The disc's a bit of an oddity now, produced by the now-defunct Twilight Time Films in 2017, which didn't really specialize in this sort of movie - I don't recall them releasing any other Hong Kong action - but they had access to Sony/Columbia's library, which included Destination Films, which included these two movies in more or less the form they were released in America back in the 1970s and 1980s, with different opening credits in some cases (check out Jackie's mustache!) and a soundtrack on Drunken Master that is kind of maddening - it's like they have the complete English soundtrack, but only parts of the Cantonese and Mandarin ones, Apparently, that's just the way it's always been, and I wouldn't be surprised if between licensors like Twilight Time and whatever the successor company to "Seasonal Films" was, it was hard to get hands on better ones until recently. Both of these movies have recently been released on Blu-ray in the UK (via separate distributors!) all fixed up. Which means I could wind up buying them again and seeing them "new" for the first time again.
Anyway! How did our players do by all this?
* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the disc at Amazon
How many Shaolin Masters is too many Shaolin Masters? The answer isn't necessarily "five, possibly fewer", especially when people seldom complain about seven samurai being excessive, but it kind of feels like the filmmakers should do a bit more to earn that number toward the start, as it introduces five pretty nondescript masters with similar costumes and haircuts, in the middle of a lot of folks with similar looks getting slaughtered, and aside from Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing, who is more comedic than the rest, they feel kind of interchangeable, especially since they all immediately go their separate ways rather than stick together and explore the contrasts between them and their fighting styles.
Maybe that sort of character work isn't strictly necessary in this sort of movie; writer Ni Kuang and director Chang Cheh don't exactly create a slow burn that explodes into violence at the climax, but a stream of nearly non-stop action as the fugitives encounter resistance, focus on their training, and then draw their foes out for a rematch. Chang and the stunt team led by Liu Chia-Yung and Liu Chia-Liang spend the first half of the film delivering action in bulk, and while there may be a moment or two where you can see punches whiff as the other guy launches themselves in the air, but it's still a bunch going on that's almost all good.
But, as with most Shaw Brothers movies, technique is characterization, and once the characters start training with the goal of defeating specific foes, and then setting up a twenty-minute finale where we see it all put into place, well, that's the good stuff. Chang and the Lius build the action for maximum clarity in the one-on-ones, making the Masters nearly as distinctive as their various foes. It's a very specific sort of giving-the-audience-what-it-wants formula, and I wouldn't necessarily be surprised to learn that the action was designed first and then Ni backfilled a story, to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if the thread in the middle where one starts to wonder what makes the Shaolin masters so special that they can be treated as less expendable than the various other Han fighting the Manchus came about by accident and that's why it never really became a theme.
It's a formula that delivers some fine, nifty-looking action, at least; it's no wonder Chang would return to the Shaolin Temple again and again.
Shao Lin si (Shaolin Temple)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 2 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it, or buy the disc at Amazon
Because of the way I tend to see Shaw Brothers movies - randomly, every few months or so, as they show up at various midnight movie programs or when there's an archival print at a festival - it's easy to forget, or not even realize, that Chang Cheh had a sort of "Shaolin Temple Cinematic Universe" going, reusing characters and actors so that the stories would, at least roughly, line up and form a larger saga. Which is a sort of roundabout way of saying that it was kind of neat when the stars of the previous night's movie, Five Shaoline Warriors, showed up and it became clear that this movie would end more or less where the previous one started.
It hijacks the movie in a way - the film starts out as one thing - three young men determined to prove that they are worthy of entering the temple and given menial tasks that initially seem like little more than hazing until it's revealed that the monks have seen their potential and assigned them the work that will strengthen them and develop the skills they will later need to fight - that is more or les sidelined when the soldiers show up and ask to hide, eventually merging in with that story on the one hand, as they join the fight against the attacking Manchu army on the one hand while two characters sneaks out and other adventures (presumably chronicled in other movies). As with Five Shaolin Masters, there are a fair amount of seemingly redundant characters, with Fu Sheng's Ma Chao-Hsing once again the standout because there's personality to his bluster and braggadocio, the character who can't easily be swapped out for another.
There's a good flow and sense of fun here, though, as the new students banter, with physical comedy in how they learn their lessons, and the intrigue ramps up as the film goes along and a number of plott threads develop. The action, whether it be sparring or training or, finally, fighting with real intent to kill, is good stuff. The filmmakers manage a good balance of the basically supernatural abilities that the students are learning and the more realistically violent action of the soldiers come to sack the temple, and where they overlap, there's a knowing cruelty that's a bit enhanced by the nature of this as a prequel, as we know this particular guy is not just what amounts to a schoolyard bully. Indeed, it handles its prequel nature fairly well, not waving away how much of the thrust of Five Shaolin Masters was that those characters decided they were inadequate fighters while still having an exciting climax.
And now, it will probably be another year before I see another Chang Cheh Shaolin Temple movie, and as such have no idea how it fits in.
Wu Du (The Five Venoms)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the disc at Amazon
Having only scratched the surface of Chang Cheh's work at Shaw Brothers, I'm in no position to say what might be his best or his masterpiece, but The Five Venoms is solid in ways that make it a real favorite. Its six fighters are just enough for fun mixing and matching without needing a scorecard, the fighting styles are distinct and evocative of their names, there's a story that mostly gives everyone something to do throughout without it just being "martial world" abstractions.
Indeed, it's a fun caper that keeps just enough hidden to have a little mystery while allowing most of the action to take place in plain sight. It almost requires Chang and co-writer Ni Kuang to skip the usual training sequences and master characters, mostly pushing them into a prologue. The images that went with the description of the various styles will be used in the final battle with the sort of flashbacks Chang usually uses training scenes for, and even with the secret identities, the characters are fun to watch bounce off each other. Lo Meng is great as the confident young Toad, puffed up on his invulnerability, with Wai Pak and Lu Feng knowing their parts of the villain pairing cold - Wai's Snake a consummate schemer, Lu's Centipede perfectly nasty as the muscle. Chiang Sheng's "sixth venom", who is sort of an audience surrogate, is a bunch of fun, eventually capable with the martial arts but kind of a dirtbag slacker in the middle of the grand archetypes.
Keeping things moving does kind of require sidelining Chiang and moving Philip Kwok Chun-Fung's Constable Ma off the board for a large part of the middle, as the bad guys start circling around each other - with enough auxiliary villainy that there are multiple suspects for the identity of the Scorpion - and Lo's poor lovable Toad is humbled. The fights are a blast, though, as the martial arts team makes each venom style instantly identifiable and larger than life but not quite silly, the big final five-way showdown a blast.
It's a wuxia with more going on than martial arts, broad enough to seem grandiose, but with earnest stakes. Even if it is basically a set-up for fights, you can describe it in terms that aren't just part of the genre, and maybe that makes it a great was to introduce the Shaw Brothers and Chang to those not looking for the Shaolin mythology.
Can que (Crippled Avengers)
* * * (out of four)
Seen 14 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the disc at Amazon
Shaw Brothers was a factory of a studio; with Crippled Avengers coming out three months after The Five Venoms and reuniting much of the cast and crew for a movie that's closer to the Shaw formula but also an outright deranged version of it. If you told me that director Chang Cheh and co-writer Ni Kuang were just throwing everything out there to see what stuck under an insane schedule, I'd believe it; if you said that this was them doing a bit of self-parody, I'd believe that too.
As ridiculous as the movie is, it kind of works because the filmmakers and cast take it seriously where they need to; Lo Meng, Philip Kwok Chug-Fung, Sun Chien, and Chiang Sheng introduce their title characters with broad strokes and their disability representation is just maybe kind of questionable, but there's chemistry between them, a real camaraderie when it comes to helping each other out that makes them more than fighting gimmicks. Philip Kwok and Lo Meng, respectively, play the blinded merchant and deaf-mute blacksmith as keenly aware of just what they and the other are missing and how that can put them in danger. On the flip side, Chen Kuan-tai and Lu Feng are monstrous villains, but the sort that one believes might have once been heroes, if not consumed with rage and ready to see every little thing as a sleight that requires Vengeance.
On the way, the audience gets the humbling/training/rematch cycle, and it's some terrific action choreography, with Chiang Sheng especially showing off some amazing acrobatic ability and some downright absurd use of iron limbs elsewhere. There's a just-run-with it ethos to the whole thing, from the sadistic way the Daos pronounce how they will cripple the future heroes, to the earnest monks training them to be martial artists, to a finale where this massive structure has built and populated with henchmen for the express purpose of thwarting the avengers' remaining senses, which the others blithely dismantle. Chang never leaves a spare moment to wink at the camera, and as a result this whole thing is very silly but never in a way that grinds things to a halt.
* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Twilight Time Blu-ray)
Where to stream it or buy the UK disc at Amazon
As mentioned, I've seen this before, but somehow I had forgotten the bit with the cat and the cobra, and the subsequent creation of cat's-claw kung fu, and it kind of feels like Chan and director Yuen Wo-Ping realizing that the funny stuff is their wheelhouse. Sure, there was plenty of comedy in this film before - Simon Yuen Siu-Tin, in particular, as a martial arts master who is squarely on the less cool side of the nomad/bum divide, and how fickle the students at the martial arts schools are - but it's a moment of pure, ridiculous slapstick that makes the movie what it is, the difference between Chan being an actor who is good at comedy versus a clown.
And the movie needs that clowning, because the Eagle clan hunting down the Snakes to eradicate their martial arts style is silly but not funny, and the competing martial arts schools storyline feels like the filmmakers trying to figure out what to do with the standing sets they've been allotted to make their movie with. It's the sort of movie where you wonder just what sort of order things were done in, because I could absolutely believe that they came up with a general outline, planned and choreographed the fights, and then tried to connect them with a story. It's kind of a mess.
But, it's a mess with Jackie Chan basically figuring out who he's going to be, this put-upon underdog whose martial-arts gifts come so naturally as to be almost unconscious, and I don't know to what extent Yuen Siu-Tin played comic characters in his long career, but it certainly feels like he's passing a torch to Chan, as the movie moves from his fights full of guile and the old guy being surprisingly spry to Chan doing a bit of comic exaggeration with his snake-style boxing before pulling out the comedy, and there's also something about his sad-sack face that lets one believe in him as the victim of bullying even though he's clearly almost comically fit.
Watching it after four Shaw Brothers movies, even funny ones like Crippled Avengers, one can almost feel this next generation figuring out a new way to make martial arts action, and also feeling like scrappy underdogs because they don't have the system the Shaws do, and the fights staged outside almost feel like guerilla filmmaking (when the Shaws did it, it often seemed like a specific place between others, not like they just needed room to move and had no set in mind). It's Jackie Chan becoming Jackie Chan.
Jui kuen (Drunken Master)
* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 January 2025 in Jay's Living Room (off the shelf, Twilight Time Blu-ray)
Where to stream it (Prime link), or buy the UK disc at Amazon
Another case of "this group worked well, let's put 'em together again", this time with Jackie Chan playing another student, Simon Yuen Siu-Tin as a hobo mentor, and Yuen Wo-Ping orchestrating it. To a certain extent, this one has been kind of obliterated by Drunken Master II, which retreads the material as much as sequelizes it and is considered by many to be Jackie Chan at the absolute peak of his powers, staging his signature stunts on the one hand and recognizes that he comes across better as a goof than a dick, and is more likely to be compared to that film from 15 years later than Eagle's Shadow from six months before.
In some ways, what strikes me as especially funny, especially considering how much the previous film was struggling to build a story between its fights, is that in this one, Yuen Wo-Ping seems to have really internalized that what he is good at is fights, and so absolutely everything in the script is built to lead to a fight, to the point of absurdity. Flirting with a girl? Arguing with your father? Trying to buy a snack? Fight, fight, fight. There's a hitman using a house near where Yuen's Beggar So is training Chan's Wong Fei-hung ("Freddy Wong" in the goofy English dub) as a dead-drop, so you know that's going to lead to a fight, and in fact, we're going to jam a wealthy rival to father Wong Kei-ying just to make sure. It's not exactly a good script, but it's one that knows what it's there for.
And, obviously, what it's there for is to set up chances for Chan, Yuen, and Hwang Jeong-Ri (as the assassin "Thunderleg" Yen Tieh-hsin) to show off how they can move and trade punches until you eventually get Jackie doing drunken boxing, which is really just one of the all-time great physical comedy bits in for how he jerks around like a marionette controlled by someone who has never seen a puppet before but somehow unleashes devastating combos . I think what really makes it work, though, is that there is something underneath the fighting that resonates: That last fight is between Chang and Hwang, and Chan's take on Wong Fei-hung spent the start of the movie as a prick who thought he was cool, and to the extent he thought he was capable of improvement, he probably aspired to the kind of cool that Yen represents, dressed in a Nineteenth-Century version of what was natty in the 1970s, the best at what he does, dispensing violence but having a code, that sort of thing, and he eventually rises above it by being loose, letting himself look like a fool but doing the "be water" thing until he has wiped the floor with the killer.
He literally defeats grit with comedy, and he would spend the next 40 or fifty years doing so.
Early to hit a box set, but there are a couple dozen scattered throughout the board, so don't freak out too much.
Dale Evans: 14 ½ stars
Centipede: 8 ¾ stars
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