Rent The Return of the Street Fighter (1975)

Second Helping Of Knuckle Sandwich - The Return of the Street Fighter review by Count Otto Black

The general info page, presumably quoting the DVD packaging, would have you believe this sequel is like "The Street Fighter" only more so. The truth is that, like most sequels, it's the warmed-up leftovers of a movie that did unexpectedly well, and in every way it's a lesser film. Even Sonny Chiba's weird tendency to make funny noises and pull faces during fights in a misguided attempt to be more like Bruce Lee is greatly reduced (flashbacks to the previous film make this very obvious), which is one way in which the sequel improves on the original. The other is in giving the inevitable "funny" sidekick far fewer opportunities to be incredibly annoying.

Unfortunately, every ingredient is equally watered down, and mostly this isn't a good thing. The first film was a plotless bloodbath that worked on its own terms by being so outrageous that you didn't particularly care that it made no sense whatsoever. This time around, the hero, or rather anti-hero, isn't quite so rabidly amoral, and the battles, while undoubtedly bloody, aren't quite so gleefully over-the-top (apart from one moment of insane comic-book ultra-violence - you'll definitely know it when you see it). And given the short running-time, there's an awful lot of padding in the form of minor characters doing martial arts training we don't need to see nearly so much of, or plot exposition we don't need because what little plot there is doesn't make a lick of sense.

There are moments, such as the early scenes where our hero casually shows us that being handcuffed and surrounded by cops in a locked room with barred windows inside a police station is only a minor inconvenience to somebody as formidable as him, when it looks like turning into a genre classic. But there aren't enough of them, and when we do get to the big fight scenes without which this film would have absolutely no reason to exist, they're no different from those in the first film, right down to the return of a foe whom we saw explicitly killed (he got better), except that they're not as good and there are fewer of them. As for the story, it's such a mess that it looks almost as though the movie was supposed to be longer, but they ran out of money halfway through and had to suddenly abandon at least one subplot and pointlessly kill a major character plus a few other people who should have had far more to do.

It does give us the surreal spectacle of Sonny Chiba trying to look ruthless while eating a banana, but there are too many dull patches between the strangely pointless fights for it to be very much fun. And unfortunately the misogyny of the first movie still holds sway, with female characters existing only to suffer appalling brutality. In one scene a young child is forced to punch roof tiles until her hands bleed by her father, who is meant to be one of the good guys! This is particularly odd because the girl has no relevance to the plot and doesn't really need to be in the film at all. I'm not sure it's even worthy of two stars, given the number of times I found my attention wandering between battles. When is the world going to catch on that every obscure old B-movie with lots of violence in it isn't necessarily an unjustly neglected masterpiece just because Quentin Tarantino says so?