Karate Bullfighter - Kenka Karate Kyokushin Ken [DVD]

This is the first installment of the Oyama trilogy. Sonny Chiba plays the real life karate hero Masutatsu Oyama. Oyama walks into karate competition off the street dressed like a homeless man and wins the trophy but ends up butting heads with the local karate teacher there. The series is loosely based on his life and i must admit, i enjoyed it more than i thought i would. Infact all three movies are very good. I bought this on dvd 13 years ago from best buy under the title Champion Of Death. The picture was so bad that i stopped watching after 10 mins and threw it in the trash. I bought it again just recently remastered from Adness and the picture and sound are greatly improved. For the most part it's a fairly entertaining movie with action but some of the fight scenes are too short especially the last one but the movie has alot of heart. Just like in Karate Bear Fighter, when oyama kills the bull, the scene didn't look as phoney as i thought it would look. It was pretty badass imo. They say Oyama used to kill bulls in real life , if you believe that sort of thing. The movie has remastered picture and sound. It's in original japanese dialog with english subtitles. the dvd has trailers from Sonny's other films.

While the item arrived in time and as descripted, this review is focused on the quality of the DVD transfer. This Ventura/Adness DVD release is of the Uncut 1975 Japanese version titled Karate Bullfighter released by Toei (known for some popular anime like Dragon Ball Z).Along with featuring a trailer gallery for other Toei produced Sonny Chiba films, the most important point of this release is that it has an anamorphic 16:9 transfer in its 2.35:1 OAR with the original Japanese mono, in addition to a 5.1 surround upmix which IMO, is nothing to write home about. The PQ is rather a mixed bag, being from a slightly worn film source with some splices and damage here and there, but thankfully not heavily grain scrubbed and green tinted. However, the biggest issue is the rampant compression blocking throughout and being an interlaced transfer rather than progressively encoded. That is why I give it three stars and untill there is a Blu-ray release (hopefully with the U.S version if rights issues work out), its the best one in town.As some people know, there was a U.S version called "Champion of Death", which edited 7 mins worth of content out in addition to being dubbed in English by U.S distributor, United Artists. Somehow, the Japanese version is copyrighted to Toei America while the English dubbed version went into public domain; so thus there are two DVDs on the R1 market that are of very poor quality and best to be avoided.

This is a film about one of Sonny Chiba's Karate instructors (I'm pretty sure he had more than one) who is one of the big two influential karate instructors that were part of the martial arts revival in Japan. This is one of three films (also see Karate Bear Fighter and Karate for Life) that was based on a comic book that teacher.If you want some loosely adapted history on Karate and the sensationalized behavior of karate practitioners in the late 1940's/early 1950's, then this is well worth the watch.If you are a Sonny Chiba fan, I would rank it up there as a must have with the Street Fighter movies.

This is a great movie on the life of the greatest Karate master who ever lived, Mas. Oyama. Oyama created the powerful "Kyokushin" style of Karate in the 1950's and it is popular around the world today as a real fighting Karate style. Sonny Chiba(who was a real life student of Oyama) really did a great job portraying his mentor in this entire triology series. The other two films are "Karate Bearfighter" and "Karate For Life", also available here at Amazon. Highly recommended!

This movie is pretty good. I especially like the fight scene at the end. However, I do not consider it to be as good a movie as The Killing Machine so four stars.

As much as I dont care for Mass Oyama I have to have all Sonny Chiba films, not all are great and remember it is mostly in 70's so some times a bit cheesy. You cant bet it for the price.

Sonny Chiba is the Karate Bullfighter the title says it all.

great movie

ok