘Shin the Player’, the happy, generous gang boss who everyone seems to like – are under threat from a new breed of nastier yakuza who are intent on taking over. Can our heroine do her bit to help save the livelihoods of the nice folks to whom she owes so much..? Well, yeah – I mean it wouldn’t make for much of a film if she didn’t give a shit, would it?

Almost entirely lacking in the kind of sleaze and extremity that define pink eiga and yakuza flicks, ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’ seems like a deliberate attempt to drag some of those generic tropes into ‘classier’ territory, with decidedly mixed results. The other pinky violence entry I’ve seen from Yamaguchi, ‘Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess’, follows a broadly similar pattern, and it’s slightly surprising to learn that the director, who doesn’t exactly seem fond of violent action on the basis of these two films, actually went on to direct Etsuko Shihomi and Sonny Chiba in the hair-raising ‘Sister Street Fighter’ a few years later.

A ridiculously sentimental film, ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly’ is probably the only one of these movies you’ll find in which acts of selfless kindness and repaid debts of gratitude outweigh cynical double-crosses and nihilistic vengeance, and unfortunately they’re given more screen-time too. Despite the contemporary setting, it’s full of nostalgic nods to Hollywood gangster imagery (did guys in ‘70s Japan really dress like extras from Bugsy Malone?), with mournful accordion laments and Spanish guitar flourishes filling the soundtrack as shots of snow-covered prison windows and wilting roses dissolve into vistas of pastel-coloured neon. You totally won’t believe the scene in which the aforementioned nice gangster is gunned down by the cowardly baddies as he shields the homeless little girl whose flowers he bought everyday from their fire, and even the obligatory nightclub scene has some cheesy Barry Manilow type character crooning about seagulls instead of a rock n’ roll band.

Weak tea for many viewers perhaps, but the exquisite cinematography lends a pleasantly elegiac atmosphere to proceedings (Toei studios seemed to specialise in making even low budget genre films look absolutely stunning in the ‘70s), and, helped along by performances from some fine character actors whom I wish I was able to properly identify, the movie makes for quite enjoyable viewing, even at its dullest moments.

It’s interesting too to see Meiko Kaji stretching her acting muscles in a rare role requires her to move beyond her usual implacable avenger/silent bad-ass moves and actually portray a regular, good-natured sorta person, prone to giggling and apologising and getting all emotional about things. And she’s pretty good at it too, of course. I mean, she’s Meiko Kaji – she’s good at everything.

And thankfully, the film’s relatively ‘refined’ tone doesn’t stand in the way of one or two noteworthy action/exploitation highlights. Chief among these is a scene perhaps unique in all of cinema – the tense table billiards showdown in which Nami must take on the yakuza’s top player in a life-or-death defense of her friends’ property deeds.

Tales of courageous female gamblers and big sporting showdowns are obviously pretty ubiquitous in Japanese genre films, but never have I seen one quite like this. The villains’ shooter - ‘Ryu of the Third Eye’ – is a freaky, stone-faced dude in mirror shades and a black leather shirt(?!), whilst Nami competes in thigh boots and a white mini-dress. The logic of the rather complicated game they’re playing is relayed to us using freeze frames and on-screen captions, and Ryu’s downfall finally comes when his cravings for speed (I think it’s speed anyway – there’s a reference in the subtitles to him being paid in ‘crank’) get the better of him, an effect which is brilliantly achieved by having the actor freak out and make jittery, horror movie faces whilst someone shines Bava-esque yellow lights in his face. Eventually he cracks, and charges across the room, jamming a gigantic syringe into his arm and sighing with relief as the assembled hoods look away in disgust.

Then of course, there’s the blood-soaked vengeance massacre at the end. I mean, I don’t care how classy you wanna try to make your pinky violence/yakuza movie, you’re not gonna get away without the blood-soaked vengeance massacre, and Yamaguchi is at least wise enough to deliver the goods. I seem to recall that Meiko and the goofy on/off love interest guy she’s been hanging around with throughout the film basically have a conversation that goes a bit like “hey, you’re secretly a master-swordswoman, what a coincidence, I’m a disgraced yakuza hitman”, and so they set out to kick some ass.

Blood runs in rivers, lives are ruined, the cops are on their way, and she’s not going to get far in that blood-stained kimono waving a sword around. But vengeance has been served, we’ve had some carnage to keep us satisfied, and all is right with the world – perhaps the most perversely feel-good ending I’ve ever seen to a film in which just about everyone is dead or in jail.

Nami’s adventures continued (perhaps?) in 1972’s beautifully titled ‘Wandering Ginza Butterfly II: She-Cat Gambler’, the unusual use of Western style sequel digits suggesting a sense of cohesion that I’d imagine is probably quite misleading in a world where studios seemed to come up with titles for their movies simply by jamming a load of mad words together with a colon in the middle. Praise be.

Mp3> When the Sun is Gone (Wandering Ginza Butterfly)