Five Superfighters

Customer Reviews:

Another Shaw Brothers Classic.......2003-03-15

This is another less known "old school" Shaw Brothers classic mostly due to the lack of popular stars. Only the drunken broadsword master is familiar due to being cast in similar roles as a drunken master and monkey stylist. The fight choreography is typically well done but the climactic battle is short

5 SuperFighters.......2002-03-02

Why its called 5 Super Fighters, I don't know. Three students of Monkey Style are forced to take revenge for their master when he is beaten up by a stanger. Each student vows to find a new teacher and return to fight the stranger in 6 months. Unaware of the decision of his students the old master turns to the bottle and stops teaching. Many Shaw style training sequences take place during the movie and the students return on their masters birthday to fight the stranger.

This is really a great movie to see monkey stlye, I believe these 3 students are in Two Champions of Death and play monkey style fighers hired by the Bad Guys.

The DVD quality is what is you can expect from from a dubbed VCR tape to DVD. This is quite normal for a movie of this type and any true kung fu movie collector wouldn't worry about this.
There are a 3-4 instances where the sound is turned down during fight sequences, which doesn't really hurt the movie.

Customer Reviews:

Who the heck are the FIVE Superfighters?.......2007-05-21

Over the years, the Shaw Brothers studios produced many hits, misses, and numerous films that fall in between. FIVE SUPERFIGHTERS would be the latter.

The story begins with a mysterious martial arts master clad entirely in black (so you know he's the bad guy) entering a town with a banner draped over his shoulder proclaiming that he's out to correct poor and unworthy kung fu. His first victims consist of an entire school that he storms. Throughout the opening the credits, the students and master of the school prove themselves to be no match for the villain.

Unfortunately, director LO Mar uses freeze frames rather poorly in this opening sequence: rather than freeze the action to show the titles and then resume the fight from the same point, LO cuts to a different part of the action after each freeze frame, which interrupts the flow of the fight more than the pauses.

After the opening titles, the bad kung fu hater happens upon the aging Master WAN and his three pupils, who are simply minding their own business at the side of a street. The villain accuses the martial artists of being in his way and beats the pupils soundly, forcing WAN to engage the black-garbed master. The fight ends rather badly as WAN succumbs to the villain's greater skill.

With their tails tucked between their legs, Master WAN and his students retreat to the abandoned house where they live. After WAN falls asleep, his students vow to find other teachers to improve their kung fu so they can seek vengeance for their master. The three pupils, without saying anything to their teacher or even leaving him a note, depart and go their separate ways, all agreeing to meet in six months in time to return to celebrate their master's birthday.

While WAN is left thinking that his students have forsaken him, the three pupils meet three teachers: a tofu selling widow with great kicking skill, a crippled beggar who knows the crane style, and an aging fisherman who's an expert with a staff. Six months of training ensues for the three youngsters while Master WAN combats his inner demons.

After reading the above synopsis, you may have the same question I had as I watched the film: who are the **Five** Superfighters? In other Shaw offerings where the characters are counted in the titles (e.g., THE FIVE VENOMS, HEROES TWO), the film makes clear who the titular characters are. In LO Mar's film, I kept waiting to see who aside from the three students comprised the promised five. The movie provides a couple of false hopes--a retired fighter who conceals his skill and two youngsters who attempt to help Master WAN at a tavern--but never makes clear who the five are. Even the Cantonese title of this film, TONG SAN NG FU (literally, "the five tigers of Tong San"), is of no help.

It wasn't until I looked at the original movie poster for this film that I realized who the superfighters were supposed to be. Thankfully, the Celestial DVD includes this poster as both an on-disc extra and as part of the packaging. Still, the fact that the film fails to make the identities of the five clear is a definite shortcoming.

(For anyone who wants to know who the five are without hunting down the movie poster, please read on.)

Aside from not making clear who the five titular characters are supposed to be, the script suffers from other problems. The student who follows the tofu seller, for example, comes up with a phenomenally stupid idea for convincing the woman to teach him her kung fu. Worse yet, the widowed tofu seller actually instructs him on her technique after he executes his lame-brained scheme. As well, the script has the fisherman making his pupil promise to stay on for two years, but the writers apparently had no idea how to get the youngster out of this promise in a convincing manner. Also, the need to have fight scenes every couple of minutes at the expense of a cohesive and intelligent narrative becomes very clear when several characters show up (such as the widow's father-in-law) to fight someone and then disappear without another thought given to them. It may seem unusually harsh to criticize an old-school kung fu film for its weak script, but standout films like LEGEND OF A FIGHTER, DREADNAUGHT, and THE FIVE VENOMS prove that it is possible to have good drama and a decent plot in a kung fu movie.

The other negative aspect of this film is the horrible soundtrack. It is meant to keep the tone light (despite the numerous fights, there's a grand total of ONE death in this film), but it seems completely out of place and added almost at a whim rather with any kind of effort to match the action on the screen. I can only assume that the Celestial disc used the original score, which may have sounded to OK to an audience in Hong Kong back in 1979, but is rather painful to listen to these days.

On the plus side, if you like lots and lots and LOTS of fighting in your movies, you won't be disappointed by the sheer quantity of kung fu encounters in FIVE SUPERFIGHTERS. The quality varies, but for the most part, the choreography is competent if largely unspectacular. I'm no expert on martial arts techniques, but my big beef with the fighting is that the three pupils didn't seem to change their repertoire all that much after supposedly studying under their three new teachers.

This film is not one of the more distinguished titles in the Shaw catalogue, and I would definitely not recommend it as an introduction to viewers who are new to old-school kung fu films. Still, it has enough action to warrant a mild recommendation to those who enjoy a lot of kung fu action.

Just as a closing thought, I wonder about the blurb on the back of the Celestial release that claims FIVE SUPERFIGHTERS is "arguably the director's best-loved movie". If this rather middling film is indeed LO Mar's crowning achievement, I would hate to see what his other films are like.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

All right, for those of you who stuck with my review and are dying to know the identities of the Five Superfighters, they are as follows:

Master WAN
His three pupils
The villain in black

Kind of lame, huhn?

DVD:

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