Kant Miss Kung Fu Klassics: Five Element Ninjas (1982)

Title: Five Element Ninjas

Director: Chang Cheh

Review:

Five Element Ninjas is a fast paced and extremely entertaining Kung Fu film from famed Chinese director Chang Cheh. It is a film filled with revenge, betrayal, ninjas, and non stop kung fu action! It tells the tale of two Kung Fu schools who are battling to see who is the best of the two. Both schools bring their best martial artist to duel with each other, but only one will emerge as victorious, the best. The desire to be the best martial arts school in the land prompts one of the schools to cheat and so the end up relying on the aid of the notorious “Five Element Formation”, a group of ninjas that is segmented into five groups, each of the ninja groups attacks by using five elements which include: Fire, Water, Gold, Earth and Wood. Will the good guys have what it takes to go up against the Five Element Ninjas?

We're the good guys 'cause we're dressed in white!

Without a doubt, this one is one of my favorite Chang Cheh movies so far. It’s filled with some of the best Kung Fu fights you are going to see on any movie. These actors/martial artists are so skilled and have such speed! These guys are so good you will probably be tempted to hit that replay button to see some of the moves they pull off, I know I did! And the film has such a diverse use of weaponry! This is one of those films where each fight uses a different kind of weapon, each amusing in its own way. There’s giant axes, all sorts of different swords, poles, ninja stars, you name it, you’ll see it on this film. The first ten minutes of the film starts with a tournament between two schools, each school brings their best fighters forward against each other which makes for some really interesting fights. And all this awesomeness happens without the Ninjas even being introduced yet! By the way, one of the most enjoyable aspects for me on this one where the ninjas! You want to see the coolest ninjas on any film? Check this movie out! There’s a whole school of these guys! Stealthy, deadly and with a huge assortment of weapons! I love how a whole bunch of them will jump out of nowhere without making a single sound! These guys will whip out weapons you’ve never seen on any other movie before. So be on the look out for those.

The story though simple, grabs you. The good guys’ teacher is poisoned with a venom that will incapacitate him for three whole months. So he will not be able to use his Kung Fu skills to fight in the schools name, and so his pupils are forced to go up against the other school that is defying them. On their way to the duel a trap is set for them to battle against the Five Element Ninjas. The good guys are not familiar with the techniques used by the FiveE Element Ninjas, so it’s a total massacre, with the good guys getting some of their best fighters literally slaughtered! There is this one gruesome fight where the earth ninjas have knives popping out from the ground, injuring the good guys feet and legs. These knives rip the flesh off of the good guys legs, and he fights as chunks of flesh are hanging out of his legs! But he gives a good fight even though he is practically stepping on his own innards as he fights! Gruesome! Cringe inducing, and also very Chang Cheh! This director loved bloody action on his films! His heroes really suffer on his films.

Hey! Thats four against one! No fair!

Speaking of Chang Cheh as a director, this movie has a lot of elements that you can come to expect from a Chang Cheh/Kung Fu movie. Rivaling schools, Kung Fu fantasy elements, heroes who have to go and train in order to be able to face their enemy (this one being the most reoccurring of all) and finally, I noticed something that happens a lot in Chang Cheh movies: the female is the source of all evil. It’s something that he seems to do in many of his films, where the women are not to be trusted at all. They are always backstabbers somehow (sometimes even literally backstabbers! On this film a female ninja infiltrates the good guys school to get to know their secrets and plans, stirring the roosters nest as they say. Her intrusion into the school is one of the more interesting moments of the film, specially considering what happens because of it. I guess Chang Chech didn’t have the best relationships in the world and this somehow mirrored onto his movies? I don’t know, but the case is he does this a lot on his films! Even in The One Armed Swordsman a female is the one responsible for making the titular character loose an entire arm!

Never trust a female in a Chang Cheh film!

The film is not without its shortcomings though. This is one of the cheesiest of the Chang Cheh films I’ve seen. The Five Element Ninjas sometimes come off as funny, they each dress in the color of their element, the wood ones wear brown garments, the gold ones wear gold, the water ones wear blue and so forth. The wood ninjas were the silliest of all because the hid behind trees and tried to camouflage themselves as the tree, they looked kind of silly. The water ninjas were kind of funny too because all they did was swim around the water, I mean, couldn’t the good guys see them? I didn’t enjoy the use of reverse photography on some of the shots involving the water ninjas emerging from the water. But whatever, this is a Kung Fu fantasy, people float above water, ninjas travel through the earth, disappear, these guys appear to have all sorts of mystical powers, which of course is part of the charm of these movies! One other negative point for me is that to me, of all of Chang Cheh movies, this is the one where you can notice that the exteriors are all sets, with fake skies and clouds. I’ve never really loved this about these movies, but on this one is more evident. Still, the movie is so entertaining that I simply ignored this. Modern Kung Fu films do not suffer from this ailment thanks to the aid of CGI.

But anyhows, once the good guys train to overcome the Five Element Ninjas its payback time and we get treated to the last half of the film which is basically the good guys confronting the Five Element Ninjas yet again, only this time, they are ready for them! It is interesting to see them overcome the Five Elements. This is a great Kung Fu Fantasy and I recommend it as one of the most entertaining and fun ones I have seen to date.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Kant Miss Kung Fu Klassics: The Return of the One Armed Swordsman (1969)

Title: The Return of the One Armed Swordsman (1969)

Director: Chang Cheh

Review:

Thanks to the Weinstein Company re-releasing a bunch of the Shaw Brothers Kung Fu movies on DVD I've finally been able to catch up with a lot of these martial arts films that I had not yet seen. For example, I recently had the pleasure of watching The Return of the One Armed Swordsman, which by the way I bought on a whim. I simply said “whatever, lets see what this is all about”. I’m glad I picked this one up! This is one of the most enjoyable Kung Fu movies I have EVER seen! Upon doing a little research on the film and its director, I find out that the fact that this movie is so awesome isnt pure happenstance. The filmmakers behind this movie were masters on their own right!

The Return of the One Armed Swordsman tells the story of this tournament that’s being held by a clan of swordsmen called ‘The Eight Demon Swordsmen’. This clan has invited all the senior members of each sword school and asked them to participate in this tournament to determine once and for all which of all the schools is the best of all. Problem is that if you don’t go to this tournament, you’ll be killed! In other words, you have to fight or you die! This naturally forces all the senior members of the different schools to go. I guess they figure “sure, what the hell; this is what we train for anyways!” Unfortunately, there is a trick behind the whole thing. Once all the senior masters are in the tournament, they are taken hostage by the Eight Demon Swordsmen! So now, it’s up the sons and daughters of the sword masters to rescue their fathers! Can the junior swordsmen take the Eight Demon Swordsmen on their own? Or will they need the aid of someone with far more experience and swordsmanship?

Before talking about Return of the One Armed Swordsman I guess it is important to mention that this is a sequel to a film called The One Armed Swordsman (1967). The cast and crew from the original film return, with The One Armed Swordsman being played by the same actor, Jimmy Yu Wang. The first film is a great one, but it’s a bit different from its sequel, the first film is more of a drama, with few martial arts sequences through out the film. The focus of that movie is not the action, or the fights, but the story, the drama. This is great because I’m all for a well told story, and for all intents and purpose, the original film is just that. We get to see how the One Armed Swordsman looses his arm, and why. It’s a great film, but the sequel is a bit more entertaining in a way. Its more action packed!

Should I or shouldnt I? That is the question!

This second film plays out a lot like a western, you know, kind of like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992). If you remember that one, we have this old gunslinger trying to retire and live the quiet life, until he is called out of retirement to help a town with his gun shooting skills. On Return of the One Armed Swordsman, Fang Kang (the titular character) is trying to live the quiet life of a farmer with his wife. He has left his sword fighting days behind. It seems that he will be happy growing rice on his fields for the time being. That is, until the younger students from all the different sword schools come knocking at his door requesting his legendary abilities to help them rescue their seniors from the clutches of the Eight Demon Swordsmen. And of course, Fang Kang seeing the great evil that is being done agrees to help them. Now, after this set up, the film is a non stop roller coaster of action all the way to the very end!

The good guys have eight masters to fight through before they finally arrive at the school where their fathers are being held hostage, so it’s kind of like a road trip where along the way, every five minutes we stumble upon a different bad guy. And each one of them has a different fighting style, a different weapon. And this is really where this movie earns its awesomeness. The good guys use regular swords. For example, Fang Kang uses a sword that belonged to his father, which was cut in half in a brutal battle. But Fang Kang is most agile when using this damaged sword, it’s kind of his thing. But the bad guys? Man, these guys go all out in using awesome weapons! One has a scythe that is attached to chain, and there is this whole sequences where he uses this weapon, that is just wow. We get swords that extend themselves, we have shield that are made of knives. And there is this one amazing sequence where the good guys finally arrive to rescue their fathers…that is one awesome brawl! Trust me; you haven’t seen a good Kung Fu fight until you’ve seen this one! The villains all have these shields that have swords attached to them, when they throw them like frisbees they impale their opponents! Trust me; you have to see it to believe it!

I was blown away by this movie! It was only later (thanks to this awesome blog post from Cool Ass Cinema on Chang Cheh’s best films) that I discovered that the reason why this film is so awesome is because of the director behind it. Chang Cheh is this legendary Chinese director that made hundreds of films, many of them Kung Fu films. Upon watching this one I couldn’t help thinking that this film along with a couple other Chang Cheh films (like Five Element Ninjas (1982)) might have been the catalyst behind John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China (1986). The thing that makes this director’s films great is that he takes special care in making sure that visually, everything looks beautiful. The colors, the sets, the wardrobe. He makes sure his characters are fleshed out and have a meaning and a purpose for everything they do. And finally, Chang Cheh knew what people wanted from a good Kung Fu flick: Non stop Kung Fu Action! And by awesome I mean bloody! And freaking entertaining! Everything is made that much more interesting because attention to script and storyline are not sacrificed at all, they are excellent as well. So, add this one to your list. One of these days, when you feel like checking out an old school Kung Fu flick, pop this one in, you wont be disappointed!

Rating: 5 out of 5