This is a cult classic in the Shaw Brother library. It’s got elements (pun intended) of weapons, ninjas, crazy effects, gore and some extreme violence as well as Chang Cheh directing it. In a way, it’s near the tail end of the Venom mob era with only Lo Meng remaining (unless you count the 7th Venom Wong Lik). However, compared to other fans of this movie, I’m not as sold as it sometimes being lifted as “the best” of its genre for the time.
The plot is quite simple where one clan at the beginning is challenged by a rival kung fu clan. The rival clan mostly is defeated in a series of 1:1 (and one 2v2) quick contests, leading a samurai to appear and defend the rival clan’s master. The samurai is defeated leading him to commit sepuku as well as poisoning the head of the clan with a spiked ring along with issuing a challenge by his friend who runs a ninja clan.
Already, the premise is pretty dodgy where a samurai shows up to fight on behalf of a disreputable clan. On top of that, this samurai is friends with a ninja head which just sounds like BS. If anything this was just to create some theater to justify katana sword play and kung fu being superior to the Japanese martial arts (the first challenger to the samurai in the dubbed version has a mousy voice and denigrates the samurai being of Japanese descent, which shows me some of Chang Cheh’s racism towards the Japanese).
At any rate, the head of the clan decides to accept the challenge by sending out all but two of his best students to see if the ninja are real. In the meantime, as the head has been poisoned, he’s forced to stay behind to recuperate while the remaining clan fortify their base. The students mostly go in pairs to investigate these challenges which are five areas in total, each representing a certain “element” with a corresponding group of ninjas boasting styles related to that element.
The first is the gold challenge where ninjas (oddly enough) are dressed in gold lame outfits, bearing bright, blinding shields that shoot darts and carry swords (probably ninja-to). Of course, the two guys get blinded and are slaughtered. Next, we have the wood ninja where the ninja hide in trees and are camouflaged with their clothes. The slowly decimate the two challengers with some sort of brass knuckles, claws and darts. Afterwards, we encounter the water ninja who are dressed in blue, swim around in a river and carry harpoons and ropes to snag their opponents. Then the person who is like the subleader of the clan encounters the fire ninja. The fire ninja not only have swords but bear little fire sticks that blow dense red smoke to blind and confuse the subleader. He actually manages to get a few kills in but not before getting pierced by a sword. The ninja leader comes out to greet the subleader and the subleader rips out the sword in his stomach in order to die with honor and not give his name away.
Finally, we encounter the earth ninja who lie beneath the ground and poke this one guy in the groin multiple times. This possibly is the nastiest, cringeworthy dead in a Shaw Brothers movie I’ve ever seen. Essentially, the hero is stabbed multiple times to the point where his intestines slowly leak out from his pants and as he tries to defend himself against the ninja leader (who makes an appearance once this guy is seriously injured), the hero steps on his intestines! It’s fucking gross. Yes, the effects were bad but the thought was awful. In turn, the ninja leader just strikes the guy with his long blade which seems mild compared to FUCKING STEPPING ON YOUR OWN INTESTINES.
Thereafter, the bodies of the party are returned to the base where the heroes examine each one and realize that the threat not only is real but incredibly dangerous. So they increase their security but are soon intercepted by a female spy. Lo Meng, who plays the kind but stupid other subleader, takes the girl in, despite how the main hero, played by Ricky Cheng, is immediately suspicious of her. For the duration of the girl’s stay, Ricky is suspicious and treats her like trash, which oddly causes her to like him.
Eventually, the ninjas attack the base with the girl playing a flute to hide the noises from the alarms from Lo Meng. Just before though, she tries to seduce Lo Meng and Lo Meng attempts to show his honor by refusing her body and saying that they should get properly married. Like WTF? There’s no intimacy nor reason for him to like her. This is such a stupid thing on Lo Meng’s part but it could be a bad translation. Either way, her distraction serves enough of a purpose as the ninjas easily infiltrate the HQ and find the leader’s chambers. They lock the guy in with some ninja tools then shoot rockets through his window so he would either burn or suffocate to death.
At that point, Lo Meng and Ricky figure that they’re being attacked with Lo Meng telling the girl to hide. But she spits a dart into his shoulder and he realizes his folly. Again, because he doesn’t go on the assault, she’s able to stab him with a long knife hidden in a bouquet of flowers. It’s a fatal blow effectively but Lo Meng with his remaining strength decides to try and save the master. Still, it’s futile as there’s too many enemies and he’s weakened. Eventually, the ninja master steps in and delivers the final blow as the master (in comedic fashion) dies of smoke inhalation. Seriously, the dude clutches at his throat and just does a sideways rigor mortis. It’s fucking hilarious.
However, Ricky is captured but is granted leniency by the girl. So they tie him up and place him in a room for her to watch over. During the night, Ricky figures out how to escape the rope bondage as it’s revealed that he once had a different master that taught him how to untie himself from a ninja knot. Like how fucking convenient is that? Anyway, he keeps the appearance of the ropes still binding him as the girl comes in to taunt him. Then he frees himself and takes her hostage to escape. When the ninja master sees that the girl is scantily clothed, he ends up punishing her with hard labor.
In turn, Ricky runs off and somehow finds his old master, getting him trapped again. But he implores the old master to be fully trained to defeat the ninja. So we’re introduced to three others, including Wong Lik, Chu Ko and Yu Tai-Ping. These guys have been tied to many other Venoms movies, usually as villains or side kicks but never the main heroes. So here, we get them. Unlike the rest of the Venoms, these three simply don’t have the charisma, presence or whatever that made the original Venoms special. But I’ll address that later. At any rate, Ricky goes to train with these three to counteract the various five element ninja styles and just before Ricky leaves, he’s given a special key that no one knows what the hell it’ll be used for.
Ricky goes solo back to his base to issue a challenge back to the ninja head in a similar fashion as before. He acrobatically escapes a few attempts against him while the ninja leader tells the girl to repent she should follow Ricky to learn about his newfound skills, brothers and master. As she leaves, the leader also tells a few extra ninjas to follow her in case she fails.
So the girl meets up with Ricky and tries to get information out of him. But he already detects the other ninjas and stabs her before he gives her any information. However, she honestly didn’t know about the ninjas who followed her and dies in confusion. Ricky, of course, takes out these ninjas then questions himself whether he did the right thing in killing her. I mean, here the acting is really bad and their relationship hadn’t been well established so her death felt bland. If anything, they built her up as a nuisance (literally Ricky would call her Nuisance) and it’s hard to find any sympathy towards her especially for how she murdered the likeable and nice Lo Meng.
So for the next five sections, we repeat the series of challenges with Ricky and his three new brothers going to each area to re-challenge the elemental ninjas. They start off with this long, metal axes which come apart and do a bunch of cool things (like the rear blade becomes a kind of detachable half circle knife). In the gold ninja fight, their biggest move is to close their eyes and fight blind. Then they have a kind of cheerleader formation routine to deflect the shooting shield darts with the flat of their axes.
With the wood ninja section, they remove the crescent blade and attach it to a chain to wield it like a long whip to combat the short distanced wood ninjas along with high leaps into the trees. One of the more gruesome deaths involves one of the ninjas effectively being quartered where his limbs are ripped apart when the blades sink into them and the brothers pull him apart. These brothers are pretty sadistic btw as they offer smiles each time they succeed in their maniacal and bloody devastation of these ninjas (which I see more as lame acting in trying to be charismatic)
The water ninja section goes by quickly as they use their axes as more like a staff type of weapon which has retractable spear tip and side point that counteracts the ropes from the ninjas. They spear the ninjas to death and use part of their shirts as some sort of combineable net device to snag the last guy while water gliding across the river and stabbing him to death. Honestly, this was one of the most ridiculous moments that seemed to be where a lot of kung fu movies were heading. Again more on this after.
Then fire comes up and the main defense here is a flag thing that is attached to their staff/spears. It’s kinda like the other movie Spearman/The Flag of Iron in how they use the flag like component as a weapon. Here, the flag helps to disperse the smoke and confuse the ninjas to allow our heroes to job these guys out.
If you can’t tell, I’ve been going through the motions with this “review” and only highlighting the main parts. But there’s really nothing compelling to say outside of the weapons themselves because it’s just a gauntlet squash match at this stage.
At any rate, we finally get to the last part, the earth section. Here, the heroes turn their staves into a kind of stilts to walk upon, which helps them to avoid the ground spears. And for that matter, their weapons come apart in half. So it’s just really crazy engineered weapons that somehow are more like Inspector Gadget/MacGuver level shit rather than realistic weapons that ought to fall apart in a hard hitting fight. You get my tone.
All the earth ninjas get squashed leading to the final fight with the ninja leader. Of course, this fight is more challenging and our heroes fight the leader one by one. Heck, Ricky tells his brothers that they should fight the guy one at a time. I think it’s some stupid Chinese honor combat thing because he briefly mentions the Chinese thing and you just look at how the ninja slaughters these guys almost the entire fight. At one point, the leader goes underground and returns by using his belt (which came off during the fight) to hand cuff Ricky’s legs to his weapons. So Wong Lik is taken out to help Ricky while the other two get screen time to show off their skillz (meaning flip around and get cut up)
So as Ricky and Wong Lik struggle to figure out how to get the belt off, Wong Lik remembers that he has a key that was dropped by Ricky in a previous fight. Why he didn’t outright give Ricky the key back is silly but this whole movie is silly. At any rate, we get the Chekov’s Gun moment where the key serves a purpose (and why this particular key could unlock a specific belt in the whole world is anyone’s guess), which allows Ricky and Wong Lik to get back into the fight.
By now, the heroes have been worn down quite a bit while the leader remains unscathed. So Ricky decides to abandon his weapon and try and subdue the ninja leader with his own weapon in the belt. The ninja leader uses some sort of foot claw thing which prevents the others from getting close. In turn, after a series of flashbacks, Ricky sacrifices himself by letting the ninja leader to dig his feet into his chest so that Ricky and restrain the leader. Then the leader gets stabbed and falls into the earth while the heroes pull him apart. There’s a sickly moment of the leader’s presumable heart pumping out blood from underneath the dirt mound as he dies off. While we don’t actually get to see the body split in half, the implication of what happens is quite horrible.
As the heroes scramble to grab the fallen Ricky, they ask him, “Why’d you do it?” and he replies that he didn’t know himself but was probably thinking of the girl. As he dies smiling (which is odd), he points to the ninja earth sign so that the brothers (including one dude who was severely cut up) to smash it into bits.
So this movie for some is a classic. I think it’s stupid. There’s a lot wrong with it where I hated the general direction that kung fu movies were going around this time. First, the plot is just dull. The movie itself doesn’t get boring but there’s nothing intriguing about the plot itself, nothing thought provoking or profound. It’s just Chang Cheh going through the motions at this stage of his career.
The characters are dull too. I think they were trying to build up Ricky as a new Chang Cheh favorite because of his acrobatic talent (he’s one of the better Taiwanese ones around that time) but he just lacked….a LOT. No charisma, just smiles all the time, one dimensional fighting skills and all he could do is flip around. Now, he could flip around great but the so-called martial arts in this film were more about the flash or as McMahon would say “the sizzle but not the steak.” I feel that Chang Cheh had been trying to establish more stars in the way that he would have David Chiang and Ti Lung -> Fu Sheng and Chi Kuan Chun -> The Five Venoms, etc.
Around this time with movies like The Ten Tigers of Kwang Tung, you could see a bizarre, confusing plot in place and a bunch of new heroes (their version of a new five) that never could get over by themselves and with lame/bad chemistry and an unimposing villain (kinda like Jack Perry and the Bucks in AEW) while the older generation were still the big stars. But something was massively lacking and it could’ve been a combination of things.
At the same time, Lau Kar-Leung was progressing kung fu and other ways of telling kung fu in his films. With Chang Cheh’s films, there was a formula, generally of tragedy. The heroes would go out on top and there would be massacres, etc. But I feel that his work started to get stale around this time. The real story and selling point of films like this weren’t the plot nor even the actors. It was the crazy kung fu.
The thing about the kung fu elements and violence though is that it simply felt too outrageous. As things progressed around this time, the kung fu started to use more wire works, more outrageous flips, etc. that made everything look nonsensical. The older Lau Kar-Leung stuff, while slower, felt more genuine with less edits, actual kung fu and moments to digest everything. Like Buddha’s Palm looks awful but had that similar feeling and was made around this time.
Also, too many things were arbitrary and I did not feel connected to anyone in this story. Older Chang Cheh films were more compelling because the characters, theme or story were more important than the kung fu itself. Some of the people from Five Elements Ninjas were in Chinatown Kid but that movie still resonates with me because the characters were far more compelling and there was a heartfelt story that I think still can apply now.
At any rate, this movie is a fun movie when you’re bored but it’s not a great movie compared to older ones. The weapons themselves are cool but I hate when that aspect becomes the story which is why I’m not as huge of a fan of this compared to others.
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