This relates to Kung Fu movies perfectly because while the Shaw Brothers literally produced hundreds of films, the best of them were constantly re inventing the genre by throwing in all kinds of crazy ideas. Those who know the Shaw Bros will probably have been introduced by way of the amazing 36 Chambers of Shaolin and while its a dazzling piece of cinema it's actually pretty straight forward in terms of content and gives no indication to the kind of weirdness the studio would occasionally delve into.
Five Element Ninjas is the perfect middle ground between the brothers unleashed Id and their more traditional underdog stories. It all starts out typically enough with a fight between two rival schools. Lesson 1 about Kung Fu movies, there can't ever be a friendly rivalry between two schools, one always has to go overboard and try to kill all the students of the other school....
So here, one school loses miserably and as penance employs the assistance of the Five Element Ninjas. These guys are a band of ninjas who take their style from the well...five elements (Gold, Water, Earth, Wood, Fire) they're like the planeteers only mass murders. Yeah I haven't mentioned anyone's names because they really don't matter and that's not a criticism because every character is simply comes down to how these characters choose to kill people....if only real life was that awesome. But, each of the five elements have their own arsenal of authentic weapons that the movie pauses to highlight. The weapons and the different elements make the whole thing feel like a video game, where characters keep advancing and collecting new shit. You always hear critics praise films by pointing out how the setting is like a character, well here the weapons are characters. Anyone seeking to write a martial arts script needs to watch this just to understand how many awesome death machines your characters can fiddle with.
The sole survivor of the loser school trains with a new master and devise several techniques to destroy the element ninjas. And then shit gets really crazy as the methods of killing people get more and more elaborate, scratch the video game analogy because maybe it's more like a musical (there's some angles highlighting the symmetry of the fight formations that feels like something out of Busby Berkley) especially as our hero and his team become a unit and start splattering blood everywhere, its really a sight to see. I love pictures that try to ground themselves in reality but have such a other worldliness to them you forget there's no magic or anything involved. Yeah, this is all goofy as hell but that's why it works. It's not afraid to be loud, violent and kind of obnoxious but hey, I wish I could say that about the countless comic adaptations we're subjected to every year. Five Element Ninjas may be light on plot but its kinetic picturesque approach to action reminds me of what I love about comic books more than any comic book film does. A film that paints in broad strokes but still manages to shake you up. For a film that really just seemed to have been made to showcase weapons it takes a lot of risks.
Name me one comic book film that has this level of visual inventiveness. You can't.
Five Element Ninjas comes a lot closer with some smoke and mirrors.
DEADLY SERIOUS KILLING SYSTEM #1: While there's tons to choose from. My choice has to be the fishing move performed on one of the main bad guys. Each of the fighters employs a Kusarigama that looks like this:
To grapple one of the villains limbs and proceed to rip him apart into five pieces, yeah it goes there.
