Five Element Ninjas (1982)

Five Element Ninjas (1982)
Aka Chinese Super Ninjas; Super Ninjas
Chinese Title: 五遁忍術
Translation: Five Escape Ninjitsu

Starring: Ricky Cheng, Lo Meng, Chan Pui-Sai, Lung Tien-Hsiang, Michael Chan Wai-Man
Director: Chang Cheh
Action Directors[1]: Chu Ko, Ricky Cheng

I learned about this film through Thomas Weisser’s Asian Cult Cinema in the late 1990s, in which he gave it the full four-star rating on account of the film’s outrageous graphic violence. Mr. Weisser, whose writing often invoked the emotions of a 14-year-old boy with raging hormones, was particularly excited about a scene in which a guy loses a fight after he trips on his own intestine. I was a junior in high school when I read that and, not having experienced the excesses of Hong Kong cinema, did not quite know how to process that. It took me nearly two decades before I finally sat down to watch it. Why didn’t I see this sooner? Evidently, I’m a moron.

The story is simple. Two kung fu schools in China are vying for control of the Martial World and have arranged for a ten-round duel to decide who reigns supreme. The Good School, led by Master Yuan (Kwang Fung, of Sword Stained with Royal Blood), has won nine out of ten matches when the Bad School, led by the deviant Chief Hong (Shaw Brothers regular Chan Shen, of Intimate Confessions of a Chinese Courtesan), unveil their secret weapon: a Japanese samurai. The samurai bests his first opponent, but then loses to the Good School’s star student, played by Lo Meng, the Toad Venom. Before commiting hara-kiri (as was the style of the time), the samurai directs the leader of the Bad School to send a letter to a ninja master colleague of his to seek revenge.

The Ninja Master (played by Michael Chan Wai-Man) shows up and challenges the Good School to a duel with his infamous Five Element formations. The color-coded ninja who make up said formations viciously slaughter all of the students, save Lo Meng and Seven Steps of Kung Fu’s Ricky Cheng, who stayed behind to hold down the fort. Enter kunoichi  (or female ninja) Junko (Chan Pui-Sai, of the adult drama The Pure and the Evil), who poses as a sexual assault victim fleeing the vicious grasp of her uncle, played by Bey Logan (I jest). Lo Meng takes her in, against Ricky’s wishes, and Junko proceeds to map out the entire compound before shooting Lo Meng with a blow dart.

The rest of the ninja invade the place and massacre everyone, except for Ricky, who Junko has inexplicably fallen for (considering he has been a jerk to her) and whose three-pointed spear she’d love to sheathe…if you catch my drift. Ricky escapes and finds a convenient ninja master in the Chinese countryside to help him train for revenge.

With the exception of a 15-minute lull early in the second act, when Junko is scoping out the Good School’s headquarters, the film is practically non-stop action. It starts with the tournament between the schools, and quickly segues into the initial encounter with the Five Element Ninjas. There are two other protracted massacre sequences involving the ninja, after which we’re treated to some simple training sequences for Ricky and his new friends. They then face off with the Five Element Formation, which takes up a good 20 minutes of screen time.

Structurally, there is one big flaw in the movie, and that deals with the second band of heroes who face off with our shinobi villains. With the exception of Ricky Cheng’s Xiao Tianhao, we never learn anything about them and Chang Cheh fails to give us any reason to care about them, beyond “The ninja are evil, and someone needs to get revenge on them.” One could have cut a few minutes from the exhausting finale and given us a little more interaction between Ricky and his new classmates, just to put a little more emotional weight into the finale.

But then again, there’s so much quality action on display that few viewers may notice, and even so, may not care the slightest. Lead actor Ricky Cheng and Chu Ko (who would go on to choreograph the Taiwanese films Ninja Hunter and Super Ninja, and who plays one of the heroes in the second half of the movie) really pull out the stops here. If Robert Tai really did work on this film (see footnote below), then this is hands down my favorite work of his. It easily trumps his Taiwanese films from the 1980s and even his collaborations with Chang Cheh and the Venom Mob. We are talking Sword Stained with Royal Blood level of action direction here, from numerous complex movements in a single take to equally-complicated positioning of the characters during the fights themselves. Most of the action is weapons-based, although with Lo Meng in the cast, you can count on some of his famous Chow Gar during two sequences.

The action directors do not skimp on the Japanese weapons on display here, matching and perhaps surpassing the variety seen in Heroes of the East and Revenge of the Ninja. As expected, we get your basic katana and wakizashi sword techniques in the fights. Michael Chan’s character fights mainly with a naginata, although he wears cat claws on his feet. The tree ninja use Wolverine-esque claws and the more discreet catclaws. The earth ninja are armed with kama-yari, which is like the Chinese hook spear: a spear with a straight blade with second, curved blade descending from it. There is also a variation on the kusari-kama used by our heroes, a blow gun used by the kunoichi, and several other tricks and weapons on display. From the Chinese kung fu point of view, we have fighters using poles, hook swords, straight swords, broadswords, kwan do, spears, and a few other weapons just to keep things varied and interesting.

This movie is also insanely gory. All of heroes walk around in white clothes and capes (why capes?) with their chests exposed (oh Chang Cheh, you and your homoerotic subtexts), which makes for a nice contrast with all the red paint on display. Then there’s finale, which seems to have been cut from the American dub, but which I saw on Youtube some time ago where the villain dies by being pulled apart to a distance of about ten feet before his intestine finally snaps. I am going to guess this film was menaced with an X-rating if they didn’t cut that?

To bring things back full circle, this is one of the ninja films for you all to see, if you haven’t gotten around to it yet. It is not particularly deep, and the film is missing the usual themes of heroic bloodshed[2] and brotherhood that define most of Chang Cheh’s output. I mean, the main theme here is stay the hell away from ninja! Do not even hire their services! It will only come back to bit you in the rear in the end.

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[1] - According an interview with Robert Tai for the now-defunct Kung Fu Cult Cinema website (https://web.archive.org/web/20060415063117/http://www.kfccinema.com:80/features/interviews/roberttai/roberttai.html ), Tai was approached by Chang Cheh to do the action direction for this film. However, Tai’s filmographies on both the Hong Kong Movie Database and the Internet Movie Database do not mention this film.

[2] - There is lots of bloodshed, but it feels more gratuitous than poetic, like his Chang Cheh’s earlier films.