Kant Miss Kung Fu Klassics: Five Element Ninjas (1982)

Title: Five Element Ninjas

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Director: Chang Cheh

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Review:

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Five Element Ninjas is a fast paced and extremely entertaining Kung Fu film from famed Chinese director Chang Cheh. It is a film filled with revenge, betrayal, ninjas, and non stop kung fu action! It tells the tale of two Kung Fu schools who are battling to see who is the best of the two. Both schools bring their best martial artist to duel with each other, but only one will emerge as victorious, the best. The desire to be the best martial arts school in the land prompts one of the schools to cheat and so the end up relying on the aid of the notorious “Five Element Formation”, a group of ninjas that is segmented into five groups, each of the ninja groups attacks by using five elements which include: Fire, Water, Gold, Earth and Wood. Will the good guys have what it takes to go up against the Five Element Ninjas?

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Without a doubt, this one is one of my favorite Chang Cheh movies so far. It’s filled with some of the best Kung Fu fights you are going to see on any movie. These actors/martial artists are so skilled and have such speed! These guys are so good you will probably be tempted to hit that replay button to see some of the moves they pull off, I know I did! And the film has such a diverse use of weaponry! This is one of those films where each fight uses a different kind of weapon, each amusing in its own way. There’s giant axes, all sorts of different swords, poles, ninja stars, you name it, you’ll see it on this film. The first ten minutes of the film starts with a tournament between two schools, each school brings their best fighters forward against each other which makes for some really interesting fights. And all this awesomeness happens without the Ninjas even being introduced yet! By the way, one of the most enjoyable aspects for me on this one where the ninjas! You want to see the coolest ninjas on any film? Check this movie out! There’s a whole school of these guys! Stealthy, deadly and with a huge assortment of weapons! I love how a whole bunch of them will jump out of nowhere without making a single sound! These guys will whip out weapons you’ve never seen on any other movie before. So be on the look out for those.

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The story though simple, grabs you. The good guys’ teacher is poisoned with a venom that will incapacitate him for three whole months. So he will not be able to use his Kung Fu skills to fight in the schools name, and so his pupils are forced to go up against the other school that is defying them. On their way to the duel a trap is set for them to battle against the Five Element Ninjas. The good guys are not familiar with the techniques used by the FiveE Element Ninjas, so it’s a total massacre, with the good guys getting some of their best fighters literally slaughtered! There is this one gruesome fight where the earth ninjas have knives popping out from the ground, injuring the good guys feet and legs. These knives rip the flesh off of the good guys legs, and he fights as chunks of flesh are hanging out of his legs! But he gives a good fight even though he is practically stepping on his own innards as he fights! Gruesome! Cringe inducing, and also very Chang Cheh! This director loved bloody action on his films! His heroes really suffer on his films.

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Speaking of Chang Cheh as a director, this movie has a lot of elements that you can come to expect from a Chang Cheh/Kung Fu movie. Rivaling schools, Kung Fu fantasy elements, heroes who have to go and train in order to be able to face their enemy (this one being the most reoccurring of all) and finally, I noticed something that happens a lot in Chang Cheh movies: the female is the source of all evil. It’s something that he seems to do in many of his films, where the women are not to be trusted at all. They are always backstabbers somehow (sometimes even literally backstabbers! On this film a female ninja infiltrates the good guys school to get to know their secrets and plans, stirring the roosters nest as they say. Her intrusion into the school is one of the more interesting moments of the film, specially considering what happens because of it. I guess Chang Chech didn’t have the best relationships in the world and this somehow mirrored onto his movies? I don’t know, but the case is he does this a lot on his films! Even in The One Armed Swordsman a female is the one responsible for making the titular character loose an entire arm!

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The film is not without its shortcomings though. This is one of the cheesiest of the Chang Cheh films I’ve seen. The Five Element Ninjas sometimes come off as funny, they each dress in the color of their element, the wood ones wear brown garments, the gold ones wear gold, the water ones wear blue and so forth. The wood ninjas were the silliest of all because the hid behind trees and tried to camouflage themselves as the tree, they looked kind of silly. The water ninjas were kind of funny too because all they did was swim around the water, I mean, couldn’t the good guys see them? I didn’t enjoy the use of reverse photography on some of the shots involving the water ninjas emerging from the water. But whatever, this is a Kung Fu fantasy, people float above water, ninjas travel through the earth, disappear, these guys appear to have all sorts of mystical powers, which of course is part of the charm of these movies! One other negative point for me is that to me, of all of Chang Cheh movies, this is the one where you can notice that the exteriors are all sets, with fake skies and clouds. I’ve never really loved this about these movies, but on this one is more evident. Still, the movie is so entertaining that I simply ignored this. Modern Kung Fu films do not suffer from this ailment thanks to the aid of CGI.

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But anyhows, once the good guys train to overcome the Five Element Ninjas its payback time and we get treated to the last half of the film which is basically the good guys confronting the Five Element Ninjas yet again, only this time, they are ready for them! It is interesting to see them overcome the Five Elements. This is a great Kung Fu Fantasy and I recommend it as one of the most entertaining and fun ones I have seen to date.

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Rating: 4 out of 5