The Venom Mob—five masked ruffians with singular fighting styles— would appear in dozens of films at Shaw Brothers, but Five Deadly Venoms is where they first made their mark. A Tarantino favorite endlessly sampled by the Wu Tang Clan, Chang Cheh’s kung fu murder mystery is a ferocious cult classic.
A profoundly influential wuxia classic, this opus of dismemberment and revenge made a star of its leading man Jimmy Wang Yu. Stunningly shot on studio soundstages, The One-armed Swordsman sees director Chang Cheh elevate the Shaw Brothers house style to operatic levels of artifice and abstraction.
As the golden age of kung fu movies drew to a close, the great filmmakers at Shaw Brothers began questioning the very tenets of the martial world. Punctuated with fierce stabs of color, this brutal late-period epic from director Chang Cheh calcifies the path of vengeance into nihilistic abstraction.
What good are codes of honor in an unchivalrous world? It’s the key question for director Chang Cheh in this period crime epic. With action staging by choreographer supreme Lau Kar-leung, The Boxer from Shantung builds to a pyrrhic last stand that ranks among the bloodiest battles in the Shaw canon.
Disabled heroes are a time-honored wuxia tradition, attesting to the power of kung fu dedication in overcoming physical adversity. Reuniting most of the Venom Mob, Chang Cheh stages some of his greatest dust-ups, while the gang weaponise their respective infirmities for a barnstorming battle royale.