Version: English dub
Like nearly every other martial-arts movie made in the 70s, and presented on a $10 "Master's of Martial Arts" DVD, it is nearly impossible to watch 'Karate Warriors' and actually understand what is happening. For example, in the first scene, you can nearly make out some yakuza trashing a pornography shop. I say nearly, but this movie is presented in the total opposite of widescreen, I like to call it "super-compressed screen". I blame this on both bad cinematography and a cheap DVD authoring job. Neither of which are factors when Sonny Chiba is involved.
Sonny Chiba arrives in a town where two gangs are fighting each other. After someone is hurt in the showdown in the porno-shop, Sonny Chiba takes him to a doctor. This doctor seems to know everything about both gangs, telling Sonny everything he needs to know about the evil-doers before this doctor disappears for the rest of the movie, which ends up Sonny v. every gang member in town v. a wandering samurai (I thought wandering, sword-carrying samurai had kinda disappeared before the 1970s, but I guess I was wrong), as Sonny takes on the two gangs by playing them against each other.
Think that sounds familiar? It should, as 'Karate Warriors' is another remake of Akira Kurosawa's 'Yojimbo'. It isn't as good as 'Yojimbo', or the Sergio Leone remake 'A Fistful of Dollars', but it is entertaining. Any plot is substituted for fights, fights, and more fights. For example, any scene that shows either someone in sunglasses or a group of at least 3 men, you can be assured that someone is going to be beaten up very shortly.
On the negative side, the camera is very shaky, which makes it hard to see if there is a fight on the screen or just a couple of guys playing one of those primary-school clapping games. When we finally get to see a clear fight, it is in slow-motion, then a speed-up when a strike connects, and back to slow-motion. And everyone thought 'the Matrix' was original.
'Karate Warriors' makes a good introductory lesson on Japanese movies from the 70s: Anyone wearing sunglasses and refuses to take them off is generally a bad guy, women are always secondary characters, nothing makes a better plot-device than a good old fashioned random brawl, an any apparent emotional ending is really a phony-ending just to tie up all loose ends before Sonny kills the remaining bad-guys in the real ending - 7/10
