After fighting for his life in an Asian death pit, The Karate Kid, Part III deliberately lowers the stakes of the franchise and has Daniel LaRusso returning home to Receda, to be confronted by ... well, John Kreese again. Sort of. Kreese is still not over being humiliated by LaRusso at the All Valley, which actually makes sense when you consider that in Karate Kid time, the lapse between the first film and third film is only a few weeks. Having been financially ruined by the sudden departure of his Cobra Kai students, Kreese now reaches out to a man who may be the most ridiculous villain in the history of movies, corporate eco-terrorist and Cobra Kai financier Terry Silver, played by Thomas Ian Griffith. A despondent Kreese shows up on the doorstep of Silver's enormous mansion, and is welcomed with open arms. As they are talking, Silver's manservant interrupts with some routine papers. "Ten years ago nuclear was the preferred waste, you could dump it anywhere," Silver nostalgically sighs as he signs. "Now everybody's a detective!"

Because of some Vietnam debt he owes Kreese, Silver agrees to put his entire criminal empire on hold so that he can make enacting Kreese's revenge his only business -- he actually tells his secretary "for the next few weeks, my business is strictly revenge," which causes no reaction in her whatsoever. He puts Kreese on a plane to Tahiti and then sets about putting into action an elaborate two-part plan. The first part involves hiring a vicious karate champion named Mike Barnes (Sean Kanan) to come to Receda and harass LaRusso into competing in the next All Valley tournament. For the second part, Silver will insert himself into LaRusso's life as a false Miyagi. The idea is that Daniel will become reliant on his teaching methods instead of Miyagi's, and Silver will be able to poison the champion's pure heart by teaching him dirty Cobra Kai tricks. By the time the tournament rolls around, LaRusso will be so screwed up in the head and poorly prepared that Barnes will cream him, and Kreese's revenge against this 17 year-old kid will be complete. Awesome.

Yesterday we covered the first film in the quartet, and today we're revisiting The Karate Kid: Part II, undoubtedly the best of the lot. It has the best fight choreography, the best dialogue, James Crabe's best camera work and a good villain. It's also the ballsiest film in the series, and not just because it attempts the risky maneuver of transplanting the Daniel LaRusso story to a foreign culture which the audience could have easily not identified with, but also because it successfully takes what's essentially been a story about mall karate and upgrades it into a martial arts film with death stakes. Surprisingly, what many fans appreciate most about Part II is its prologue, taken from material shot for the first film. Immediately following Daniel's win, the victory parade makes its way out to parking lot only to find Kreese in a non-celebratory mood. In fact, we see him break Johnny's second-place trophy into pieces, a moment that's incredibly irksome. Within moments, Miyagi is more or less saving Johnny's life and leaving Kreese in an embarrassed, bloody-fisted heap.

Elisabeth Shue's non-involvement in the sequel is quickly dealt with -- a prom break-up -- then a letter arrives summoning Miyagi to Okinawa, and Daniel decides to follow. The movie gets through all this rote exposition as fast as it can, and we're soon in Okinawa, where an entire soap opera has been frozen in amber for forty-five years, waiting for the return of Miyagi. The woman he loved, but left to come to America, still loves him. The rival who wanted to fight Miyagi to the death over that woman shows up as soon as Miyagi and Daniel arrive and reissues the challenge. Called Sato (Danny Kamekona), he's now a rich guy who is raping the entire village, but he wears cool tinted sunglasses. Sato has a nephew, Chozen (Yuji Okumoto) who cheats local farmers with some kind of scam involving phoney-baloney weights. LaRusso accidentally uncovers it one day by breaking one of the fake weights in half like a cookie, earning himself an eternal enemy in Chozen. Now that everyone hates everyone, the games can begin.

The original run of The Karate Kid series coincided perfectly with my own middle school-aged dalliance with karate, which is probably why the series has an outsized place in my memory to this day. I didn't last long in karate -- green belt, I think, whatever that means -- but I liked the idea of karate, which was better represented on the big screen than in the nerf-chucks I had to make do with, or by my pot-bellied, Bob Guccione Jr. look-alike karate teacher. For me, the word karate will always be synonymous with John G. Avildsen's lightning-in-a-bottle film about a dumb Jersey kid who moved out to California in the mid-80s, just as it was having trouble reintroducing a large population of unstable Vietnam vets back into the workplace. In downtown L.A., Martin Riggs was taking out his sniper's remorse and dead-wife issues on the entire homicide division of the LAPD, while over in the Reseda neighborhood, the war was still going on inside the Cobra Kai dojo, run by a sadist who probably invented the ear necklace.

The character of John "this is a karate dojo, not a knitting class" Kreese was said to be a burden for actor Martin Kove. He apparently had a real problem playing a guy who corrupts a bunch of kids, teaching them the "way of the fist" and generally preparing them for what could seemingly only be a life of organized criminality. We're not talking about poor kids off the street, remember -- we find out late in the film that Johnny (William Zabka), LaRusso's chief rival, is actually country-club rich -- we're talking about young men who are going to take their Cobra Kai misteachings with them into higher education and then the upper crust of the workforce, causing us who knows what kind of damage. The much-maligned third film in the series will take a stab at exploring this angle -- what exactly the Cobra Kai financiers were trying to franchise -- but not to any satisfying degree. For our purposes, the Cobra Kai dojo is the equivalent of a biker bar that our hero innocently wanders into and asks for a Capri Sun.