The Street Fighter (1974)

An Okinawan street fighter ("the last of the Okinawan street fighters," as he describes himself) is on death row in Japan (we don't know why). Right before his execution, he's visited by a Buddhist priest for last rites, but the priest is actually this hardcore assassin named Terry something-or-other, and he does some crazy move that will cause the guy to go into a coma in about ten minutes. So the authorities take him to the gallows, and right as he's about to be hanged, he passes out. There's a lawyer there, and he says they have to provide medical care for all prisoners, so the execution is postponed and they put the street fighter in an ambulance. Naturally, Terry and his sidekick attack the ambulance and kidnap the street fighter (who's still unconscious). Why do they do this? Because Terry was paid by the fighter's brother and sister to free him. So Terry revives the guy and sends him off to Hong Kong. Then the brother and sister come around wanting to know where he is, and Terry says, "not till you pay me another 3000 yen." A fight ensues, and Terry ends up throwing the brother out the window to his death, and selling the sister into sex-slavery. Then, while relaxing, Terry sees on the news that some really rich oil tycoon has died of a heart attack in Cairo, and his hot daughter has inherited the whole business. Terry then gets a call from some associate of his, who wants to set up a business meeting with some other people. These people, an old guy and a young woman, who is the boss, want Terry to kidnap the oil tycoon's daughter. Terry asks for more money than they think is appropriate, and wants cash up front, which they won't provide. So he walks out of the meeting. This prompts one of the people, the old guy, to try to kill Terry to keep him from telling about the plan. Terry easily rebuffs his attack and leaves. The young lady is furious and orders the old guy to find and kill Terry. So later, the old guy shows up at Terry's apartment with thugs, all of whom are easily defeated by Terry. He finishes by hitting the old guy with a special punch that makes his teeth come dribbling out of his mouth, and tells the guy to tell the bitch he works for to go fuck herself (or something to that effect). So the old guy goes back to the evil young lady and tells her he could not kill Terry, and she is mad pissed off and shoots the old guy dead. Angered by this whole getting-attacked-at-a-business

-meeting-then-at-his-house business, Terry goes to the oil tycoon's daughter's uncle, who is head of a Karate school, and challenges him to a fight. (Well actually, first Terry breaks into the karate school, kicks the asses of a bunch of karate guys, finds the oil tycoon's daughter, who is on the premises, and tries to kiss her. Then when he is confronted by the uncle, he says he wants to fight. The uncle agrees.) The uncle, who is about fifty and very chunky, is really good and seems to be on the verge of defeating Terry, who fights using a blend of styles and thinks that Karate is bullshit. Just then, the oil tycoon says something about Terry's father, whom the uncle knew during the war (and who first had the idea to combine kung-fu, karate, and a lot of other styles to create an invincible fighter). This prompts a sepia-toned flashback sequence, in which Terry remembers his father being executed by the Japanese (who also insult Terry for being half Japanese and half Chinese), and remembers his father's advice to trust no one and never give up. This memory reinvigorates Terry in his fight with the uncle and he lands some choice blows. The uncle then stops fighting and says, "OK, I get it." Then they sit around while Terry's sidekick puts band-aids on him, and Terry proposes that the uncle hire him to protect the oil tycoon's daughter, which will give Terry the chance to stick it to the evil young lady who tried to have him killed, since he knows she will attempt to abduct the heiress. Terry says at this point that that lady and her people are punks, and he can't stand punks. The uncle agrees, but the tycoon's daughter, who is also there, is appalled and says Terry is a thug. Apparently though, even though she is the one who inherited the oil empire, her karate uncle has the final say. So the next day, Terry and his sidekick are driving behind the oil tycoon's daughter as she goes somewhere, but the evil young lady's forces cleverly box Terry in in traffic, then have a bulldozer pick his car up and drop it off a bridge into a dry ravine. When two thugs come down to the ravine with guns to finish the job, Terry, who was playing dead, is fine and kills them. Naturally, by the time Terry gets his shit together, the oil tycoon's daughter has been kidnapped by the evil young lady's forces. The young lady's forces, it appears, are in league with some Hong Kong mafia guys, one of whom runs a brothel. The Okinawan street fighter has landed somehow as an employee of this brothel (a doorman, sort of) and discovers that his sister has just been purchased by the brothel. He asks the mafia guy owner what he has to do to get his sister out of bondage, and the guy says, "come help me with this abduction of an oil tycoon's heiress," which is a win-win for the street fighter, because Terry will be trying to thwart the abduction, and so he will get to seek revenge for Terry's having sold his sister into sex slavery and killed his brother. So he says yes. Meanwhile, the evil young lady and her whole organization take the oil tycoon's daughter to some kind of mountain hideaway. Terry and his sidekick catch up to them. The heiress waves to them from a window, but in the time it takes Terry and his sidekick to get out of their boat (they came up a river on a boat to find her) and climb up to her window, some guy in a blue tuxedo comes in to rape the oil heiress. (In a turn I don't quite understand, he is the same guy who first raped the Okinawan's sister when Terry sold her into slavery.) Terry hops in the window just in time to kick the guy's ass and actually rip his dick off. He then wipes his hands off thoroughly with the guy's tuxedo jacket and saves the heiress. At this point, despite her earlier misgivings about Terry, and despite having just watched him rip someone's penis off with his bare hands, she seems kind of attracted to him. Unfortunately, by the time he gets her back to the boat, they are set upon by thugs, so Terry sends her with his sidekick in the boat and stays to fight. Eventually, he confronts the mafia guy who runs the brothel , who wears funny gold pajama pants at all times and is a really good fighter. The mafia guy makes a point of saying that he will not use his blue dragon, which is a big knife, and will instead fight Terry with his hands. They start to have a really well-matched fight, but then the evil young lady arrives and has a gun, and Terry is thus taken into custody. They take Terry up to a cliff overlooking the river, tie him to a tree, and hit him a lot with sticks to try to find out where the heiress is. Terry, of course, does not tell them. Just then, the sidekick, who was somewhere else along the river and could hear Terry being beaten, shows up and tries to save Terry by hitting some of his captors with a cudgel (really). This doesn't work, and he is quickly subdued by the mafia brothel owner. The evil lady then takes four of the six bullets out of her gun and tells the sidekick she will shoot Terry Russian roulette style unless he says where the heiress is. Terry orders the sidekick not to speak, but he loves Terry so much (we will later learn that Terry saved his life in Singapore) that he breaks down and says that the heiress is waiting at the next bend in the river. Then the evil lady is about to kill Terry anyway, and the mafia brothel owner says, "he's a fighter, he shouldn't go out like that. Let me kill him with the blue dragon." She says OK, but instead of killing Terry, the mafia guy cuts his ropes with one ferocious swing of the blue dragon, and Terry falls headfirst into the river. During the time that Terry is hurtling headfirst toward certain death, he makes weird kung-fu faces, and in this way we know that he is summoning the strength to survive. Somehow, they decide to let the sidekick go, and he finds Terry and drags him out of the river and of course Terry has survived. Terry, however, is contemptuous toward the sidekick and tells him to go away because he gave up the location of the heiress, which was a dishonorable move. So the evil lady and her crew (including the mafia brothel owner and the Okinawan street fighter) take the heiress onto an oil tanker out at sea. Terry actually manages to follow the evil lady and the heiress right up to the docks, but can't get on the boat with them because he has to fight a blind swordsman (who also was at the brothel earlier). At the beginning of this fight, Terry is wearing awesome goggles, but he takes them off. In the middle of the fight, some random guy on a motorcycle comes along and keeps trying to run into the blind swordsman with his motorcycle. Eventually, the blind swordsman knocks the motorcycle guy off the bike with his sword and goes back to fighting Terry. Terry then kills the blind guy and takes off the motorcycle guy's helmet to see that it was his sidekick, who refused to leave him. The sidekick says some nice stuff, then dies. Terry sheds a single tear. Then Terry gets a motorboat somehow and goes out to the tanker where the oil tycoon's heiress is being held. He gets on and fights a lot of dudes. Meanwhile, somewhere else on the boat, some white guy in a white suit and BluBlockers sunglasses is telling the oil tycoon's daughter that she has to sign over all her interest in the business to him. The evil young lady is there and explains that the white guy has joined her Hong Kong organization, and once the heiress signs, the organization will "control everything." This white guy also mentions that he actually killed the oil tycoon (it wasn't a heart attack). The heiress, who is very petulant, refuses to sign. Just then, Terry busts in. He kills the evil lady and the white guy. There is some other white guy who was in on the whole kidnapping somehow (an American mafia connection, maybe?), and he's trying to shoot Terry when the mafia brothel owner intercedes and says, "This one Okinawan street fighter would really like to fight Terry to settle a grudge. Let's let them fight, fair and square." The other white guy says OK, so Terry and the Okinawan go out onto the ship's deck to fight. Naturally, there is a thunderstorm going on. They fight some, and then the American mafia guy, who has been standing and watching (along with the heiress and the mafia brothel guy) gets impatient with the fight and shoots Terry in the leg. This angers the mafia brothel guy, who promptly kills the American mafia guy with the blue dragon. Terry, gunshot wound notwithstanding, continues to fight. Then, the Okinawan's sister (the one whom Terry sold into sex slavery) appears and tries to kill Terry with a nasty-looking three-pointed knife. Terry easily rebuffs her and knocks the knife away, but with Terry's shot leg slowing him down, the sister manages to pin Terry against a staircase by hugging him the way boxers hug each other when they need a rest from getting pummeled. While Terry is struggling to get her off of him (despite having sold her into slavery earlier, he seems disinclined to hurt her at this point), she shouts and gestures madly at the knife, and her brother the Okinawan street fighter understands that she wants him to stab right through her to get to Terry (there was some dialogue earlier where we learned that her time as a prostitute had made her not want to live except to get revenge). The Okinawan does this, and Terry is pretty badly hurt - he seems to have a punctured lung or something. This allows the Okinawan to knock him down, and it appears that he is about to deliver a death blow. But just as he is about to do a flying leap and land atop the prostrate Terry, Terry manages to lift up one hand and catch the Okinawan by the neck. Then he actually rips the guy's throat out and lies on the deck of the ship with the throat in his right hand while the mafia guy and the heiress look on in horror. Then the movie ends.