Five Elements Ninjas

Before I even knew the name Shaw Bros. I was a fan. I saw this movie many years ago on a t.v. series Black Belt Theater.

The 5 elements are unique and add some of the fun to this movie.

If you are a fan of old Kung Fu movies, do yourself a favor and pick this up on DVD. The quality isn't great, but it does have a nice mini-filmography of the actors in the movie.

'Five Element Ninjas (1982)' is a Kung fu flick about a martial arts school whose best fighters win a tournament and, in the process, cause a Japanese opponent to commit Seppuku. The man's fellow fighters send a letter to one of his allies back in Japan, an ally who just so happens to be a master ninja and leader of the eponymous five element ninja clans. Naturally, the ninjas make their way to China to avenge their fallen friend, and their mysterious martial arts skills prove to be very challenging to overcome. That's the basic set-up, even if the synopsis spoils a lot more of the narrative, and what follows is a nuts-and-bolts - but no less effective for it - revenge thriller with sequences of sometimes startlingly brutal combat and an unexpectedly nihilistic vibe. The five element ninja factions all use different methods to defeat their foes. For example, the gold ninjas use copper (?) hats to blind their opponents, the wood ninjas disguise themselves as trees, the water ninjas hide (you guessed it) underwater, the fire ninjas cloud the battlefield with smoke before striking with flaming swords, and the earth ninjas attack from beneath the ground. Each clan has several more tricks up its sleeve, but their common theme is to surprise and disorient their opponents before they viciously carve them to pieces. There are also regular ninjas who can silently infiltrate even the most heavily guarded of places, and they strike with ruthless efficiency using claws and iron fists and daggers and all manner of deadly instruments. They aren't interested in fighting fair and it's this that gives them their greatest advantage over the more traditional Chinese martial artists comprising the film's heroic side. Even though it is essentially a China vs Japan affair and there is an undercurrent of Ninjutsu being less honorable than Kung fu, the flick doesn't really feel interested in the kind of jingoism so often present in its peers (some martial arts movies are literally anti-Japanese propaganda pieces). It isn't really interested in the political implications of its premise, more so in pitting two different styles of combat against each other and making a broad but indicting statement about vengeance - and even violence - in general (one of the characters, after murdering someone who has recently wronged them, says to himself: "I didn't do anything wrong... did I?"). It's arguably uninterested in making any kind of statement at all, but its unwillingness to compromise on its focal violence speaks volumes in itself. This is sometimes downright nasty and it has no semblance of mercy to it. It also has a fairly unusual pacing that puts a lot of emphasis on the things building up to the hero's desire for revenge, rather than on the training process required to achieve it (which still appears but is much shorter so that the following segment can surprise us with the techniques the lead has learned in order to counter the various strategies of the five element ninjas). After a pretty full-on opening movement, the picture slows down significantly to introduce and focus on a kind of femme fatale character, and this somewhat humdrum segment is clearly the weakest. It's narratively important, but ever-so-slightly dull. It doesn't help that the soundtrack features an incredibly repetitive motif that builds and reaches its crescendo literally on a loop as if it's emphasising several major reveals that all occur within minutes of one another. In reality it's used to highlight things like opening a window or delivering a note, and its overused so much that it's genuinely annoying. Despite these issues, though, the film is a lot of fun when it gets out of its own way and does what it's best at: highly choreographed ultraviolence. With a colourful, almost cartoony aesthetic and a willful shunning of reality (it makes excellent use of reversed footage), the movie depicts its impressive combat as frantic, urgent and splattered with blood. Although it still tends to seem more like a painful dance than a duel (not a complaint), the film is considerably more vicious than a lot of its peers and is unafraid to showcase its brutality in shades of gleefully saturated red. People are stabbed, slashed, disemboweled and literally pulled apart, and it's all glorious. It's all in good fun (for us) and makes for some really memorable set-pieces soaked in bodily fluids and punctuated by out-of-place smiles of victory. Overall, this is a highly enjoyable and suitably silly martial arts movie that features some notable moments of gore and a strangely bleak atmosphere that's actually slightly haunting in retrospect. It's good stuff.

Cheh had a long and colorful career as one of the top directors at the Shaw studio but by 1982 his stock had fallen as trends moved away from the period costume kung fu action films he was so fond of. While fellow kung fu film director, Liu Chia Liang was still able to pull off hits, Cheh was perhaps getting too quirky and obvious with his favorite themes of heroic men in revealing outfits, gruesome fights and few if no women in the story. A few films followed in this year with one released the next, but none rival Five Element Ninjas. Cheh was out of the Shaw studio by 1983 and working in low budget Taiwanese cinema he never was able to achieve anything remotely near his past successes. This is his swan song at the Shaw studios,

The plot is absolutely silly and full of absurdities even for your average Chinese made Ninja film. It's as if Cheh saw the competition and said, "Oh yeah? Well watch this!". Except for Venom star Lo Meng, the cast is composed of Shaw second stringers but that doesn't mean the action is anything less then excellent. This film has the best fight scenes in a Cheh film since "The Crippled Avengers" of 1979. Everyone is fighting with weapons in mass fight scenes that are incredibly choreographed. Unfortunately, many production credits are not translated and I don't know who was the genius behind the fight scenes. Lo Meng is the only one doing open hand fighting and he fights a samurai in the first extended fight scene! Granted the samurai sword skills on display are from outer space but it goes with the absurd nature of the entire movie. So much of this film is wacky that it's a waste of your time to recount it. It's as if everything you'd expect from a late Cheh film (good and bad) was turned up to "11" including the pace.

Bloody and nuts. Just the way a good Cheh film should be. See it.

The Garrish colors add to this awesome action flick. The choreography is beyond superb (almost no wire use, no stupid CGI, Joel Silver not in presence.) King Fu films are like gene Kelly films or Fred Astaire films- you watch them for the beautifully choreographed moves. The Kung Fu here is among the best of all kung fu films (not classic fung fu films--ALL Kung fu films) The crap Hollywood is spewing now and calling kung fu is just their shallow brainwashed doctrines of how anything that doesn't encompass CGI or a woman for PC reasons is cheap. This is a must for your King fu collection.

Since the previous comments have pretty much nailed it on this one, all I have to add is that if you've only seen this in the seriously edited- for-television version that ran as part of the BLACK BELT THEATER/DRIVE-IN MOVIE package back in the '80's, seek out the version that can still be found for rental in some video shops. The uncut ending is a real mind-blower!!! However, this film is so good that even edited it turned enough of us on back in the days to keep us tuning in every Saturday afternoon for years.