Five Shaolin Masters

The Return
Of The Quing

Five Shaolin Masters
aka Five Masters Of Death
aka Shao Lin wu zu
Hong Kong/Taiwan 1974
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so it’s fortunate that I recently watched the Taiwanese movie Return Of The 18 Bronzemen (reviewed here), from the Eureka Masters Of Cinema Cinematic Vengeance box set, because it gives me a little historical context for what is yet another loose fabrication of one of many various tales inspired by real life events. At the end of that curious movie, with its equally bizarre attempt at a resolution, the main antagonist/protagonist of the Quing Empire sent his troops to burn down the Shaolin Temple. This film, the third in Arrow’s Shawscope Volume 1 Blu Ray box set and called Five Shaolin Masters, deals with the aftermath as seen by five surviving students of the temple, as each of the five get into fights with villains as the credits introduce us to each actor and character in turn. As a result of this, the credits take about a quarter of an hour to get through but this is not unusual and I’m pretty sure one of my old Region 3 Celestial Pictures DVDs, I think it might have been one of the Water Margin movies made prior to the Japanese turning it into a TV show, has the credits constantly going throughout most of the movie as each character and actor is introduced when they enter the narrative.

Okay, so the main one of the five is played by David Chiang and, also, we have Sheng Fu as the youngster upstart of the five who is almost, but not quite, serving the same kind of role as Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai (and certainly Horst Buchholz from the remake of that film called The Magnificent Seven). Anyway, the five of them survive the burning and evade their enemies for now but, they are on the run from the Quing government. So they split up and each find allies and rebels, using their secret Shaolin hand gestures which will identify people sympathetic to their cause. They also have to sniff out the ‘traitor’ who was a spy in their midst for the Quing mob.

And, yeah, it’s a strong movie with a heck of a lot of action and some of the more energetic fight scenes I’ve seen in a Shaw Brothers picture... certainly holding their own against the Taiwanese pictures I’d seen recently, it has to be said. Of course, being as it’s a Shaw Brothers production, it looks pretty good (even if I did recognise some of the sets and locations from others of their movies) and, even though the story is beyond simplistic, there’s just more of it and there’s time spent rounding out the characters and concentrating on their dialogue.

There’s also the normal distraction of the soundtrack being obviously borrowed from a whole host of other films. Now, as it happens, I couldn’t recognise any of the scores here but I certainly know enough to recognise I was listening to needle drops from Italian soundtracks. Arrow’s wonderful accompanying booklet put me straight to the films being used and they certainly are Italian scores, by the likes of Piccioni and Rustichelli but, I’m glad to say I’d not seen the particular films in question (which makes me feel a little better about not being able to identify the scores, for sure).

By the end of the movie, the five heroes decide to return to the ruins of their former Shaolin Temple and train hard in fighting techniques they believe will help them to defeat the specialist fighting styles of the various main heavies who are pursuing them. So one practices with a thing he calls a chain whip for example... while another starts practicing pole fighting techniques to deal with a bad guy who’s speciality is an axe on a chain (which he less than subtly, when he is de-chained, converts into an axe on a stick so he can carry on with the lethal duel). One guy, in order to defy the striking blows of one of the opponents, practices a kind of tumbler, ground fighting technique which, although partially effective, looks quite silly on the extended training montage we see cross cut  together of the five as they spend a year training at their new, advanced fighting styles. In fact, when this guy starts rolling around on the ground, well... all I will say is that, in my head, Ollie & Jerry were singing There’s No Stopping Us to accompany the visuals.

And the final fight, where the five stand against an army of around eight to ten of their combined enemies, which keeps cross cutting from one protagonist to another, takes up pretty much the last 20 minutes of the movie. And, contrary to how things might have ended in a Western made movie of that particular time period, not all of the five heroes make it out of the encounter alive... I’ll say that much.

And now that I have said that much, I’ll acknowledge that I haven’t really got that much else to say about Five Shaolin Masters. Other than that it’s hugely entertaining and one of the more engaging of the Shaw Brothers produced movies I’ve seen over the years. Definitely something to recommend if you are into these kinds of kung fu movies and I’m definitely looking forward to the next film in the set, for sure.