Three Films Make A Post: So, what does Jirocho do, exactly?

The Kingdom of Jirocho 4 (1965): In this final of four Jirocho movies starring the great Koji Tsuruta and directed by Masahiro Makino, things change: about half of the characters are recast – generally not for the better – and something like focus appears, one might even say this one’s got a plot. Tonally, there’s still quite a bit of the funny business, but much of the film is taken over by Jirocho’s wife slowly and very dramatically dying of what I can only assume is consumption.

The production as a whole feels cheaper, and rather like a project everyone involved was trying to get over with as quickly as possible. However, there are still enough aesthetically or emotionally pleasing moments here to make this a somewhat satisfying viewing, at least if you’re into ninkyo eiga.

Magnificent Trio (1966): This isn’t exactly one of the more spectacular offerings from Chang Cheh’s early wuxia phase. Its actual emotional and moral core lies surprisingly enough with the female characters – particularly those played by Margaret Tu Chuan and Chin Ping – but this being a Chang Cheh joint, he puts emphasis on the much less interesting business of his male trio, of whom only Lo Lieh’s doubtful hero is actually interesting. There are bits and pieces in the background of Jimmy Wang Yu’s and Cheng Lei’s characters that could be thematically interesting but the film never really gets into those.

What’s left is a decent mid-60s Shaw Brothers wuxia – that’s still nothing to sneeze at.

Para Betina Pengikut Iblis: Part 2 aka The Female Followers of the Devil: Part 2 (2024): Rako Prijanto doubles down on the insanity of the first part of the story, and tries to squeeze even more melodramatic acting, trashy yet awesome gore, and general disreputable mayhem in, while also adding a bit of religion, fights between the now three Female Followers, a bit of a demonic zombie apocalypse and martial arts of doubtful quality.

If that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, dear imaginary reader, I don’t know what to say.

One-Armed Swordsman (1967)

Original title: 獨臂刀

Because his father sacrifices himself to protect his master Qi Ru-Feng (Tien Feng), the master swordsman takes on Fang Kang (soon grown into Jimmy Wang Yu) as his pupil and takes care of him pretty much like a son. This doesn’t manage reduce the huge amounts of anger and guilt inside of Fang Kang much, and though he grows up to become Qi Ru-Feng’s best pupil – in the ways of the sword as well as those of honour and simple human decency – the young man simply feels inadequate.

It certainly doesn’t help his emotional well-being that Qi Ru-Feng’s other students use him as a verbal – and physical - punching bag based on him coming from the lower classes. Even Ru-Feng’s daughter Qi Pei-Er (Violet Pan Ying-Zi) is part of the bullying – in her case this is an attempt to deny her own attraction to him filtered through some rather spectacular self-centeredness.

Fang Kang decides to leave his master, but on a final encounter with Pei-Er and the upper-class twats, a mixture of bad luck on his side and horrible impulse control on hers lead to her cutting off one of his arms while she’s pretending to surrender in a fight he didn’t want.

The mutilated Fang Kang more or less stumbles into the arms of peasant girl Xiao Man (Lisa Chiao Chiao), where for some time he finds peace, physical and emotional healing, as well as love. As the wuxia gods will have it, Xiao Man is actually the daughter of a martial artist who got killed for the usual martial world reasons, and the owner of half of a martial arts manual meant to train the left arm. That’s the only arm Fang Kang has left, and he simply can’t stop himself from learning to fight with only one arm at the same time he’s professing to be finished with the martial world.

That’s going to come in useful when Fang Kang is drawn back into into it. His old master and all of his other students are under attack by a group of villains who have developed a rather cruel fighting technique that counters their golden sword arts, and these guys are not going to rest until all of Qi Ru-Feng’s people are dead. Being a honourable and responsible man who can’t stand by when he witnesses wholesale slaughter of a family he still feels bound to, Fang Kang will put himself into danger again.

As much as I love the later periods of Chang Cheh’s body of work, the films he made when he still had to play by some of the rules of wuxia are special to me. In them, like in this classic, some of Chang’s weaknesses simply didn’t apply. So we have actual female characters with personalities, motivations and even some depth, and a narrative that feels tight, focussed, and more than just a mood meant to stitch fantastic martial arts sequences together.

In fact, while the fights here are pretty damn spectacular and influential on anything that came after in the genre for good reason, One-Armed Swordsman is very serious about telling a complex tale of a man growing up, working through trauma and hurt to become someone who is not only loved but feels himself worthy of being loved, learning to give back what he receives emotionally, and working through his issues to become a whole person instead of one defined only through his losses. In a turn of events one really doesn’t expect of Chang, here, Fang Kang’s sadness when he looks at the bodies of people he has slain feels absolutely genuine – and part of the point of the film. This isn’t about vengeance and everybody bleeding to death in the film’s final shot, but actually about how to live – with pain, and hurt, injustice, and love.

Jimmy Wang Yu – who’d become a bit of a one note dispenser of anger after leaving the Shaw Brothers – here acts with surprising depth of feeling, admitting weaknesses and complexities into his performance I can’t remember finding in much of anything he’d go on to do during the 70s. There’s a fearlessness in admitting to the pain Fang Kang goes through that I find rather more impressive than reels of slaughtering fake Japanese.

There’s a reason this one is an absolute classic, or rather, the many reasons of a film that does everything it puts its mind to very well indeed.

The Five Venoms (1978)

aka The Five Deadly Venoms

aka 5 Deadly Venoms

The dying master (Dick Wei) of a kung fu clan known as the House of Venoms regrets the rather dark and dubious deeds he and many of his students have committed over the years. His final wish made to his last student, Yang De (Chiang Sheng), is for the young man to find his other surviving students, observe their virtue, and dispatch them if necessary. There are two problems here: even though his master has taught Yang De a smattering of all the techniques of the House – namely the styles of the Gecko, the Toad, the Centipede, the Snake and the Scorpion - the other students have all specialized, and he’ll not be able to stand against them in single combat. Making matters more difficult is the fact that most of the students have never actually met one another, so finding the people whose virtue Yang De is supposed to evaluate could turn out to be rather difficult. One suspects the master of the House of Venoms never had the time to learn of the power of the style of Drawing.

However, there’s another surviving member of the House of Venoms who has retired to a small town in the country. He has stolen and hidden away the clan’s treasure, and the master is convinced the other Venoms are bound to look for him and it. So Yang De really only needs to travel there and keep his eyes open, beat the villains he can’t beat without teaming up with a virtuous venom who may or may not exist, find the treasure himself, and give it to charity. Simple.

As it turns out, the Venoms are indeed all in town looking for the treasure – some committing increasingly horrible deeds of violence and betrayal while others do try to act noble.

Chang Cheh’s The Five Venoms is often overshadowed by the later films featuring its five leads. They were soon to be known as the “Five Venoms”, and consisted, besides Chiang, of Philip Kwok Chun-Fung, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Lo Meng and Wai Pak. These five were great screen martial artists when working more in the background or alone, as they more often than not before this, but absolute magic when brought together. Later films do indeed provide even more opportunity to showcase their particular artistry.

However, one of the strengths of Five Venoms as a movie is that it is particularly willing to put its martial arts – though there’s still a lot of it, all of it great and often highly imaginative – aside for a bit to mirror Chang’s generally dark, pessimistic and woman-less – one can’t help but suspect a connection there - world view not only in rather dark ideas about the nature of many people but also a mood of the Chinese gothic. The use of torture and cruel, non-martial killing methods used by the evil Venoms does slot into Chang’s taste for a bit of on-screen cruelty, but combined with some choice shadows draped over some well-known Shaw sets and camera work that suggests more than a passing acquaintance with Italian Gothic horror (or similar ideas about how to suggest dread and decay visually), it does sometimes suggest that this particular version of ancient China is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Witchfinder General, if not locally, then spiritually.

Because two genres aren’t enough for Chang and the writer of more movies than many people have seen in their lives, Ni Kuang - who is of course on script duty here - this is also a bit of a classic murder mystery concerning at first an investigation by observation into the moral nature of the Venoms and then one about the identity of the elusive final Venom, Brother Scorpion, a cruel, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order, complete with red herrings.

It’s a combination I find irresistible, particularly when it is held together as well as it is here – philosophically, on a plot level, and aesthetically.