AKA ‘Karate Cop III: Song of the Sea’ 1984
We find our hero Gen this time in Nagasaki. At the beginning of the film he is apparently down on his luck, watery eyes, crawling around on the floor of a pachinko parlor like a child, trying to find metal balls to keep gambling. The mood this creates for the viewer is quickly discarded though when Gen comes across a woman who plans to jump off a building. He saves her life only to discover that it’s a man in drag. This sets the true tone for the film that follows. A comedy. Certainly the most lighthearted of the Keiji Monogatari films so far with no gratuitous scenes in sight.
The story in brief. Gen is sent undercover around the Goto Islands of Nagasaki to find a man who shot and killed a yakuza gangster that had taken over his bar. The police want the man for info on other members of the yakuza while the yakuza themselves want to kill him. And so the two groups search for him with Gen most often bumping into over the top, colorful criminals. When I say over the top I mean that there is a scene where Gen is chasing after a suspect and is stopped by a bow and arrow hitman, dressed in leather and wearing a Jason like hockey mask. This kind of unusual character is like something you’d see in the likes of Sonny Chiba’s ‘Street Fighter’ films, but I digress. Gen is bested by the hitman and is thrown through a wooden shack leaving a cartoon like body shape in the shack. This is what I mean by comedy and lighthearted. But it’s a refreshing change from the darker predecessors. In fact, only one person dies in this movie and that’s the yakuza boss that was shot in a flashback.
As for the martial arts, well, the choreography takes a tumble. Tetsuya Takeda seems a bit rusty here in his movements, but I don’t entirely blame that on him, the film is clearly more…stunty and over the top/comical in it’s fights. The stunts themselves are rather lacking as the camera cuts away to avoid showing the full stunt which would have obviously cost more, so instead we see someone fall off a building and then cuts to them on the ground with the most exciting part left to the audience’s imagination. One thing that I did find interesting was Gen’s use of plastic gymnastic like rings in his fight scenes, the latest edition to Gen’s everyday weapon armory. Why it’s interesting is because it finally made me realize that the guy I saw in the park (see here) also used an exercise/yoga ring while practicing martial arts. I thought it had something to do with Hong Kong kung fu movies using iron rings, but now I know it’s actually from this. Still waiting to see which movie the golf club shows up in… I also noticed how Gen’s training in the film is very much reflected by that guy at the park too.
All of this has happened before 