My first encounter with Joe Law AKA Chi Lo’s Crippled Masters (1979) was on a blind buy VHS tape purchased from Suncoast Pictures one Saturday night in 1997. Usually the reality never matched the promise of those early VHS covers, especially the martial arts ones, but here it certainly did. At the time it was put out by New Line Cinema, who are probably best known for Lord of the Rings now, but back when they picked pick up Masters, New Line trafficked in the likes of art house treasures and more sordid genre fare like the films of John Waters, who had the best description of the film in his book Crackpot:
“If you want to be civic minded and publicize your newly installed handicap ramps, show The Crippled Masters, an honest-to-God karate film with two heroes-one has no arms, the other no legs. Everybody beats them up until one jumps on the other’s shoulders, and together they become a killing machine.”
While some may lump Masters in with Chinese and Hong Kong fighters, the film’s lineage was actually Taiwanese, who were not as well funded as the likes of Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest of the East. Because of that they weren’t above exploiting two disabled individuals to deliver one of what in my humble opinion is one of the greatest fight flicks out there. The film takes the revenge route and has the local kingpin Lin Chang Cao (Chen Mu Chuan) who suffers from severe kyphosis himself cutting off the arms of once great martial artist Lee Ho (Frankie Shum), who was actually born without fully formed arms due to thalidomide syndrome.
Lee then goes into exile where he comes across Tang (Jackie Conn) some months later, who was one of the men who maimed him. Tang had also crossed the boss, and had acid poured on his legs for his transgression. Conn in real life had lost the use of his legs due to complications in childbirth, and they were kept crossed at all times, so he could maneuver with his hands. The two men soon meet a contortionist/martial artist master, who then recruits them as students and trains the men for both vengeance and to steal 8 Jade Horses. The horses were stolen from their master by Lin and hide the secret to defeating him.
The thing that really stood out to me about the flick making it a favorite for me personally is how the two men endure so much hardship, but by the end of the film overcome their disabilities become martial artists beating the bad guy and winning the day. The acrobatics needed to achieve this feat and fights here are nothing short of impressive, since we can definitely see both men are powerful fighters in their own right and this was way before CGI or greenscreen. Then there’s the very clear reality that these two men were already disabled, became martial arts experts after the fact, who then went on to star in four films, which is almost as impressive as the plot of this film to be honest.
Film Masters have sourced this HD scan from the only surviving 35mm film print. And after watching their raw scan, which is also an extra on the disc, I can see they had their work cut out for them. It definitely looks leaps and bounds better than my VHS and allows a clearer look at the sheer tenacity on screen from the Masters. The film also comes with a very aggressive DTS-HD mono track, this had my sub thumping my home theater whenever there was a fight on screen, hitting a solid low whenever a punch landed. There’s also a very informative commentary as well as a 30 minute mini-doc Kings of Kung Fu: Releasing the Legends, which looks to act as an intro to the kung-fu crazed that birthed this insanity.
Watching the film now, there’s a new more nuanced context at play in the current climate. Echoing the excellent commentary on the disc by Will Sloan and Justin Decloux of The Important Cinema Club, I would like to think that this film really does transcend its exploitative trappings even though this film was originally made to allow abled body audiences to gawk at these disabled men. It definitely allowed the audience to sympathize with these men and not only root for them, but see them for the heroes they were. It’s most definitely a negative conceptually, but these film did enable these men to have careers in film as martial artists and allowed them to make make a living, which is the crux of the question of did this film purely exploit or empower them as well. I would like to say a little of column A, and also column B.
