For some martial arts movies, one of the best testaments to their quality is the sheer number of times they’ve been copied. Shamelessly replicating the formulas of successful films was a common trend in the martial arts movie genre, especially when it came to old-school kung fu movies.
There’s no better evidence of that approach than Bruceploitation, which was a situation where copying Bruce Lee’s style went so far that the strategy wound up developing its own subgenre. But while Bruce Lee’s movies are certainly the most notable example, they were hardly the only victim of this particular method.
In fact, there were quite a few great martial arts movies that became the starting points of new trends that took hold in the 1970s and 1980s.
5 The One-Armed Swordsman
One of the most important building blocks for the long-standing definition of what constitutes a martial arts movie came in 1967 when Jimmy Wang Yu starred in Chang Cheh’s The One-Armed Swordsman. The Shaw Brothers wuxia classic sees Wang Yu step into the role of an expert swordfighter who loses his arm, relearns how to fight, and goes on a killing spree to save his former martial arts master.
The One-Armed Swordsman was influential in more ways than just the effect it had on how martial arts movies utilized male protagonists and training sequences; many were far more direct, introducing their very own one-armed heroes in films such as The One-Armed Swordswoman.
Interestingly, Jimmy Wang Yu himself was a big part of this movement. He starred in a long list of movies as a one-armed martial artist, and only one was a legitimate sequel to The One-Armed Swordsman. Most, like The One-Armed Swordsman Against Nine Killers and The One-Armed Swordsman Meets Zatoichi, were purely knock-offs and reimaginings of the original idea.
4 Fist Of Fury
Nearly every Bruce Lee movie has been copied in some form at least once, but none has received that treatment more than the actor’s second kung fu film, Fist of Fury. The 1972 kung fu gem tells the story of Chen Zhen, a young martial artist who comes home to find his master dead, presumably killed by members of a rival Japanese school, who act as an oppressive force in the movie.
Technically, Fist of Fury was a knock-off itself. The story clearly took inspiration from Jimmy Wang Yu’s 1970 Shaw Brothers hit, The Chinese Boxer. But while The Chinese Boxer was the root of that trend, it was Fist of Fury specifically that so many movies were trying to emulate.
Fist of Fury’s patriotic Chinese vs. Japanese theme, combined with Bruce Lee’s portrayal of the rebel hero, has led to a number of remakes, sequels, and knock-offs, from Fist of Fury Part II to Jackie Chan’s New Fist of Fury.
3 The Flying Guillotine
The One-Armed Swordsman wasn’t the last Shaw Brothers film to be the subject of numerous rip-offs. In 1975, Shaw Brothers made The Flying Guillotine, a movie that starred Chen Kuan-tai as an assassin who performs executions for the emperor with “the flying guillotine,” a weapon designed to remove people’s heads from afar, via a chain and a basket with bladed edges, wielded like a lasso.
The weapon, which was supposedly based on a real device from China’s Ming Dynasty, served as the basis for some wild action sequences where characters would lose their ends in a fashion that was both spectacular and absurd at the same time.
The Flying Guillotine was a smash hit for Shaw Brothers, prompting rival studio Golden Harvest to respond with Master of the Flying Guillotine. The result was a cycle of dueling “flying guillotine” movies from Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest, including Flying Guillotine, Fatal Flying Guillotine, and The Vengeful Beauty.
2 Drunken Master
The release of Drunken Master had a domino effect in 1978, launching Jackie Chan to stardom and setting the stage for a new wave of martial arts movies inspired by its central premise, which was a martial artist fighting with drunken boxing style kung fu.
Similar to Drunken Master, many of these films would see young heroes learn drunken boxing from elderly ne’er’do’well alcoholics, who would turn out to be secret martial arts masters.
Yuen Siu-tien, who played the mentor to Chan’s character in Drunken Master, returned to reprise his role in several spiritual sequels, including Dance of the Drunk Mantis and The Story of Drunken Master. Drunken boxing remained relevant for years via releases such as Shaolin Drunkard, 5 Superfighters, Shaolin Drunken Monkey, and more.
1 Five Deadly Venoms
Drunken Master was actually one of two movies to kick off a martial arts phenomenon in 1978, with the other being Shaw Brothers’ Five Deadly Venoms. Five Deadly Venoms told the story of six martial arts experts, all trained by the same master and five having their own distinct styles, with the sixth knowing a bit of each.
The story follows the sixth student, who has to find the other five and identify which ones have taken the path of evil and which ones he can count on to defeat the others. Five Deadly Venoms emerged as a cult favorite, resulting in Shaw Brothers reusing five of the six main actors for a long-running series of martial arts movies. They made so many movies together that they even had their own nickname: “The Venom Mob.”
They didn’t all share the same story as Five Deadly Venoms, but had some things in common, such as the five actors usually playing the main characters, with at least one or two taking on a villain role. And like Five Deadly Venoms, they took full advantage of the Venom Mob’s individual skillsets to add some diversity to the martial arts choreography.
The Venom Mob consisted of Lu Feng, Chiang Sheng, Lo Mang, Phillip Kwok, and Sun Chien. Typically, any film that includes at least two of the five martial arts stars in major roles is regarded as a “Venom movie.”
Ultimately, the concept grew beyond the five actors, with other studios using a similar ensemble format and banking on the name through films such as The Nine Venoms and Five Venoms Attack.
