Occupied Territories

True Romance (written by Quentin Tarantino, directed by Tony Scott) opens with Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) spending his birthday watching a Sonny Chiba Streetfighter triple feature. This was a reintroduction to Western audiences of a man so dangerous that his first international success, The Streetfighter, was the first film to earn an X rating for violence.

One of the innovations of The Streetfighter was showing X-Rays of exactly what Sonny Chiba was doing to the bad guys when he hit them including a much censored, rarely seen sequence, where Chiba castrates a rapist with his bare hands.

—Michael Ryan