Welcome back to Foreign Film February. This is one of my longest-running movie themes. I think it is second only to 31 Days of Horror,in terms of longevity. I’ve been doing it since February 2022.
It is the 6th of February, and this is my first post to Foreign Film February, which feels a little late, but also reminds me of how much I’ve been stepping back from my movie themes. My original theme month was 31 Days of Horror, and I initially tried to write about one movie per day. But that is difficult, and all my other themes quickly became less than that.
Still, I always tried to write as many posts as I could with each theme. Some did better than others. But now I write a Friday Night Horror column, and a Pick of the Week, plus I do Five Cool Things every other week, and I’ve been writing a lot of reviews for Cinema Sentries. None of that is going to stop, and so there is a realization that I won’t be writing as many posts about each month’s theme. I’ll still try to do a theme each month; just don’t expect so many posts.
I thought I’d start this month’s FFF with something fun. I’ve written about the Shaw Brothers films numerous times, and I am a big fan of the studio’s kung fu output. This film comes from Arrow Video’s first big boxed set of Shaw Brothers films and is one of their most popular films.
Five Deadly Venoms is a clear favorite of Quentin Tarantino’s. It likely influenced the fictional TV show that Mia Wallace from Pulp Fiction starred in, The Deadly Viper Squad, and certainly influenced the Kill Bill films (there is a fan theory that the events of Kill Bill are actually part of that series, which makes it all a fictional TV series within the real Pulp Fiction universe, but I digress.)
It is a strange film within the Shaw Brothers filmography, as it relies more on story than most, with the action sequences taking a bit of a back seat. At the heart of the film is a mystery, or rather multiple mysteries, as we’ll see.
It begins with the dying master of the Five Deadly Vipers clan sending his last pupil, Yang Tieh (Chiang Sheng), on a mission to stop the other clan members dead in their tracks. The Vipers, it seems, have been up to no good; they have become an evil clan. It is unclear whether the master set them up this way (probably) and now that he’s dying he wants to set things right, or if they went wrong somewhere along the way.
Either way, Yang Tieg is now charged with finding them and stopping them from getting some mysterious treasure. Finding that treasure and giving it to charity will put karma on his side.
The trouble is each of the five clan members (and the dude who has the treasure) is a mystery. When they left the master’s teachings, they took on new identities.
They are all likely in one village where the treasure should also be. When Yang Tieg arrives in that village, he finds a family has been brutally murdered. The treasure may have been stolen from them.
So, Yang Tieg must find the treasure and figure out who each of the five clan members are. The five clan members are all trying to find the treasure. And now the police have a murder to solve.
I’m not against convoluted mysteries, but this one stays confusing and not all that interesting. The script never leans into one of them. Instead we wander from one clan member to the next, and then hang out with the governor and the police trying to solve the murder.
What is cool about this movie is those five clan members – the Five Deadly Venoms—follow a specific style of fighting: Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard, and Toad. The clan master introduces them early in the film. Each of them wears totally rad masks and demonstrates their fighting style (Centipede is so fast with his arms it looks like 1,000 punches come at you at once – Snake crawls on the ground, etc.). Each fighter fights like his namesake.
That stuff is so much fun. Unfortunately, because each clan member is hiding from the other, they hardly wear their masks, and they rarely use their special techniques. This film would be 1,000 times cooler if it was just Yang Tieh discovering each of the Vipers one by one and fighting them in their full regalia.
There are moments of interest throughout. At one point the evil governor puts one of the Vipers into an Iron Maiden like device with a thousand nails that is suppossed to find his one weak spot. Another guy gets a thin knife stuck into his brain through his nose.
But mostly we get a convoluted mystery. The finale does give us some cool fighting, and that is worth the price of admission. But it sure is a slog getting there.
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