Three years after acquiring the rights to fifty old-school Shaw Brothers releases, Dragon Dynasty finally rolls out the big one, director Chang Cheh’s kung-fu classic, Five Deadly Venoms. Originally released in 1978, it is arguably the best-known Shaw Brothers movie in the world, having influenced everyone from the Wu-Tang Clan to the World of Warcraft, and even making Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 Cult Films list.
As great as this move is, it’s hard not to see it as a sign of desperation on the part of Dragon Dynasty, who had been sitting on their rights to all these films since their initial wave of Shaw Brothers releases a year ago failed to meet the company’s financial expectations. Which is a terrible shame, in my opinion, because it consisted of six excellently put-together editions of equally choice films (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Come Drink With Me, Heroes of the East, My Young Auntie, The One-Armed Swordsman, and my personal favorite, Five Fingers of Death, aka King Boxer), and because it was probably the only thing that the company had managed to do right.
Founded by the Weinstein brothers, and featuring active involvement by Hong Kong cinema expert Bey Logan, as well as fans like RZA and Quentin Tarantino, Dragon Dynasty was initially hailed as the savior of martial arts cinema in the United States, where it has historically been subject to unnecessary cuts and dubs, often in a misguided effort to make the films more accessible to American audiences (and often at the hands of Weinsteins’ own Dimension Films label). And for a while, it seemed like the company was really trying to treat the material with respect, and provide the consumer with the highest quality product, even though they kept the annoying habit of re-titling films in order to make them sound more appealing to the masses (the Shakespearean martial arts drama The Banquet, for example, became The Legend of the Black Scorpion under Dragon Dynasty, despite having fuck-all to do with scorpions, of any color).
However, due to reasons about which I can only speculate (Bad economy? Poor sales?), Harvey and co. soon went back to business as usual, dumping the same incomplete Dimension cuts of classic Jet Li and Jackie Chan films onto their DVDs, sometimes even without an original language audio option, and expecting consumers to not purchase better editions available overseas. Fortunately, this did not seem to affect their first wave of Shaw Brothers releases, all of which came from recently remastered prints from Celestial Pictures, and offered a plethora of special features, which matched or even upstaged the DVDs from the extensive Shaw Brothers catalog offered by the Hong Kong-based distribution company IVL
Anyway, the Region 1 faithful can rejoice now, because the wait for this one is finally over, and it was more than worth it: the picture quality is even better than on the IVL release, with more vibrant colors and a generally crisper image, and features none of the distortion and ghosting that plagued that edition, which was interlaced and PAL-sourced. The 5.1 stereo surround remaster of the IVL release is gone, making way for the old-school English dub (which those with fond memories of the film’s initial run in the US will undoubtedly appreciate), in addition to the original Mandarin mono and a Bey Logan audio commentary track, which, as usual, is a real revelation. The man really knows his shit, and his enthusiasm and insider knowledge of martial arts and martial arts cinema always make for an exceptionally entertaining commentary.
For those of you wondering about the plot, it’s simple: the master of the Five Venoms House is dying, and his final wish is for his final student (Chiang Sheng) to seek out five mysterious former pupils, each trained in a different style modeled after a venomous animal whose name he has adopted (the Centipede, the Gecko, the Scorpion, the Snake, and the Toad). He is to team-up with the righteous ones and kill the ones who have been operating against the clan’s best interests. The problem is, since they all wore masks during their training, he has no idea what they look like, and having only been trained in a little of each style, he is no match for any of them by himself. A lot of kicking and punching ensues.
The kung-fu is a bit slow, even by Shaw Brothers standards, but the movie makes up for it in camp value (those Mexican wrestling-style masks are hilarious) and a surprisingly suspenseful plot. This is the movie that established actors Chiang Sheng, Lo Meng, Philip Kwok, Lu Feng, Sun Chien, and Wai Pak as the so-called Venom Mob, who, together with director Chang Cheh, went on to make many more movies featuring better-choreographed fighting, but rarely one this entertaining. If anything, in addition to becoming increasingly more gory, subsequent Venom films only underlined Chang’s obsessions with bare-chested heroics and male bonding, which I personally find rather tiresome. His work is therefore a bit of a mixed bag for me: while his focus on camaraderie and heroic bloodshed, not to mention his latent misogyny (women are often virtually non-existent in his films, and when they are, they are usually either harbingers of doom, or total bitches), can be a detriment to my enjoyment of his movies, the absurdity and glee of some of his more outrageous concepts often manage to make up for it. As a rule, when Chang is playing it straight (as in, say, The Boxer from Shantung), chances are I won’t like it. But the campy, gloriously outlandish stuff (dig Crippled Avengers) totally flips my shit, and I would love to see more of it.
Which is exactly why you guys need to buy this. For $15 you won’t just be getting a fine piece of entertainment, but also encouraging the folks at Dragon Dynasty to keep up the good work they have done with their Shaw Brothers releases, and, most importantly, to keep releasing what they have. American fans of Asian cinema in general, and kung-fu films in particular, have learned the hard way that once Harvey Weinstein gets comfortable sitting on something, it’s pretty fucking hard to get him to move.
