Pick your poison

By Noel Vera

Chang Cheh's "Five Deadly Venoms" (1978) turns on a brilliant
premise: five men, trained in five styles of kung fu--"Centipede,"
giving the user the ability to inflict many deadly blows in quick
succession; "Snake," conferring great agility and a sinuous
attack; "Scorpion," giving the user the ability to strike from a
distance; "Lizard," granting him the ability to walk up walls;
and "Toad," giving the skin near invulnerability to blade or blow.
But that's only part of the hook: problem is, the five men were
always masked and trained at different times, so Centipede and Snake
know each other but not the others; Scorpion trained alone; Lizard
and Toad are friends but haven't met anyone else, and their master
doesn't know where any of them are, or what they look like now. This
worries the master; he's dying and he wonders if his pupils are using
their skills for good or evil. He has trained a sixth student, Tieh
Yang (Chiang Sheng) as much of all five skills as he could in the
short time he has left, and sent the youth out to search for the
other five and, if necessary, destroy them. But the youth has to find
them first.

"Five Deadly Venoms" isn't just a showcase for five wildly differing
fighting styles and abilities--it's also an ingenious mystery
thriller, with the audience left guessing who among the main
characters is a Venom, if he'll turn out to be hero or villain, and
why. Forget looking among the women: there aren't any, almost.
Chang's focus on male-to-male relationships--and on muscular, half-
naked bodies--in many of his films is so intense as to be overtly
homoerotic. Throw in a depiction of ancient China as an intricate and
corrupt bureaucracy, where a man can be called in to help capture a
murderer and find himself accused of the crime; where baroque
tortures are inflicted (at one point a horrifying cross between the
Iron Maiden and some insane parody of acupuncture--a metal suit
bristling with a thousand needles inside--is used); where silent
murders that leave no mark are performed regularly (the most
unsettling in its simplicity involves laying wet paper across the
face), and you have a film that, while hardly realistic, is a vivid
expression of one man's unique obsessions and concerns.

One major concern of Chang is character, and the depiction of the
five (six, unofficially) Venoms and their relationship to each other
should make the film interesting to viewers other than genre
enthusiasts. Chang is a master of quick, economical character
sketches: of the easy friendships with deep ties longtime companions
may have for each other, or the trust fellow killers form when the
world's out to hunt them, or the relationship that develops among new
acquaintances who learn to work together and fight the enemy. He can
also take a quiet scene and make it compelling despite (or because
of) its stillness: when a Venom confesses to a crisis of conscience
Chang manages to make the scene, amidst all the killings and tortures
and general mayhem, easily the most disturbing in the film.

"Five Deadly Venoms" was to become an enormous hit--Chang and his
Venoms would make fourteen features altogether--and an influential
film (Tarantino would borrow the concept of a group of expert killers-
-including naming each member after a poisonous creature--for "Kill
Bill;" John Woo would model his most significant films on Chang's--
the bursts of sadism, the homoerotic bonding). "Venoms" marked a
change in Chang's style of filmmaking, away from fairly accurate
historical details and clothing to a more stylized rendition of the
world, plus garish costumes that exposed the muscled male chest. A
classic kung fu flick, and a great action film.

Shaolin basic training

Noel Vera

In the early '70s the Shaw Brothers, through filmmaker Chang Cheh,
produced a series of movies focused on the history of the Shaolin
Temple, including "Heroes Two" (1974), and "Shaolin Martial Arts"
(1974); the stories were reportedly suggested by Chang's longtime
collaborator, fight choreographer Liu Chia-Liang. Liu Chia-Liang
(also known as Lau Kar-Leung) was offered the chance to direct, and
in 1978 reworked the themes and stories he suggested to Chang into
what may be the ultimate tribute to the legendary temple, "36th
Chamber of Shaolin."

The story is simple to the point of being idiotic: at the time when
the Manchu dominated China, a student named Liu Yu-Te (Liu Chia Hui,
also known as Gordon Liu, the director's adopted brother, playing the
role that would make him a star) joins a student rebellion; the
Manchus find out about it, crush the rebellion, Liu's family, and Liu
himself almost, though he manages to take refuge in the Shaolin
Temple. He learns the secrets of the monks there and, changing his
name to San Te, starts teaching these secrets to outsiders, to help
fight the Manchu oppression.

The storyline--youth learns kung fu to wreak vengeance--was old even
when the movie was made; yet one of the hallmarks of great Hong Kong
action movies is the way they manage to ring fresh variations from
such stories. Chang Cheh often started with a simple revenge plot and
pumped it so full of baroque violence and homoerotic bonding that it
looked and felt like a film by no one else. Liu Chia-Liang was ruled
by a different passion: to present kung fu fighting styles, weapons,
philosophy and history with as much realism as possible (within the
conventions of an inherently hyperbolic and ruthlessly commercial
genre). The story may be your standard-issue revenge plot, but there
reportedly was a real San Te, and he reportedly was responsible for
opening up Shaolin training to the general public.

Liu goes still further by concentrating, in the most minute and
exhaustive manner, on Liu Yu-Te's education. "36th Chamber" has been
called the greatest film ever made on Shaolin teaching techniques,
for good reason: the training sequences, where Liu must enter and
master thirty-five chambers of increasing levels of difficulty,
recalls the kind of ruthlessly detailed procedurals Akira Kurosawa
loved to create (how to wage war in "Seven Samurai;" how to track a
kidnapper in "High and Low"). "36th Chamber" charts not just physical
progress, but psychological and spiritual as well--you see every
grueling step of the transformation from Liu Yu-Te, hapless student
rebel, into San Te, poised and invincible Shaolin monk.

The Shaolin philosophy is presented in other, subtler ways: when Liu
Yu-Te is asked by a monk why he wants to learn Shaolin he talks of
teaching it to the helpless. Mention of revenge would have had him
ejected outright; this more selfless motive, if contradictory to the
temple's non-involvement policy, is more seductive (and in fact, the
monk looks pained, as if stricken with unworthy thoughts of helping
Liu). Liu Yu-Te would maintain this uneasy relationship with the
temple even when he is renamed San Te, learning without being fully
assimilated, shaking the natural order as he rises swiftly up the
temple's hierarchy. When things come to a head and San Te, who has
become the temple's most accomplished graduate, demands to be allowed
to open a 36th chamber--one that would train outsiders--the Shaolin
monks decide that, rather than to deal with him through direct
confrontation, they would redirect him (a common Shaolin defense
techniques): they would banish San Te, officially to punish him,
unofficially to test him and see if he can gather enough disciples to
start such a chamber.

Actually, to call "36th Chamber" the quintessential revenge flick (as
so many of its fans have done) is to do it a disservice (its American
nickname "Master Killer," is an even grosser disservice); there is no
real drive in Liu/San Te to seek revenge; his thoughts are and have
always been towards the benefit of the general good (a rare motive
for the kung fu protagonist). It's an amazingly complex film, open to
all kinds of interpretations underneath its overt simplicity, yet
filled with an exuberance and energy and strange honesty that only
Liu Chia-Liang--possibly the greatest martial arts choreographer who
ever lived--can provide.

(First published in Menzone, July 2004)

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)