The Five Venoms

  Cheh Chang built up, over the course of his years directing martial arts movies, a killer roster of Kung-Fu talent - Chiang Shen, Sun Chien, Phillip Kwok, Lo Meng, Wei Pai, Feng Lu and others. They'd eventually coalesce into a stable group which eventually became known as the Venom mob, mostly due to this movie. Wikipedia informs me that they were only active for less than five years, which surprised me - they put out a lot of movies in that short time.

 I loved The Five Venoms (or The Five Deadly Venoms, as it was known back then) as a kid and watched it quite a few times -  there was a TV station that aired a lot of old martial arts movies on Sundays, and this one was in regular rotation. Unfortunately I did not enjoy it as much this time around.

 The premise is great: An old master (Dick Wei/Tu Lung) charges his last apprentice Yang Tieh (Chiang Sheng) with hunting down his previous ones. Each one was taught a deadly animal-based martial arts style (Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard... and, uh, the other one). The old master is dying, so he doesn't have time to train him fully in any of the styles - Yang just gets the basics and gets sent away; because of that, he's told that he'll need to ally with one of the venoms to even stand a chance. There's also some deal with a treasure Yang needs to recover, because these movies seem to be allergic to simplicity.

 Another complication: The Venom clan apprentices go incognito, and the master can't (or won't) help Yang identify them. The apprentices don't even necessarily know each other.

 This simple, videogame boss-rush premise is completely wasted as the script almost immediately tangles itself into knots. Yang, who'd been set up as the protagonist, is unceremoniously ignored for most of the movie to instead focus on the rest of the venom's misadventures; Snake and Centipede think they know where the treasure is, so they kill a whole family to get to it. A constable and his friend, who may or may not be venoms as well (spoiler: they are) investigate, there's a whole lot of betrayals, double-guessing and plotting against each other... but sadly not too many fights. There sure is a lot of torture, though.
 Things get pretty bleak - innocents get tortured to death, and there's some nasty business with hooks going through nasal passages to cause untraceable deaths (with some really vivid bone-crunching sounds!) I clearly misremembered Crippled Avengers being uncharacteristically brutal, since this one's also got plenty of nasty business going on. And because it's all incidental, the nastiness doesn't line up with the plot as it does on Avengers and when the assholes do get theirs it's nowhere near as satisfying.

It's not terrible, necessarily, but both the script and the acting would need to be quite a bit better to make it work. As it is, it's a relief when brawls do break out: The Kung-Fu action is clean, full of amazing physical stunts, great wirework, and fun gimmicks. The whole animal style thing is goofy as hell, though - poor Snake especially made me crack up whenever he showed off his special moves.
 As with most of the Shaw Brothers movies, the action doesn't concern itself much with making the fights look realistic. Awesome moves and athletics are the order of the day, with the choreographies being heavily stylized... if the hits clearly don't connect, eh, it's no big deal.

 It really doesn't matter, all the fights are good fun. It's a shame the rest of the movie kind of drags.