Crippled Avengers / Avengers Handicapped / Mortal Combat / Return of the Five Deadly Venoms / Can Que / Chaan Kuet (1978) **½
When The Five Deadly Venoms went through the roof in defiance of the Shaw Brothers’ baseline assumption that well-known stars were the key to success, director Chang Cheh wasted no time in getting the band back onstage for an encore. (Or most of the band, anyway. Wai Pak, who played the Snake, would be absent more often than not from subsequent Venom Mob outings.) The irony, of course, was that doing so meant a return of sorts to the traditional Shaw Brothers system, since the Venoms would henceforth be stars collectively, even if they remained minor players on an individual basis. But at the same time, the mere fact of having a star ensemble meant that Chang had to do things a little differently than he had when working with an ensemble of stars. Crippled Avengers, the initial Venoms follow-up, conspicuously represents an effort to refine the innovations of The Five Deadly Venoms into a reproducible formula. As before, the five remaining leads are apportioned among the heroes and villains, rather than being concentrated into a team. As before, Chang and co-writer Ni Kuang take a quasi-magical view of the martial arts in their script, opening up space for special effects trickery to supplement the genuine physical prowess of the performers. And most importantly, Chang and his three-man team of action directors once again invoke a variety of fictional, fantastical kung fu styles, calculated to exploit the Venoms’ training as Chinese opera acrobats, resulting in fight scenes that look more like exceedingly strenuous dance routines than the mortal combat promised by the US theatrical title.
You won’t need much experience with kung fu movies to think you know what’s coming when a pack of ruffians calling themselves the Three Tigers (Dick Wei, from Horrible High Heels and The Brave Archer, Jamie Luk Kim-Ming, of Shaolin Drunkard and The Invincible Kung Fu Brothers, and Stewart Tam Tin, from The Vampire Partner and The Angry Dragon) barge into the home of Du Tian-Dao (Chen Kuan-Tai, of Heroes Two and Challenge of the Lady Ninja), master of Black Tiger kung fu. When they find no sign of the man they’ve come to confront, the Three Tigers decide to send their target a message by making cripples of his wife (Helen Poon Bing-Seung, from Hong Kong Superman and Dirty Ho) and son (who’ll be played as an adult by Lu Feng, of Masked Avengers and The Daredevils). They hack off Mrs. Du’s legs at mid-thigh, and Du Chang’s arms at the elbows, finishing up just as the Black Tiger himself returns home. Naturally he’s not in the best of moods once he sees what his uninvited gets have been up to, and the Three Tigers rapidly find their number reduced to zero. Not that that does their victims much good, of course. Mrs. Du is dead of her injuries by the time her husband is finished avenging her, but Chang is rather tougher, and lasts long enough to get patched up. The boy’s misfortune leaves him and his father alike more determined than ever that Chang should carry on the Black Tiger legacy, although his new handicap is obviously going to complicate that. Du therefore spares no expense to hire the greatest blacksmiths in the land, commissioning from them a succession mechanical forearms for his son, each more sophisticated than the last. The seventh and final pair, completed just in time for Chang’s coming of age, is both dexterous enough to perform almost any task that he might have asked of his original hands, and rugged enough to function as deadly weapons. Put those iron hands together with the three core techniques of Black Tiger kung fu, and Chang will indeed be able to say, “Nobody bothers me.”
So that’s our hero’s origin story, right? And the rest of the first act will have Chang gathering around himself a band of fellow cripples whose disabilities he and his father will turn into superpowers with a combination of Medieval magitech and kung fu? Nope. What really happens is that Du Tian-Dao goes mad with unresolved grief and resentment. He becomes a tyrant over his village, and trains his son to use his augmented fighting strength for evil. The point of no return for them both comes when Du’s steward, Wan (Johnny Wang Lung-Wei, from The Five Deadly Venoms and The Lady Assassin), rounds up the four sons of the Three Tigers, and hands them over to Chang so that he can practice what he’s learned to its full, lethal effect.
From that day on, Du and son make a hobby of inflicting debilitating torture on anyone who so much as fleetingly annoys them. The locals get hip to the danger quickly enough, but there always seems to be some luckless outsider passing through town who doesn’t know the score. Consider Chen Shuen, the petty trader (Phillip Kwok Chung-Fung, of Shaolin Temple and House of Traps). One wrong word to Du Chang when they cross paths at the inn run by Fang Li-Lu (Wang Han-Chen, from Legends of Lust and The Master of Kung Fu), and that’s it for his eyeballs. Another traveler by the name of Hu Ah-Kue (Sun Chien, of The Unbeatable Dragon and The Vampire Is Alive) gets his shanks cut off on the spot for carelessly bumping into Chang on his way out the front door to Li-Lu’s inn. And Wang Yi (Chiang Sheng, from 18 Shaolin Disciples and Legend of the Fox), an itinerant kung fu master who takes it upon himself to put a stop to the Dus’ malfeasance, ends up a brain-damaged imbecile after falling into the dictator’s clutches instead. While the villains eat dinner, their minions squeeze Wang’s skull to the cracking point with a tightened iron band. Nor does the one villager with the courage to rise in rebellion fare any better. When Wei Jia-Jie the blacksmith (Lo Meng, of Hex vs. Witchcraft and The Magnificent Ruffians) sticks up for Chen Shuen, Du has him dosed with drugged wine that destroys his ability to speak, then deals him such an open-handed clout upside both ears that his eardrums burst beyond any hope of healing. And although Wei is confident at first that his skill at the forge will enable him to support not only himself, but the other three recent victims of Du’s cruelty as well, that picture changes when Steward Wan lets it be known throughout the village that anyone patronizing Wei’s smithy takes their life in their hands. There just doesn’t seem to be the same demand for tools, cutlery, and horseshoes after that.
Wang Yi never introduced himself when he came to town, and it’s no use asking him to do so now. He can still talk, but there are a lot of things he doesn’t remember anymore, and who he even is happens to be one of them. Fortunately, he was carrying a letter to his sifu, Master Li Jing-Ying (Miao Ching, from Shaolin and Wu Tang and Heroes of the East), and since they obviously can’t stay in the village anymore, the three cripples who are still capable of deciding things reckon they might as well set out for Li’s villa to complete Wang’s original mission for him. Master Li is intensely moved by the men’s plight when he meets them, and he takes it upon himself to train Wei, Chen, and Hu not merely to compensate for their disabilities, but to craft a set of bespoke kung fu styles around them. Then they can return home, and give Du Tian-Dao and his entourage a piece of their minds to match the pieces he already took from Wang’s. And since Li’s villa has a forge on the premises, Wei helps out by building Hu a set of iron legs to match Du Chang’s iron arms.
It takes three years for Wei, Chen, and Hu to catch up to Wang in fighting skills. (Luckily Li’s teachings had become so fundamental a part of his pupil’s being that not even reduction to idiocy could dislodge them.) And when the Crippled Avengers feel themselves ready to make their Martial World debut, they do it in style! Arriving just days before Du Tian-Dao’s 45th birthday celebration, they give Steward Wan the Devil’s own time trying to thwart them without spoiling his temperamental master’s good cheer. Wan fights them with his own men; with Law Bo (Tony Tam Chun-To, from Shaolin Rescuers and The Flag of Iron), the kung fu master who serves as those men’s drill instructor; and even with a hired assassin known as Archer Lin (Yu Tai-Ping, of Five Element Ninjas and The Weird Man). None of them have what it takes to get the job done. The final straw, though, comes when Wei and company kill one of Du’s party guests, the superhumanly strong and tough Master Jiu Gao-Fung (Yang Hsiung, from The Duel of the Century and Revenge of the Corpse). No way can Wan keep that under wraps. Master Du’s birthday is officially ruined, and you can bet he won’t be taking that lying down!
Crippled Avengers is a very mixed bag for me. I’ve seen enough of these things now that I’m starting to develop definite tastes in them, and one thing I’m discovering is that I like kung fu movies better the closer the fighting hews to authentic martial arts traditions, at least when the tone of the film is basically serious. The Venoms could flip and tumble like nobody’s business, but only a couple of them knew how to fight, and that shows in Crippled Avengers to the movie’s detriment. Watching the five leads in action here, it’s possible to imagine how Gymkata might have turned out if Robert Clouse had brought over a Hong Kong action director to handle the fight scenes. The acrobatic sensibility makes for an especially strange mix with Chang Cheh’s propensity for over-the-top gore. For instance, there’s a real “what the fuck?” moment at the end of the fight against Jiu Gao-Fung in which the villain, bested at last by the power of Hu Ah-Kue’s wrought-iron feet, stuffs his spilling guts back into his belly before delivering one final flurry of punches. It’s an extraordinary thing to have happen in a film that often looks like the cheapest imaginable production of Shen Yun. And speaking of Hu Ah-Kue, I have to dock Crippled Avengers a few points for never pitting him against Du Chang one-on-one. Surely the guy with the iron feet is the natural ultimate counter to the guy with the iron hands!
Oddly, the training sequences are significantly more engaging than the fights, because those scenes overtly exist for no other purpose than to get the audience marveling over the things these actors can do with their bodies. They’re pure displays of strength, speed, and agility, unencumbered by any countervailing narrative function. Meanwhile, fights and training vignettes alike benefit from some unusually inventive cinematography and staging, showing the action from unexpected angles and perspectives. And finally, Chang plays some neat little stylization tricks along the way, similar in concept to all those bits in the Shaolin Temple films when the screen goes red as the heroes die, but more sophisticated. My favorite is the use of total silence during sequences focusing on Wei Jia-Jie’s point of view, which Chang manages to imbue with drastically different meaning before and after Wei’s training under Master Li. There’s a fair bit to like in Crippled Avengers, and I’m not surprised that it’s such a cult favorite. It just isn’t a cult that I’m likely to join any time soon.
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