YMMV / Showdown in Little Tokyo

• Complete Monster: Funekei Yoshida is a ruthless Yakuza boss who takes control of the Los Angeles drug trade by dismembering his opposition and proceeds to shake down the inhabitants of the Little Tokyo district. When he was still a lowly assassin in Japan, he murdered the parents of the young Chris Kenner and tried to kill the boy next. In the present, he has a man crushed inside a car to take over his business, then, mid-coitus, decapitates a girl who tried to warn the previous victim about Yoshida. He kidnaps and rapes Minako, a singer who works in his new club, after forcing her to watch the tape he shot of himself beheading her friend Angel. He's merciless towards any failure from his own men, and he arranges for the two heroes, Johnny Murata and Sgt. Chris Kenner, to be painfully tortured to death through electrocution. When they inevitably escape and come back for him, he tries to burn Minako alive out of spite.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The medical examiner Kenner and Murata meet following the death of Angel notes that she took a fatal dose of amphetamines, remarks that it makes crack look tame by comparison, and warns that it will become a real problem if it ever gets popular. Twenty years later, methamphetamine use and addiction in the United States skyrocketed, and by the early 2010s, it became a serious nationwide drug problem widely considered a national health emergency.
• Ho Yay: Between buddy cops Kenner and Murata. The most outrageous example is right before a fight scene:
  Murata: Kenner, just in case we get killed, I wanted to tell you, you have the biggest dick I've ever seen on a man.
  Kenner: [nods] Thanks, I don't know what to say.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa would get steady work for the next three decades, but he is most iconic for bringing Shang Tsung to life.
  • This was Tia Carrere's most visible role, prior to Wayne's World one year later making her one of the most desirable women of the decade.
• Special Effects Failure: Yoshida's tattoos gradually fade away during the final fight with Kenner.
• Spiritual Licensee: Showdown in Little Tokyo is as close one can get to a movie version of SNK's Burning Fight. What with fighting a Yakuza gang but taking place in Little Tokyo, instead of Osaka, Japan in the arcade game.

---