Shout! Studios’ fourth collection of Shaw Brothers Classics includes some major titles. Five Element Ninjas is an all timer, up there with The 36th Chamber and Five Deadly Venoms. It lives up to the hype too.
The ninjas are the bad guys but they present five different obstacles. Copper hats blind their opponents with reflections, plus blades come out. Others hide in trees so it’s like the trees come to life. There are water ninjas, fire ninjas and even people coming out of the ground years before Red Dawn.
There are also traditional black ninjas and their whole bag of tricks. Subtitles identify the hidden ninja weapons in case you missed how they did it. Also, there are no sound effects when the ninjas walk. When you’re tired of the stock footstep sounds in every fight scene, that’s a neat distinction.
But it gets even better when the heroes train to battle the Five Element Ninjas and come up with even cooler countermeasures.
House of Traps is what it sounds like. Although I didn’t count, it felt like there were more traps in Five Element Ninjas. The Sword Stained with Royal Blood has a good trap too and several in Masked Avengers. Even Shaolin Prince has a basic trap and Shaolin Intruders has one out in the open in an exterior, so we could call this set the trap collection.
Two Champions of Shaolin is a Wutang movie, and has flying daggers before Zhang Yimou. Even the B sides are ’80s, so they’re firmly established in the Shaw Brothers formula, and going fro broke near the end of the studio.
By Opium and the Kung Fu Master it seems like a precursor to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon with rooftop fighting, One Upon a Time in China with bamboo ladder fights and a dragon dance contest. Plus, there’s a good say no to drugs message. Many of these films are ambitiously experimental with wirework, including many moves we never saw in later Hong Kong films. Others clearly paved the way for set pieces in Jet Li and Donnie Yen movies.
A Chu Ke is broken up film by film. He can still speak about the ideas behind each film and how they pulled it off. Lung Tien-Hsiang is only there for Sword Stained. Derek Yee is on Shaolin Prince but discusses his whole career.
Commentaries seem much more diverse than previous sets, giving David West, James Mudge, Brian Bankston and Ian Jane equal weight. Their expertise overlaps but each historian is distinct.