KUNG FU KORNER: Kid with the Golden Arm (1979)

Like a lot of other round-headed kids in the '80s whose dads had VCRs, I grew up watching a shit-ton of kick-ass Kung Fu films that were taped off late-night TV. Every Saturday, dad and me would watch these flicks over and over, but there was one in particular that we must have seen at least 80 kabillion times: The 5 Deadly Venoms (1978). Mysterious dudes in cool masks, secret identities, magic fighting styles patterned after venomous reptiles, amphibians and arthropods…. Forget playing catch in the backyard, that was how we bonded.

 As it turns out, we weren’t alone in adoring that movie. The 5 Deadly Venoms just happens to be one of the most beloved Kung Fu films of all time, AND the guys in it got super freaking famous because of it, eventually making dozens of other awesome films together - some of which, like the Brave Archer series and Chinatown Kid ended up being far better films than the one they made their names with. Who knew? Not 8-year-old me, that’s for sure. If I had, I would have easily and without a doubt replaced Venoms with Kid with the Golden Arm (1979) as my hands-down favourite Kung Fu film in the entire universe, double-stamped, no erasies.

For anybody unfamiliar with the fake moustaches and corn-ball sound-stage exteriors of late 70s Kung Fu cinema, Kid with the Golden Arm is about as flamboyant and fantastic as these films could get without going too far into camp territory. In many of his later wuxia genre films, director Chang Cheh occasionally stumbled while walking the fine line between universal accessibility and downright cartoonish goofiness, but with Kid he demonstrated a masterful control over any tonal ambiguity. As complimented by the colourfully distinctive costumes and wide-angle composition, the broadly-stroked characters and simplified plot become tools of a classical sort of story-telling, often rendering any subtitles unnecessary. For the record, here’s the basic plot (and I do mean basic): a bunch of super-bad tough guys, each possessing - and, conveniently enough, named after - their own unique Kung Fu style try to steal a cache of gold that's en route to, of course, the poor and hungry. Luckily, they are repeatedly thwarted by a wicked-awesome Kung Fu all-star security force - all of whom are also named after their respective specialties. A monkey could understand what was going on.

The story is heavily laced with broadly familiar themes of loyalty and honour and is certainly easy to follow, but rarely does the film pander. It’s obvious that Cheh - inspired by the wonderfully balletic fight choreography that dominated his later work - was weaving together a more expressive story than could be seen in his earlier movies, a story elementally closer to opera than film. Only instead of beautiful singing and orchestration, the narrative is driven by hyper-kinetic violence and gore (My kind of opera!). And while it's just ever so microscopically shy of total cheeseball territory, it still skates close enough to make it incredibly fun to watch. Plus it features some amazing feats of martial arts, and the Venoms at their absolute best.

It’s clear that working with the Venoms motivated Cheh to create films that were a little bit grander and more theatrical than his previous work. The Venoms, students of the Peking Opera School, were their own fight choreographers as well, peppering the action with acrobatic flourishes that made Chinese martial arts seem even more sensational than ever, raising as they did the popularity of the genre to greater and greater heights. While not as internationally humungous as Bruce Lee, these guys were and are still Kung Fu legends, and it’s films like Kid with the Golden Arm that established then and maintain now their legendary status. Man, I wish I had seen it when I was a kid. But I gotta tell ya, watching it for the first time as an adult helped transport me back to those Saturdays of my youth, which just goes to show how much Cheh absolutely and positively nailed it. I cannot wait to watch this one again - this time with my dad.

-Rajo

Check out this trailer for The 5 Deadly Venoms! You could probably also do a search and watch a good chunk of the film RIGHT NOW! God, I love YouTube. 

Also, here's part one of a great documentary about the Venoms themselves, which sheds some light on Hong Kong film production of the late 70s.  Always interesting.