Transported 400 years into the past after falling into a mysterious time slip, a squadron of contemporary Japanese soldiers becomes caught between two warring samurai clans fighting to determine who will be the supreme Shogun. As the fighting between the rival samurai clans intensifies, squadron leader Lt. Iba (Sonny Chiba) makes his bid to become ...
As might be gathered from its title, The Legend of the Eight Samurai is set in feudal Japan. Princess Hiroku Yokoshimaru's family is wiped out, along with her bodyguards. All that stands between the princess and certain death is an inexperienced young samurai played by martial-arts expert Sonny Chiba. Armed with little more than determination, ...
The third entry in the Street Fighter series found the filmmakers adding in James Bond style trickery to spice up the kung-fu formula. This time, Terry Tsugury (Chiba) is hired by the criminal Owada clan to rescue a pair of cassette tapes that contain a formula that would the cheap manufacture of heroin. Tsugury pulls it off successfully but when ...
Sonny Chiba stars in The Killing Machine; in fact, you could say that he is the killing machine. A veteran of the World War II Japanese army, Doshin So (Chiba) would like to live a life of peace, but...right now, he'd like to squash a vicious gang of black marketeers. If you're a Sonny Chiba fan, you'll get your fill in The Killing Machine. ~ Hal ...
In this actioner, a brave fighter takes on a deadly quintet of his peers to save the life of his lover who has been captured by a powerful and evil wizard. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Japanese action icons Sonny Chiba and Yasuaki Kurata team up for the first time ever on the big screen in this supernatural thriller that finds two lone monks doing battle against an army of evil spirits. For 1400 years, the monks of Kikyo Temple have waged tireless war against the malevolent mountain entities that plague the Japanese wilderness. ...
The Bushido Blade is set in 19th century Japan, at the time of American Commodore Matthew Perry's opening up of the ancient oriental nation. As played by Richard Boone (in his last film), Perry is a megalomaniac mercenary who makes Custer look like a humanitarian. The plot involves Perry's efforts to locate a sacred sword. The rest of the cast ...
Japanese martial arts legend Sonny Chiba stars in this action-packed drama. In Karate Bear Fighter, Chiba plays Masutatsu Oyama, a karate master whose "take no prisoners" style ultimately proves too brutal for the other fighters in his dojo. Oyama turns his back on his fellows and becomes a body guard for an old army buddy who has since become a ...
Director Teruo Ishii's sequel to his own Chokugeki! Jigokuhen (1974) once again stars Sonny Chiba as Koga, but this film's tone is completely different, replacing gritty action with sophomoric humor. The storyline concerns Koga's gang of thieves plotting to steal a priceless diamond from a master criminal, but Ishii plays the film for gross laughs ...
Lee may be unrivaled as a swordsman, but losing his memory has quite understandably left him feeling lost and haunted. Determined to find the truth -- and exact revenge on the person who caused him so much suffering to begin with -- Lee sets off for what would become the fight of his life. The Legend of the Flying Swordsman was directed by Bosco ...
A super-villain with no scruples at all starts off this complex, twisting, turning action film that continues its gyrations for more than two hours. The villain wants to wrest control of a large corporation from the Japanese mafia. To that end, he commits about every type of crime on the books, including trapping a woman into heroin addiction, ...
Sonny Chiba stars in this action drama about a martial arts champion who wants to leave the competitive world for a quieter life. But after he becomes involved in the death of an underworld figure, he finds himself on the run from thugs determined to take revenge against him. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Bunta Sugawara returns as Shozo Hirono in this sequel to the acclaimed yakuza film Jingi Naki Tatakai (aka The Yakuza Papers: Battles Without Honor and Humanity). Hirono, now dug deep into a Japanese crime family based in Hiroshima, finds a new adversary in the person of Katsutoshi Otomo (Sonny Chiba), a ruthless killer who is willing to do ...
This martial-arts actioner from director Kazuhiko Yamaguchi is the third in a series of films inspired by the life of Masutatsu Oyama. Pushed to the outskirts of the sport after som unorthodoxed matches, Oyama is tapped to compete in a no-holds-barred exhibition fight this time around. Cult star Sonny Chiba, a student of Oyama himself, stars as ...
While most martial arts films focus mainly on showing the moves, strikes and blows of the combatants, they don't show the logical consequences of these battles in any detail. The Streetfighter does, and it won an "X" rating for violence when it was released to the U.S. in 1975. This cult film and its three sequels are thought to be particular ...
Careful, parents: this one's Immortal Combat, not Mortal Kombat. And it's R-rated, too. Even so, the young fans of wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper will probably find some way to get this on their TV screen. Together with the equally musclebound Sonny Chiba, Piper takes on a battalion of seemingly indestructible martial-arts bad guys. The lovely and ...
A double disaster film with both an American and a Japanese cast, Virus presents some pretty wild probabilities to viewers. First of all, a virus has been developed that gets loose and starts to destroy humanity on a grand scale. The only people who are remotely safe are a group of eight hundred men and eight women on Antarctica. Since the ...
Cinematographer Andrew Lau directed this Hong Kong martial arts fantasy from a Manfred Wong screenplay. Wong based his script on a Chau Ting screenplay adapted from the long-running manga by Ma Wing-shing. Martial arts ruler Lord Conqueror (Sonny Chiba) adopts two youngsters as disciples, and a decade later, the two -- Wind (Ekin Cheng) and Cloud ...
Two vengeful assassins are loose on the streets of New Orleans and are looking to systematically murder some of the elite Special Crimes Agents responsible for sending them to prison. Now only the two leaders of the highly trained corps will be able to stop the slaughter. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
You've seen him as the bone-cracking anti-hero of the Street Fighter films, now watch Sonny Chiba team with Japanese screen legend Toshiro Mifune and some of the biggest names in Asian cinema in an all-out martial arts melee that's guaranteed to please. Yagyu Jubei (Chiba) is the son of a shogun's instructor and the most powerful swordsman in ...
Casey Chan Lai-ying directs this Hong Kong/Japanese co-production about a pair of Hong Kong cops -- Julia Cheung (Sibelle Hu Hui-chung) and Teddy (Chin Kar-lok) -- who arrive too late to prevent crazed Japanese detective Sato from murdering a group of mobsters from notorious crime boss Jimmy Lee's syndicate. Teddy eventually catches up with Sato, ...
Motivated by their very real grievances, a group of bombers announce that they have placed speed-triggered bombs aboard a bullet train from Tokyo to Hakata, the "Hikari 109." If the train slows below a certain speed, it will be destroyed along with its many passengers. Proving their assertion by blowing up an unmanned freight train, the terrorists ...
This exciting action film from prolific director Teruo Ishii stars Sonny Chiba as Kouga, a descendant of a long line of ninja warriors who has put his amazing physical abilities behind him and lost his way. Eventually, however, Kouga teams up with a hitman named Sakura (Mitsuru Sato) and his friend Hayato (played by former world lightweight boxing ...
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