Schoolgirl with brown belt and high kick.
Don’t be fooled with the poster of High Kick Girl movie, because this is a real manly martial arts film. The martial arts choreography is truly free from wires and looks like old style fights from Chuck Norris movies of 90s, reminds old Japanese movies like Streetfighter with Sonny Chiba. Great spirit! Well used slow motion repeats to show us how Karate works in real life.
Want to say that fight in the beginning of the movie looks a little bit poor, you definitely can notice how guy doesn’t kick real. But let’s look at the girl who has brown belt in Karate and desperately wants to become a black belt. She tests other Karate schools with her high kick and looks very cool in fighting, but it was really funny to see how she knocked down national champ with one kick. You can see that only one thing doesn’t give her to get the black belt – problems with kata. Girls fight in some building looks cool and reminds sometime the Gogo Yubari from the Kill Bill film. And of cause tough silent Japanese spirit is everywhere.
High Kick Girl is a really good example of nowadays girls-action movie popularity after CHOCOLATE with Jeeja Yanin, COWEB with wushu expert Jiang Lu-Xia and BARE KNUCKLES with Jeanette Roxborough. Rina Takeda as a high kick girl is a real-life black belt and a champion. In the movie she uses the schoolgirl uniform for her fight scenes, of cause it looks stereotypical Japanese cinematic technique of “schoolgirl panty shots” but anyway she is really tough and will kick anybody’s ass anytime. Moreover you can see not bad technique of Muay Thai, Aikido, Chinese Boxing and of cause a little bit of aerobics in the movie to make the viewer go wild.
Probably Japanese producers decided to make their own popular martial arts movie series like the third film action Undisputed 3 in US or upcoming Ip Man 2 Film in Hong Kong.
While the plot of High Kick Girl is pretty standard the fight scenes are really good and down to earth.
