I'm not sure why I added this cult hit, called merely Five Venoms on Netflix, to my streaming list. Maybe I wanted to ensure that even genres I rarely watch -- martial arts, in this case -- remain available. Maybe the slim lineup of 20th-century features had a hand in my decision. Most likely, it had come up in some discussion of influences on Quentin Tarantino or whatnot. In any event, I watched it recently for the sake of variety.
In what I presume to be several centuries ago in China, a kung fu master on his last legs asks his one remaining student, Yang Tieh, to seek out his long-gone five previous students and, if they've turned to violent crime, kill them. (No middle ground, eh?) He doesn't know what names they're using or even their faces, since they always wore masks, but Yang can meet a man likely to provide further hints and can then keep an eye out for anyone using distinctive fighting moves. Each of the five employs a different style, and Yang has been hastily trained as a jack of all styles and master of none. The master thinks Yang's only hope of defeating any of the five is to ally with one of them, so he'd better hope they're not all evil.
As it happens, all five can be found within a few blocks of each other, even tho most have yet to identify themselves to each other. Yang poses as a beggar near the police station and gradually figures out who's who. Three of them take very little time to make themselves known to the viewers; the other two left me, at least, in doubt for a while. I won't tell you how many are murderous thieves, but it's between one and four, sure enough. I'm somewhat relieved that there's a sliding scale, with not everyone being fully good or fully bad, tho we ultimately know whom to root for.
At no point in this dubbing did I hear the word "venom." Instead, the master and his students form the Poison Clan. The five graduates are called by their numbers in the order in which they started training, the name of a poisonous or venomous animal, or -- far too often -- both, as in "You're #5, the Toad!"
Pretty much all the negative stereotypes of martial arts flicks are accounted for herein: weak plot, lame voice acting, uninspired and faulty translation (they used the wrong numbers twice), unconvincing sound effects, mooks who don't attack en masse...and I'd make a case for sexism. There had been a plan to let one of the five grads be a woman; instead, the only women I recall seeing have no spoken lines, are tied to chairs, and wind up killed along with the rest of the house. Basically, their whole purpose is to emphasize that the villains must be stopped.
Of course, people watch these things for the action, so how's that? Well, there are some impressive-looking moves, helped along by vibrant colors. I can see why all six of the main actors went on to appear in a lot of movies together. Their styles differ enough for me to take notice. I did add a fantasy label because two of them do obviously impossible things, but it's not exactly wuxia, let alone Kung Fu Hustle.
The R rating is actually less for the battles and more for a few scenes of government-administered torture. I don't know how authentic the depiction of the old Chinese justice system is, but be glad you're not on the wrong side of it. In addition to brutality toward suspects, witnesses get locked up to ensure their presence at trials -- and they're not well protected from the people they accuse. There is no jury, and not many testimonies are needed before a judgment. And judges are easily bribed into jailing the wrong man, even in a mass murder case. This is apparently all too common, as Yang decides not to take on the judge in question because an even more corrupt one might turn up.
To the best of my knowledge, there are no other martial arts features on my list. I'm in no hurry to add another.
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