Vengeance!

MOVIE #1,800 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 07.09.24 While I have a VERY limited knowledge base for Hong Kong cinema (in general) I do have a strange history with this particular director, Chang Cheh. My friends and I (none of us cinephiles or even burgeoning film fans at the time) actually stumbled upon a VHS copy of Return of the Five Deadly Venoms (the North American release of Crippled Avengers). We watched it and had a good time, so my band at the time wrote a punk song about it where we simply read the synopsis off the back of the box and it’s on the internet here. Little did I know at the time (and barely know now tbh) how actually influential/notable Chang Cheh really is/was. This is the wildcard 24T entry today and so I’m still not giving the man his due just yet. I also realize there are other HK/Shaw Brothers directors who are probably even more deserving of a D.F. In short, I am but a work in progress.

But I enjoyed this flick. I found it hard to get into the plot and never quite grasped the intricacies of it, but it’s your standard revenge film. The hero seems impossible to kill (until they finally kill him) and he kills SO many people in his pursuit of Vengeance! For this being the movie he won Best Director at the 1970 Asia Pacific Film Festival, it has a pretty damn slight Wikipedia page with this unintentionally funny sentence in the first paragraph: “The movie has little actual kung fu and instead is heavily laden with knife fighting and judo.” Noted!

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Vengeance (報仇; original Hong Kong title, Bao chou) is a 1970 kung fu film directed by Chang Cheh, and starring David Chiang and Ti Lung. The film is set in Peking in 1925, and centers on a revenge plight of Chiang. The movie has little actual kung fu and instead is heavily laden with knife fighting and judo. It was released on May 14, 1970.