The Phantom Killer (1981)

Original title: 粉骷髏

Siu Fong (Wai Pak) is a bit of a local hero in a Chinese town ever since he fought off the bandits once lording it over the place. Because he’s also as pretty as he is boring, every single one of the town’s single ladies is swooning after him. Siu, however, has only eyes for the equally boring Sin Sin (Lee Yuen-Wa).

While Siu Fong’s gallivanting around the country probably doing something heroic, boringly, a series of murders of young women strikes our town. Curiously enough, all the victims were particular fans of Siu Fong; even more curiously, once he is back in town, the victims seem to be killed shortly after having cornered him to flirt with him.

At first, the chief of the local guard, Captain Chiu (Eddy Ko Hung), suspects Siu Fong. But various plot developments soon dissuade him from that theory. Why, perhaps the killer might be a woman trying to get rid of her rivals for that perfect man’s attentions, perhaps even a crazed Sin Sin?

I do have a place in my heart for films that mix wuxia and tales of detection, even more so when they, as Stanley Fung Sui-Fan’s The Phantom Killer does, add pleasant flourishes of the macabre to proceedings. The titular killer dresses up like a skeletal monk to commit their crimes – and their true nature is even more beautifully improbable – and there’s a whole line of inquiry about a corpse deposited in a statue, a worker in clay who sleeps in a coffin, and other elements of that nature.

Unfortunately, the macabre elements, as well as the mystery plot, suffer from the same syndrome as the film’s protagonist – they sound a lot more interesting than they turn out to be in practice.

Siu Fong’s just too bland to be interesting, and while he’s certainly physically attractive, Wai Pak projects all the personality of a freshly whitened wall. This even continues on into his kung fu style, that’s also technically flawless yet also – in a bizarre turn of events for one of the Venoms (Brother Snake) – lacking in any personality.

The macabre elements aren’t quite as struck with mediocrity as the protagonist – you can only make a skeletal monk piloted by a SPOILER so uninteresting – but director Fung certainly doesn’t use them as well as they deserve. Again, there’s nothing actively bad about the direction – it just lacks personality to a nearly improbable degree.

All of this does not mean The Phantom Killer is unwatchable, it’s just wasting some great ideas on boring competence.

The Five Venoms (1978)

aka The Five Deadly Venoms

aka 5 Deadly Venoms

The dying master (Dick Wei) of a kung fu clan known as the House of Venoms regrets the rather dark and dubious deeds he and many of his students have committed over the years. His final wish made to his last student, Yang De (Chiang Sheng), is for the young man to find his other surviving students, observe their virtue, and dispatch them if necessary. There are two problems here: even though his master has taught Yang De a smattering of all the techniques of the House – namely the styles of the Gecko, the Toad, the Centipede, the Snake and the Scorpion - the other students have all specialized, and he’ll not be able to stand against them in single combat. Making matters more difficult is the fact that most of the students have never actually met one another, so finding the people whose virtue Yang De is supposed to evaluate could turn out to be rather difficult. One suspects the master of the House of Venoms never had the time to learn of the power of the style of Drawing.

However, there’s another surviving member of the House of Venoms who has retired to a small town in the country. He has stolen and hidden away the clan’s treasure, and the master is convinced the other Venoms are bound to look for him and it. So Yang De really only needs to travel there and keep his eyes open, beat the villains he can’t beat without teaming up with a virtuous venom who may or may not exist, find the treasure himself, and give it to charity. Simple.

As it turns out, the Venoms are indeed all in town looking for the treasure – some committing increasingly horrible deeds of violence and betrayal while others do try to act noble.

Chang Cheh’s The Five Venoms is often overshadowed by the later films featuring its five leads. They were soon to be known as the “Five Venoms”, and consisted, besides Chiang, of Philip Kwok Chun-Fung, Sun Chien, Lu Feng, Lo Meng and Wai Pak. These five were great screen martial artists when working more in the background or alone, as they more often than not before this, but absolute magic when brought together. Later films do indeed provide even more opportunity to showcase their particular artistry.

However, one of the strengths of Five Venoms as a movie is that it is particularly willing to put its martial arts – though there’s still a lot of it, all of it great and often highly imaginative – aside for a bit to mirror Chang’s generally dark, pessimistic and woman-less – one can’t help but suspect a connection there - world view not only in rather dark ideas about the nature of many people but also a mood of the Chinese gothic. The use of torture and cruel, non-martial killing methods used by the evil Venoms does slot into Chang’s taste for a bit of on-screen cruelty, but combined with some choice shadows draped over some well-known Shaw sets and camera work that suggests more than a passing acquaintance with Italian Gothic horror (or similar ideas about how to suggest dread and decay visually), it does sometimes suggest that this particular version of ancient China is situated somewhere in the neighbourhood of Witchfinder General, if not locally, then spiritually.

Because two genres aren’t enough for Chang and the writer of more movies than many people have seen in their lives, Ni Kuang - who is of course on script duty here - this is also a bit of a classic murder mystery concerning at first an investigation by observation into the moral nature of the Venoms and then one about the identity of the elusive final Venom, Brother Scorpion, a cruel, sociopathic manipulator of the highest order, complete with red herrings.

It’s a combination I find irresistible, particularly when it is held together as well as it is here – philosophically, on a plot level, and aesthetically.