Five Deadly Venoms (Wu Du) (1978)

 

Wu Du

My completely prejudiced and stereotypical image of a Hong Kong kung-fu movie is that of poor production value, thin if any plot, totally exaggerated acrobatics and dubbing on the funny side of bad. I feel convinced there are a lot of those out there, but “Five Deadly Venoms” (“Wu Du”) is none of the above and it may make me revise my view on Hong Kong movies.

The old master of the Poison school (Dick Wei) is dying and sends his last and youngest pupil, Yang Tieh (Chiang Sheng), on a mission: He must find the school’s treasure and give it to charity before his five older schoolmates does. The treasure is hidden with an old man and the five older schoolmates are bound to be looking for it. The kicker is that none of them know each other, except that they exist. The Poison clan, I suppose, are assassins and therefore live and work in hiding. In order to identify them however, the old master gives each a brief introduction: Centipede (Lu Feng), the superfast one, Snake (Wei Pai), who uses one hand for fast, high precision attacks, Scorpion (Sun Chien), with deadly kicks and darts, Toad (Lo Mang), with super strength and invulnerable skin and Gecko (Kuo Chui), who can climb and stand on vertical surfaces. Each of them superior to Yang Tieh.

Now start a cat and mouse game where the various assassins ally with one of the other to find the treasure and rat each other out. The town police force is fighting an uphill battle to get to the bottom of this and it does not help that their leader is completely corrupt and in the pocket of Snake. For a while Yang Tieh keep in the background, but eventually he joins the fight, but with or against who?

This is of course a kung-fu movie and therefore revolves around a lot of awesome fighting. And it is really awesome. The crazy stunts are kept to a minimum (though definitely not absent!) and the fighting looks fairly real. The victims of these fighters look terribly hurt and this is not a movie for the squeamish. The thing with these super fighters is that in one-to-one combat they cannot be defeated, but in a two-to-one situation they are vulnerable (except against henchmen, whose only role is to be afraid and die). So, in every situation the objective, as in real war, is to have local superiority.

What made this movie interesting for me though, was not the fighting but the intricate plot of hidden identities. In this way it can be places somewhere between an Agathe Christie story and a game of chess. Who is who? Who is really aligned with who? And will something happen to tip the balance (yes, it always does). Even without elaborate fighting sequences this would have been an interesting movie.

I was also surprised by the production value of “Five Deadly Venoms”. The colors where knife sharp and the settings were elaborate and to my understanding historically correct, although it is never clear exactly when it is supposed to take place, sort of a pre-europenized China. The acting is, well, not as bad as it could be, but I am never a good judge on East-Asian acting. What I consider overacting could well be par for the course. But most of all I was never bothered by bad dubbing. Maybe because my copy was in Chinese and therefore fitted well to the imagery, but even the grunts and sighing was not as bad or extreme as I would have expected. This movie really had production value.

In the final verdict it comes down to if the movie managed to keep me entertained and interested throughout and it did and plenty. And that makes it a recommendation from me.