Karate from Shaolin Temple - Kazuma Kenji (1976) - Kai Tak Airport

Next up is a product of me investigating more of the films that Bill Lake was in during the 1970s. I was having a chat with Bill not so long ago and he swears blind that he was in a film that shot a fight scene at Eucliffe in Repulse Bay. He thought it was Bruce Lee: True Story but I had already identified his scene in that movie as being shot at Palm Villa - the same location used for Enter the Dragon that that scene is based on. Anyway, so the mission is to find the film he is talking about. Unfortunately, not all of Bill's filmography is freely available so it's a matter of exploring what I have access to.

Suffice to say this film turned out to not be the one I was after, but it does have some interesting locations, including one that caused problems for us over on Gwulo a few years ago. But I'll get to that later.

This particular movie is another Hong Kong/Japanese co-production and so gets to be on the main list for "International/Foreign movies" that is/was the main focus of the blog. Bill has a small part as a rather inept bad guy who gets killed by the main protagonist.

The story revolves around a Japanese fighter, Yamanaka Musashi (Kazuma Kenji - who film aficionados may remember as the main henchman in That Man Bolt - you can see him in this scene wearing the red shirt), who arrives in Hong Kong looking for some worthy fighting opponents and is immediately harassed at the airport by a guy who wants some of the action. His pugilistic prowess in Shorinji Kempo (this is the Japanese pronunciation of 少林寺拳法 the Chinese name of the film) is noted by some gangsters and he is misled into being recruited as a fighter for a local gangster.

The film opens with a shot of a plane landing at Kai Tak as Musashi arrives in Hong Kong on his fight journey.