High Kick Girl
This was a fun little surprise. Basically it's about this Japanese badass karate student/ schoolgirl who wants to prove how tought and powerful she is so she goes around to local dojos, beating up all the blackbelts. She eventually gets involved with this gang of killers shit gets real bad real fast.
I won't give away any more of the plot, but really, that's not the point of this movie. Karate's the star of this one. Not wire work, not acrobatics, but actual karate. All the fight scenes (which there's a ton of) are choreographed so well that many of the more powerful blows are replayed in slow motion right after. The actors definitely make contact and it's the most realistic looking and sounding fight choreography that I've ever seen. Some of it's just plain ol' brutal, and not in an over the top kind of way.
In an era when traditional martial arts have fallen due to the popularity of hybrid MMA styles, this film goes out of it way to not only champion the effectiveness of karate, but to promote the supposed philosophy of it. And while that and some other aspects will remind you of The Karate Kid, it's really an entirely different animal.
Good, fun stuff and seeing a cute Japanese chick in a schoolgirl uniform kick ass is never a bad thing. I'd kill for a Gogo Yubari movie to be made!