Five Deadly Venoms

Five Deadly Venoms (Wu Du) (1978)

Runtime: 102 minutes

Directed by: Chang Cheh

Starring: Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Philip Kwok, Lo Mang, Wei Pei

From: Shaw Brothers

Whether you want to call this Five Deadly Venoms or The Five Venoms, this is one of the more famous Shaw Brothers films and yet I hadn't seen it before. So, to see my first film from the studio in a few months I figured this would be the perfect thing to see and that's what I did when this was on the El Rey Network last night. The Letterboxd review is below:

Once again I realized that it had been far too long since I had seen a Shaw Brothers film. In the upcoming week I'll fix that by seeing more than one movie from them, and not all of them will be their typical martial arts films. This movie was on the El Rey Network and somehow I had never seen this-one of the most famous entries from the studio-so I knew I had to check it out.

The movie is all about the Poison Clan; the master and leader of the clan is dying. His pupil Yang Tieh is sent on a mission to find the master's pal; he's rich and there's the possibility the title clan (five former students who were always masked; they each fight in a unique wacky style. They are Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard, and Toad) may attack him for his cash. Yang has to try and find the quintet and not only discover their true identities but also see who he can trust... and you'll also get to see which one has a great maniacal laugh.

As I heard from other reviewers it was more about the mystery than the fighting. There's a lot of intrigue and all I'll say about the plot is that you see the Venoms go against each other. The movie's entertaining and all and I enjoyed the action scenes (along with some gruesome moments) but there are other movies from the Shaw Brothers I enjoy more, such as the first two One-Armed Swordsman films or The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. At least I can now say I've seen this.