Shigehiro Ozawa of Street Fighter fame (that is to say the Hissatsuken series with Sonny Chiba and Sue Shiomi which features very little street fighting) brings us a martial arts flick set around the time of the first world war when Japan was just about to enter on the side of the allies.
Centrepiece to the story is a group of spies called the Eastern Wolves running counter espionage for the japanese government against Russia and Germany, who are joined by the rough new recruit with the iron fists aptly named Tekken played by Tsunehiko Watase, who is doing his best Sonny Chiba impression. Apparently spy work in 1914 consisted entirely of beating people up with fists.
What follows is a fairly standard brawler of the time. There is some fun stuff here and there like the beautiful ketchup-red blood fountains of the era but it never quite reaches the same level of entertainment and charisma as its direct competitor Street Fighter.
What is also a big disappointment is the lack of use of the unfamiliar setting of the rarely seen Taisho era japan. Generally historical films tend to focus almost exclusively on WWII imperial japan, the warring states period or the Edo period. This could have been set in any time and it wouldn't have made a difference in how the plot unfolded.
I think the reason this film is mostly forgotten (I appear to be the first to rate it on imdb) and incredibly hard to find is that all of its ingredients are calibrated to bog standard with the keen eye of a master craftsman. I caught it randomly in Osaka's Shinsekai Toei cinema that plays a weekly new selection of Toei's back catalogue.
It's not bad though. Certainly more watchable than some of its contemporaries like Norifumi Suzuki's films that even made it into the west. There's a brief appearance by Tokusatsu legend Masashi Ishibashi and it briefly delves into and then quickly abandones the topic of anti-chinese discrimination.
It may have fared better with a more well-known lead like the aforementioned Sonny Chiba and some tweaks to the storyline.
