FIVE DEADLY VENOMS (Hong Kong, 1978)
Directed by: Chang Cheh
Starring: Philip Kwok, Lo Meng, Chiang Sheng, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Wei Pei, Dick Wei

This 1978 movie is famous for introducing the Five Venoms line-up, six martial arts actors who became insanely famous in the films they made together: strongman Lo Meng, Philip Kwok (best known from his role as Mad Dog in John Woo’s HARD BOILED), acrobat Chiang Sheng, super-kicker Sun Chien, eternal bad guy Lu Feng and dramatic actor Wei Pai. Directed by Chang Cheh, the man who invented the modern day martial arts movie as a macho reaction to what he considered to be the sissification of kung fu in the late 60’s, this is the classic Shaw Brothers movie, filmed on beautiful sets that are stunningly artificial, crammed with incident and with a plot that’ll make your head spin. And to top it all off, the cast were taught Wing Chun by Leung Ting, the last student of Ip Man, who has his very own biopic in this festival.

Snake. Centipede. Scorpion. Lizard. Toad. Each one an animal based kung fu style that lets you run up walls and rip out your opponent’s guts with your bare hands. These are also the styles of the evil House of Venom, a martial arts school that’s fallen on hard times and been reduced to a dying master and his one student. Before he croaks, the master wants to make sure his students are doing good and have left behind their evil ways. He tells his last student Chiang Sheng to seek out his five students but the problem is that they all trained masked, so none of them knows who they are. The best bet? A friend of the master has ammassed considerable fortune and the master suspects the five deadly venoms are after it. So away his student goes to the small town to see if he can figure out who the Venoms are, and if they’re up to no good, kill them.

Apart from a massacre at minute 20 no one exchanges a blow until almost 40 minutes into this taut small town thriller, but once the violence starts it’s hard to stop. Wrists flow like water and legs snap like whips and people are subjected to baroque tortures like the Thousand Needle Coat, friendships are forged, betrayal becomes common and the quest to discover who the Scorpion is consumes everyone. If you thought that kung fu movies were simple, this one churns your brains with plot twists before it punches out your guts.