The Executioner II: Karate Inferno (1974)
When a priceless jewel owned by rich heiress Sabine is stolen, along with her daughter, Professional thief and hired killer Ryuichi Koga and his gang are hired to retrieve both. At a ransom exchange, the team save the girl but lose the money and the jewel. When Sabine decides to deal directly with the thieves and obtains the jewel on her own by paying the ransom, Koga, having been stiffed of his fee by Sabine, steals the jewel. Little does he know, it’s a fake. Now, Koga and the team must break into a high security bank to steal the real jewel.
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Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.
I wanted to see the original "Executioner" movie before seeing this sequel, but I was unable to find a copy. But I do have the advantage of judging this sequel on its own merits instead of simply comparing it to the original. However, I am hard pressed to find anything of merit here. It's a real goofball movie, with a lot of slapstick and bathroom humor, but I didn't find any of the humor particularly funny, especially the part of the movie that tries to find humor in one character being a former rapist. The main problem with the movie is that there is simply not enough action or adventure - most of the movie consists of the character talking and scheming, and that gets boring really fast. Add some cheap filmmaking techniques (frequent close-ups and bad special effects, among other things), and in the end you get a movie I think Sonny Chiba himself would rather forget ever existed.
It's a commonly acknowledged fact that sequels rarely live up to the original... either they try too hard to replicate what made the original good and end up feeling redundant, or they don't seem to have understood why the original was successful in the first place and give us something different - which is rarely what we want when we choose to buy/watch a sequel.The Executioner II definitely succumbs to the latter problem, choosing to sacrifice most of the sex and violence in favour of screwball comedy capers... and it seems to have completely forgotten the fact that Chiba's character is a ninja! There's only two fights in the film, and only the second one of those has any balls to it... and by then it's just too late.The opening credits for the film seem like they know what we're here for, teasing us with a montage of violence and nudity that the film completely fails to deliver on... much of it was taken from the first film, and almost all the good bits of the 2nd get shown right there... you could stop watching after the credits finish and not miss much at all.Taken as a slapstick comedy, KARATE INFERNO is fairly decent... though the humour can be a bit hit & miss, and some of the production looks frighteningly cheap - almost as if the intention was to spoof bad 70's films. Taken as EXECUTIONER II the film is very disappointing, though!