a review of 五毒

2021 Cult Movie Challenge Week 5: Shaw Brothers Week Movie #2 This one took a little bit more time for me to really get into, but once I realized that this was basically an old-fashioned cops and robbers movie with superhero-level fighters in it I got into the groove and had a lot of fun with it. The technical skills on display here were pretty astounding, and the six leads had charisma to spare. It's easy to see why these guys made something like 19 movies together in various combinations over the following four years, and I'm going to see if I can track down any more of those soon. The secret-identities plot was pretty clever too, insofar as I failed to guess the last one until just before the movie revealed him to us. I'm so used to seeing these movies as having the most basic scaffolding of a plot merely to justify 90 minutes of punching and kicking, so seeing that the writers decided to fold in a fun low-stakes mystery plot here was an extra cherry on top.