Crippled Avengers

People With Physical
Disabilities Assemble

Crippled Avengers
aka
Return Of The
Five Deadly Venoms
aka Can que
Hong Kong 1978
Directed by Cheh Chang
Shaw Brothers/Celestial Pictures
Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so this one’s quite fun. Crippled Avengers is the 10th of the 12 films featured in Arrow’s generous but costly ShawScope Volume One Blu Ray box set and, for a while in the US, it was released under the title Return Of The Five Deadly Venoms and marketed as a sequel to The Five Venoms (reviewed by me here). All I can say to that is... there’s absolutely no story connection with the former film at all. The only minor bit of glue attempting to hold that marketing campaign gimmick together is that five of the lead actors here also starred in the former movie.

This film deals with Kuan Tai Chen as Black Tiger Dao Tian-Du and it’s hard to tell if you should be rooting for his character or not. At the start of the film, three avenging heroes seeking justice for some misdeed come to slay him at Black Tiger Manor but, initially settle for cutting the legs off his wife (killing her in the process) and chopping the arms off his young son. If Dao Tian-Du wasn’t completely evil then, he certainly is after dispatching the three with his martial arts skills. Over a period of years he creates and finally perfects special iron arms for his now grown son, which are bizarrely flexible in their science defying way and can also shoot darts out the fingers. Hey, he can even shoot the fists out on extenders and so his son is, somewhat, turned into Inspector Gadget. Except, he’s a ‘deadly martial arts, angry at the world Gadget’ who, with his father, hold the local district under a reign of fear, as they render any challengers and upstarts who try to deal with them, pretty useless, crippling them so they have to live with their horrible disability the way that... well let’s call him Iron Arms... had to live with no arms.

So, long story short, various upstarts who make up the four title heroes of this film, all come a cropper at the hands of this iron handed son. One is rendered blind when he has his eyes poked out by those steely digits in a sequence where, unless Arrow are being dishonest with the uncut status of these works, the director inserts a half a second or so of red to try and enhance the impact of the moment, much like Hitchcock had a bunch of red frame cut into the villain’s suicide scene in Spellbound. Another one is rendered deaf and mute while a third has his legs chopped off. A fourth one, a stranger who tries to avenge these three, has his head partially crushed and is left, with his martial arts skills in tact but, yeah, pretty much a complete idiot as he mentally regresses to childish ways. The three others manage to get him back to his master in another region and then all four are trained up in the ways of Kung Fu for three years, so they can go back and exact revenge on Dao Tian-Du, his son and his gang of skilled kung fu experts.

So, for example, the blinded man learns how to extend his other senses such as hearing and, in essence, becomes a lethal, blind martial artist, just like the hero of all those Zatoichi movies. And flexible iron legs are made for the legless man, as he becomes an expert in various acrobatic moves such as jumping through small steel rings and weaponising them like a lethal hula hoop.

And, yeah, it all leads to the inevitable showdown with various factions of the main villains’ men in some spectacular displays of kung fu fighting which, despite the US marketing, make this a much more watchable and entertaining movie than The Five Venoms, for sure. One of the villains even has a weapon called a ‘meteor hammer’ which, in actual fact, is just a big metal ball on a chain and it’s obviously the influence on the weapon of choice for Gogo Yubari’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume One.

With one of the avenging heroes acting like a complete childish idiot and the mute/deaf guy being very enthusiastic and acting like a kung fu version of Harpo Marx... or at least Nick Cravat... the film is full of characters just fooling around and performing zany but, admirably energetic and skilled, acrobatics. This is mixed with some fairly ballet-like but brutal kung fu scenes which arent afraid to ramp up the goriness at certain points. And all matched with the director’s penchant for fast zooms to hone in on details and what looks like some fairly overly used, recycled but still pretty effective sets.

There seems to be a bit of needle drop in terms of the score and there are certainly some De Wolf library cues at any rate, three of which are included on the second of Arrow’s bonus soundtrack CD compilation discs bundled in with this lovely presentation box. And, really, there’s not much more to say about Crippled Avengers other than, I had a pretty good time with this one and it’s certainly one of the better and more physically spectacular of the films included in this set.