User Reviews

After suffering numerous defeats at the hands of the Qing kung fu experts, five patriots return to the ruined Shaolin temple - that burned down at the end of Shaolin Temple - to perfect their kung fu and take revenge.

Hu De-Di (David Chiang), Cai De-Zhong (Ti Lung), Fang Da-Hong (Mang Fei), Ma Chao-Xing (Alexander Fu Sheng) and Li Shi-Kai (Chi Kuan-Chun) must now become their own masters, training themselves and overcoming self-doubt in order to become legends.

However, one of their number is a traitor, which adds some intrigue to the proceedings. The best part of the movie is the huge battle and escape at the beginning, as each hero gets an introduction and a freeze frame with their name as we rock out to their theme song. Better than that, the villains get the same treatment, including a villainous song for them to do evil to.

Chang Cheh directs this and Wang Lung-Wei again plays the traitorous villain, which is pretty astounding as he died at the end of the last film, but you can't keep a great heel down. There's also a bad guy in this that can snap necks with his ponytail, which is definitely the kind of martial art that you don't see in many films.

Chang Cheh's FIVE MASTERS OF DEATH (aka, FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS, 1974) is an all-star kung fu film with five stars playing survivors of the burning of Shaolin Temple and five others as the villains who pursue them and track them down. The heroes split up and travel the Chinese countryside rallying the people to support the faction opposing the Manchus and then reunite about an hour into the film to re-train at the burned-out temple. Then the five villains, joined by three henchmen, arrive for the sprawling final brawl, all staged on a series of Taiwanese locations.

Unlike the same director's SHAOLIN MARTIAL ARTS (1974, listed on IMDb as SHAO LIN MARTIAL ARTS) and SHAOLIN TEMPLE (aka DEATH CHAMBER, 1976), this is a fairly low-budget production and offers no shots of Shaolin or the burning of the temple. At one point, the heroes return to the charred 'temple,' which looks more like a burned-out storefront. This film forms a trilogy of sorts with SHAOLIN MARTIAL ARTS and SHAOLIN TEMPLE, although it takes place immediately following the events depicted in SHAOLIN TEMPLE.

The five heroes are played by Alexander Fu Sheng, Chi Kuan-Chun, David Chiang, Ti Lung, and newcomer Meng Fei. Fu Sheng and Chi Kuan-Chun starred in SHAOLIN MARTIAL ARTS. All but Meng Fei returned for SHAOLIN TEMPLE. The five villains are played by Liang Chia Jen (aka Leung Kar Yan), Wang Lung Wei, Feng Ko-An (aka Fung Hak On), Chiang Tao and Tsai Hung. The first four were also the villains in SHAOLIN MARTIAL ARTS, although only Wang Lung Wei returned for SHAOLIN TEMPLE (where he played the same character, Ma Fu Yi). Not yet directing films himself, Liu Chia Liang (aka Lau Kar Leung) was co-fight choreographer on this one with his brother, Liu Chia Yung (Lau Kar Wing).

Clocking in at 109 minutes, FIVE MASTERS is not quite as elaborate or full of spectacle as the other two films in Chang Cheh's Shaolin trilogy, but it's got a great cast of fighting stars and nonstop kung fu action and is a cut above the same director's other, lower-budgeted Shaolin films from 1973-76: HEROES TWO, MEN FROM THE MONASTERY, DISCIPLES OF SHAOLIN, and SHAOLIN AVENGERS.

ADDENDUM (6/24/12): I finally watched the R3 DVD edition of this film from Celestial Pictures, which is in Mandarin with English subtitles. It clocks in at 105 minutes. I don't know if that's because four minutes were cut or because it was slightly sped up because of the transfer from the PAL encoding system. The latter's more likely. I was pretty amazed at the sheer number of fight scenes in this. It probably has more fight scenes spread out through it than any other Shaw Bros. kung fu movie I can think of.

Also, I made a few corrections in my earlier review. I still don't understand why a "spoiler" warning was posted on it.

In this film, Chang Cheh pushes purity and exaggeration to the limit. For an avant-garde product, this is the consequence of multiple biases: the film has no female characters; the film consists of a continuous series of fights; there is literally no story; the film contains its share of stupid dialogue (in the French version, but it couldn't be otherwise in the original); the acting is non-existent; the sets are anemically poor: quarries, a road, a river, trees and vegetation; the film uses multiple zoom effects. The result is too many characters, too much fighting, too many grimaces.

For a story we don't care about, but the attention is maintained, not by the catastrophic acting, but by the fights: Liu Chia-Liang and Liu Chia-Yung choreograph the fights.

But the film reunites Ti Lung, David Chiang and Fu Sheng in typical characters. The others are less well known and disappear after a while.

All in all, the film is so excessive in its desire to film only fights that it becomes sympathetic. Those who die in the end don't bother us, because the stars survive (the three mentioned above).

As per prevailing wisdom, when it comes to movies, action IS character- and there's a lot of BOTH in FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS. (Chang Cheh's movies, more than most, are excellent examples of action-as-character.) We see the blazing Shaolin Temple and the subsequent flight(s) therefrom as our five heroes are introduced. They meet in short order and make plans for revenge. Here, Alexander Fu Sheng is clearly suggested to be possibly the weakest link: he can't remember the secret hand signal(s) or the numerical codes the others use. Hand-to-hand battles between the five masters and the kung fu experts sent to kill them are outstanding throughout. When Ma (Fu Sheng) is captured by Ma Fu Yi (Wang Lung), he realizes that Ma Fu Yi is the traitor- but will the assault on the prison to free him come in time to warn the others...? FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS is an amazing achievement, from the brilliantly choreographed fight scenes, which are beautifully shot on scenic locations, to the performances and the direction. This one is, indeed, a kung fu classic.

Another epic-looking kung fu flick from the Shaw Brothers empire. This one is familiar to many others in that it pits five good warriors against five evil warriors. That's the plot. The first hour and twenty minutes of the film consists of lots (and boy, do I mean lots!) of action and minor bouts, characters dying tragically, the bad guys doing evil things, and training in preparation for the event. The final twenty minutes offers up some top-notch martial arts fight sequences in a variety of scenic settings (a wood, a river, a field, a mountain).

It's well-filmed stuff with some of the genre's top martial artists (Chi Kuan-Chun, Gordon Liu, Ti Lung, David Chiang et al) strutting their stuff, plenty of stunts, fun plot elements (the finger and cup (!) signs that the Shaolin use to communicate with each other) and heroism.

The truth is that the five bad guys in this movie have all of the coolest fighting techniques! There's one guy who swings a huge axe blade around on a rope to chop up and slice apart his enemies, another who whips people to death with his long ponytail by breaking their necks! Another baddie uses Bruce Lee's "fingers of fury" technique from THE BIG BOSS to unpleasantly dispose of another hapless victim. After losing their fights for the entire movie, the good guys decide to train for a year (!) at the end of the film.

Baddies are blinded, two are impaled on a spear, and a massive pole fight takes place in a river which is spectacular stuff. The film doesn't skimp on the violence either with plenty of people dying bloody deaths and a high body count. FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS is a typical kung fu flick from the Shaw Brothers studio, and it makes for an action-packed way to spend an evening.