Which Is Stronger, Karate or the Tiger?

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Which Is Stronger, Karate Or The Tiger? 武闘拳 猛虎激殺！Yasuaki Kurata plays a masked ring brawler who is out for revenge against an evil, megalomaniac entrepreneur played by Japan's most reliable bad guy of the '70's, Masashi Ishibashi. Butoken: Moko gekisatsu!Which Is Stronger, Karate or the Tiger? stars Yasuaki Kurata as a masked ring fighter with a secret. That secret is confusingly revealed in a series of flashbacks that show why the main villain, played by Masashi Ishibashi, is so shocked when Kurata's mask comes off and he realizes who he is. It took me a while to figure it out, but then at some point, I realized that the random scene of betrayal over a cache of gold was a flashback, and who Kurata is. Which Is Stronger, Karate or the Tiger? isn't a "Bruceploitation" flick, but it has the feel of one. The dubbing (at least for the version I watched) was really bad, and made the plot hard to follow and the characters difficult to know, but there's also the sense that that would probably be the case even if it had very clear and accurate subtitles. On the plus side, it has the funky '70s soundtrack and "anything goes" sense of the best Bruceploitation joints. The fights aren't always the best choreographed and there's a reliance on weird camera angles and camera movement to create a sense of excitement, but Kurata can really throw down, and the movie kept me entertained. There was always something happening. And of course, if you're drawn in by the poster (and who isn't) then you have one question you want answered. And you might be thinking to yourself, there is no martial arts system on earth that is a defense against getting your face ripped off by a tiger, but let me tell you, this movie has its own answers, in not one but two scenes. And the second, in which Kurata is locked in a dungeon and forced to fight a tiger at close quarters, literally had me saying "Holy shit" several times. Goofy fun, and well worth your time if you have a taste for bizarro '70s kung fu flicks.