Viking Night - Shawtober September Part II: The Five Deadly Venoms
By Bruce Hall
September 13, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The now defunct Shaw Brothers Studios produced some of the most exciting martial arts films ever made. If you were into that kind of thing during their heyday of the 1970s and 80s, you no doubt remember their logo. The famous Shaw Brothers “clamshell” not only looked like it was painted on someone’s office door, but it was modeled after the Warner Brothers Pictures logo. The Shaws picked the right people to emulate, as their work would eventually become just as enduring and significant.
Along those lines came The Five Venoms, exploding onto American screens toward the end of one of our most miserable decades. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, and the already red-hot “kung fu” craze shifted into overdrive.
One of the first things you may have already noticed is that so far, I've called this film by two different titles. Fun fact: it's very common for films released internationally to go by a number of names. For a variety of reasons, the title by which different people know a certain film could depend on what the print was called the first time they saw it. What I'm trying to say is that for the duration of this article, I'm going to stick with The Five Venoms, Five Venoms or Venoms for short, and perhaps D5VNMZ for my next license plate.
I hope that’s ok with you, because I’m totally doing that.
Like most martial arts films, Five Venoms is underpinned by various social and cultural themes, punctuated by sternum shattering chest punches. Of course, morality being something most only value under duress, there’s also an abundance of kickass, slow-motion fight scenes the likes of which Carter-era audiences had never seen. Compared to the wild haymakers and awkward drop-kicks seen in most American films, this must have seemed like outright sorcery. Also, like many martial arts films, this one is part of a series. In this case one tied together by broad set of ideas, rather than a literal narrative. In other words they’re not sequels as much as they are hyper-violent fables designed to present a unique moral dilemma to a new set of characters each time
The film's namesake is the once feared Venom Clan, which has fallen on hard times as the film opens. The school's Master (Dick Wei) is dying, and has grown concerned with reports that his former pupils have turned to evil. He dispatches his last student, Yang (Chiang Sheng), to investigate and if necessary to murder his former colleagues. Unfortunately each of the former pupils fought anonymously, making them hard to track down. Each code name represented their respective style: Centipede (Lu Feng), Snake (Wei Pei), Scorpion (Sun Chien), Lizard (Kuo Chi) and Toad (Lo Mang - and save your emails; science tells us that snakes are not lizards).
That's right, even the Master doesn't know the true identities of these men (throughout their training each wore a groovy masks depicting their namesake). No, that doesn’t make any sense on any level when you stop to think about it. But as I said earlier, these are stories of legend. And like any legend, getting granular with logic will only serve to obscure the greater lesson. Honor, duty, brotherhood and justice are the name of the game, and there’s no middle ground. Obviously Yang is going to catch up with the Five Venoms, and obviously there’s going to be a lot of fighting.
But what makes this story so thrilling is that it in no way unfolds the way you'd expect it to. If you’re used to morality plays that present Good and Evil as a binary choice, you’re in for a surprise. The Five Venoms pushes back on the genre, resulting in a far more compelling narrative than you’d have had with only Two Venoms.
This is much more than an escalating series of increasingly tedious Boss battles. Each of the Venoms is indeed after a common goal, but they're not necessarily all working together and they do not necessarily share the same interests. For that matter, not all of them even still subscribe to the code of honor that once governed their lives. One or two of them might even feel more than a little nihilistic about the whole thing. Yang is warned that he will have to win over a couple of the Venoms in order to beat the rest, because Yang himself wasn't able to refine his abilities before the Master fell ill. This means determining who is motivated by greed, and who is motivated by honor.
And possibly also greed.
If you’re still reading, let’s assume you’ll enjoy the requisite scenes of astonishing high level combat. But while genre rules allow us some leeway with the laws of physics, there's nothing campy about The Five Venoms. If you’re the kind of person who associates kung fu movies with cheese, prepare to indulge yourself in the cruel crimson wine that is buckets of human blood. More than one on-screen death will make your skin crawl, with one sequence of significant cruelty coming immediately to mind. But we’re not talking about gratuitous gore. The shifting set of mirrors that is the story’s moral center contributes to the weight of most of these scenes.
This is not a brutal film so much as it is a clinically uncompromising one. The Five Venoms is a straight up moral drama with little time for sentiment or humor. The story boasts some surprisingly powerful moments, as Director Chang Cheh and producer Runme Shaw knew their cast well, and wrote for each according to his gifts. This is the kind of movie that demands its own line of merchandise, because each of the main characters is a distinct, marketable personality.
Kuo Chui's Lizard alone should have gotten his own damn movie. He's utterly brilliant here and it's a shame none of the Venom Mob ever became true stars in their own right. Fortunately for us, they left behind a glorious body of work that continues to stand up to scrutiny many decades on. And an integral part of that legendary tradition is The Five Venoms. If you've never had the pleasure, and are at all a fan of the genre, see it NOW and rest assured - you will be glad you did.
I await your thanks.