I didn’t like Five Deadly Venoms as much as I thought I would. The kung fu was awesome, particularly the final battle, which provided a suitable climax to the movie. The DVD transfer was, again, superb. The story didn’t really grab me, though.
I think in retrospect I was expecting big kung fu action with all five Venoms from the first minute, which is not what I got. Instead, I got a somewhat complex mystery, and I wasn’t quite in the mood for that. It was a pretty good mystery, and I only figured out who was who five minutes before the revelation. Also, I’ve realized that I like the big sweeping epics like Water Margin better than the close-focus kung fu flicks, on average.
Worth watching, and I have another Venoms movie to watch (same actors, not a related plot), and I’m looking forward to that one. Just not as much fun as the other Shaws I’ve seen so far.
Sigh.
This one is probably my favourite of the Shaw movies for the following reasons:
A) Not the tale of a single questing character trying to defeat a single "Big Bad."
B) The mystery.
C) It is the one I saw earliest and most often on my local "Kung-fu Movie for a Saturday Afternoon"