For your delectation, ladies and gentlemen, I offer another early collaboration between Fukasaku and Chiba.
Not part of the 'funky hat' series, presumably because our hero's nemesis has a hat that's funkier than his. That hero is Saionji Goro, a detective hired by a company to find out what happened to their president, presumably lost in a plane crash. Soon he finds himself embroiled in a battle for land where - I shit you not - an evil developer wants to take the land of an orphanage so he can build a ski resort. This, of course, is tied in to the demise of the aforementioned company president, and soon our hero finds himself in numerous battles against the evil developer, who is aided in his evil scheme by the crack shot that is Tetsu the Spade (so called because he uses the Ace of Spades as a calling card, in case you were wondering).
As is typical of the time, it's shorter than we'd expect for a film these days (barely over an hour), but is nonetheless an entertaining film; not just as an example of our dynamic duo's early collaboration, but as a film its own right.
A note about the rip: I got the DVD from ADC, so thanks to AliceFrye there. It's a bootleg DVD, and although I've done my best to clean it up, it's obvious in a couple of places that this has gone through several encodes in its lifetime. You can rest assured, though, that it's still eminently watchable. I've also edited the subtitles to fix the grammar and remove some of the more egregious engrish that infested the disk.
Enjoy.
CHIBA Shinichi and FUKASAKU Kinji's First Action Movie Together! The great Sonny Chiba stars as Goro Saionji, a drifting thrill-seeker. Out to investigate a suspisious plane crash in the Red Valley, he uncovers a plot involving yakuza and a shady land developer to evict an old farmer off of his land to build a sky resort. Goro must now help the old farmer and his daughter and take those criminals on.
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