If Sonny Chiba was Japan’s answer to Bruce Lee, then maybe you could consider Etsuko ‘Sue’ Shihomi (often credited as Shiomi) to be Japan’s answer to Angela Mao (who was originally considered for the lead role in the first film). Though she retired from the public eye completely after getting married in the eighties, from the mid seventies through the mid-eighties she was a stable of the Japanese action film scene and she starred in well over thirty feature films before calling it quits. Sort of a female Sonny Chiba protégé (she was trained at Chiba’s Japan Action Club), she never the less managed to carve out a niche of her own. BCI follows up their release of the four disc Sister Street Fighter Collection with this Blu-Ray double feature.

SISTER STREET FIGHTER (1974): 

The first film in the set was spun off of the success of Sonny Chiba’s famous Street Fighter films; with a cameo appearance from Sonny himself ensuring that there’d definitely be a crossover audience for this inaugural entry. 

When the movie begins in seventies Hong Kong, Koryu Lee (Shihomi – in the U.S. dub her character is named Tina Long) has just found out that her brother Mansei (Hiroshi Miyauchi) has gone missing somewhere in Yokohama, Japan. What she didn’t know until now was that he was working as an undercover narc trying to bring down an international heroin smuggling ring operating between Hong Kong and Japan. To try and do her part to help her brother out, Koryu hops on the next plane to Japan and once she lands, she starts doing some detective work of her own. 

The more she snoops around, the more she learns and soon enough she traces things back to a dope king named Kakuzaki (Bin Amatsu) whose gang of minions are smuggling smack by hiding it in wigs! She knows that Kakuzaki has got Mansei stashed away somewhere so she starts fighting her way into the deeper layers of his organization. Unfortunately, Kakuzaki’s right hand man, Inubashiri (Masashi Ishibashi), is pretty rough stuff as are the Amazon Seven (a group of ladies in cavewoman outfits) but thankfully she’s got a couple of allies, namely Hibiki (Sonny Chiba – his character is called ‘Sonny’ in the U.S. version just so there’s no mistaking him for someone else!) and Emi (Emi Hayakawa), to help her out should the going get tough. 

Shihomi was only eighteen years old when this first film was made and there are a few spots in the movie where she looks a little nervous, but for the most part she gives her all here and while the martial arts scenes would get better in the later films, she’s got a really endearing naivety to her here that goes a long way to making her character so likeable -she’s cute, but she’ll kill you if you cross her. Shihomi also did all of her own stunt work in the film, her training at Chiba’s Japan Action Club having paid off well. 

Fast paced and deliriously seventies to its core, Sister Street Fighter is a blast. It’s worth noting first and foremost that the U.S theatrical version of the film was roughly five minutes shorter than its Japanese counterpart and it’s presented here in its uncut, full-strength version. Directed with plenty of style and flair by Kazuhiko Yamaguchi (the man behind Chiba’s Mas Oyama trilogy made up of Karate Bullfighter, Karate Bearfighter and Karate For Life) and co-written by Norifumi Suzuki (of Sex & Fury and School Of The Sacred Beast fame), there’s a great pop-art sensibility to the first movie that makes it completely watcahble and rather impressive on a visual level. 

The action moves quickly in the film, and the violence reaches levels comparable to those seen in the Chiba films that inspired it – eyeballs are plucked and limbs are severed and there are more bone-crunching blows here than you can count. Combine this with a relatively standard but completely effective plot and some truly intriguing comic-book style bad guys and the film comes up a winner. 

SISTER STREET FIGHTER – HANGING BY A THREAD (1974): 

Two weeks after shooting wrapped on the first film, Toei had a sequel cooking with Shihomi and Yamaguchi back on board before the first film was even in theaters. They knew that they had a hit on their hands and figured they should cash in on it while they could, but the extremely rushed nature of this production hurt the final product in that this second film in the series more or less just repeats what came before it without adding much of anything to it. 

The film puts Koryu right back in the action, this time in Yokohama where she needs to track down and save a woman named Birei. It seems that Birei has gotten involved with the wrong diamond thieves and that they’ve kidnapped her but unfortunately for them, the wrong people have noticed that she’s missing. As in the first film, Koryu does some snooping around in the Japanese underworld and her results soon start to pay off in the form of a few key clues. 

As Koryu starts putting a few pieces of the puzzle together she ties everything in to a smuggling operation, lead by Kazunari Osone (Hideo Murata), that uses Chinese hookers to bring the diamonds in and out for them (Their modus operandi? Smuggling the jewels up their rumps!). This time around, however, there’s a catch that means Koryu will have to tread very carefully – it seems that her sister, Bykakuran (Tamayo Mitsukawa), has somehow gotten herself mixed up with these dangerous men and that her life could very well be in serious danger if Koryu makes a wrong move. 

As with the first film, things start in Hong Kong before quickly moving across the ocean to Japanese soil. You can more or less replace the Koryu’s brother in the first movie with her sister in this second film and the drug smuggling ring with the diamond smuggling ring as that’s what the filmmaker’s did. That being said, even if it’s insanely derivative of the first movie it’s still a lot of fun thanks primarily to Shihomi’s screen presence and fighting skills. She takes on a guy with a parrot on his shoulder and a few other colorful characters before the end credits hit the screen and if this is the weakest entry in the series, it’s still quite enjoyable as long as you don’t expect much originality out of it. The action is constant and appears here in place of a real story, but if you’ve got to replace your story doing it by stylishly having a cute girl kick the snot out of wacky bad guys is probably the best way to do it.