The Five Venoms (1978)

"Once an evil deed is done, it never ends.”

I haven't seen many films in this genre at all; I blogged another Shaw Brothers film a while ago but am still not familiar with the tropes. Still, although there’s a lot of kung fu here, and a similarly historical setting, it feels very different to The 36th Chamber of Shaolin.

The plot structure is extremely simple and info-dumped on us in the very first scene as a dying teacher of martial arts tells his half-trainer young student that he has trained five others and wants him to see whether they have ended up good or evil. We then get s montage of the five and their styles- the centipede, snake, scorpion, lizard and toad. And then the student spends the whole film just observing things until the very end. It’s certainly convenient that all five still live in the same town, but the fun is that, although we soon find the identities of the centipede and snake, we have to work out which characters in the film are the other three.

It’s not the most difficult whodunit in the world, and I guessed them all, but this way of doing things adds fun. It has a very odd but interesting feel of being a police procedural throughout, too, although the justice system is horrifyingly brutal, corrupt and atrocious, based on torturing suspects until they confess, and where judges can whip police officers to solve a crime quickly, inevitably resulting in wrongful convictions and judicial killings. I disagree with the sentiments of the last scene; that judge deserves a good kicking. But the film itself is a fun little way of passing some time.