The Four Invincibles (1979)

Better Late Then Never

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It starts at the master's party. Ku Feng brings a gift. It is a chopped off human arm and leg. The victim disobeyed the master to leave the clan for a woman. (Did the victim do that to himself or did Ku Feng do it? Is he still alive?) Ku Feng is given two letters to certify him as the new clan master. This will certainly be problematic. In the next scene Ku Feng ends up with a broken leg and kicked out of the clan also leaving behind his pregnant wife. Four other men are also victims of villain Cheng Kei-Ying, muted, blinded, and one-armed. Most of this happened because of defending the girl. Ku Feng ends up as their teacher and everyone is out for revenge.This movie is shallow in all ways. The disabilities are portrayed unrealistically as well as the martial arts training to overcome the disabilities. It blows off these shortcomings with comedy. Nothing really works and by today's standards it is certainly offensive. In another review I read this movie was described as "ugly". That is accurate and could be the world's shortest movie review ever, the single word – ugly.This movie is only for hard core fans of the genre to watch one time in order to get a good look at ugly. I hope no one else ever watches it.

THE FOUR INVINCIBLES is nothing more than a cheap B-movie version of the Shaw Brothers classic CRIPPLED AVENGERS, featuring almost exactly the same plot as in that film. The story opens with an aged and respected clan leader dying and his cruel student taking over leadership of the clan by crippling his rival, smashing his leg! The rival, Ku Feng, just about manages to escape with his life before travelling to the countryside where he recruits three newly-handicapped guys to form a team of fighters. After much training, the four men return to the clan and battle the traitor to the death.This is silly stuff indeed and yet the occasional bad taste outrageousness of the narrative sees it through. Given that the main characters are disabled, there's a lot of mugging and overacting going on here. My favourite character is Kwok Choi Hon's deaf mute who runs around performing unlikely feats and pulling funny faces. Dean Shek has a cameo and Cecilia Wong plays a woman with unclear motives. The film is quite gruesome, featuring a severed arm early on, and the bits in which various characters are blinded, lose limbs, and are deafened are quite violent, although the low budget means that there aren't many special effects and those that do occur are quite unconvincing (the one-armed guy obviously has his arm tucked down the back of his shirt, for instance).Some fun comes from the main bad guy's "insane devil palm" technique although it doesn't really do much (I was hoping for something like Lo Lieh's special method in KING BOXER). There are some brutal training sequences and one moment of gratuitous nudity. The villain has massive sideburns but is otherwise quite undistinguished in the fighting stakes. The funniest thing about the ending is the use of the 'four invincibles' fighting style in which the characters wander around like drunken zombies. THE FOUR INVINCIBLES really is a piece of so-bad-it's-good film-making.