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The Crippled Masters
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Film Masters Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (16th July 2024). |
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The Film
 After running afoul of his ruthless master Lin Chang Kung (Li Chung-Chien), escort Lee Ho (Shun Chung-Chuen billed as "Frank Shum") is punished by having both of his arms chopped off by order of the master's current favorite Tang (Thomas Hong Chiu-Ming, billed in some territories as "Jackie Conn" and others as "Bruce Leei") and is tossed onto the street with orders to get out of town fast. When Lee Ho begs his way into a restaurant, he is unable to feed himself and is further humiliated by the waiter (Pei De-Yun) and then nearly beaten to death by the bouncer (Pang San). Lee Ho is nursed back to health by the local undertaker who is aware of Lin Chang Kung's brutality having regularly provided him with coffins. When Lin Chang Kung's sadistic second-in-command Mr. Pow (Hsiang Mei-Lung) discovers Lee Ho is still in town, he sends Lin Chang Kung's best fighters Black and White to kill him. After the undertaker bears the brunt of the injuries from the assault, Lee Ho realizes that he has to strike off on his own. He ends up hiding on a farm and fighting a pig for slop until the farmer takes him in and he starts learning to use his feet in place of his hands. When Lin Chang Kung becomes displeased with Tang's pangs of conscience, he pours acid over Tang's legs and then leaves him to die. With the shoe on the other foot, so to speak, Lee Ho wants to make Tang suffer rather than just killing him; however, an elderly kung fu master (He Jiu) pops living like a contortionist in a wicker basket tells them that they can overcome their disabilities and become "two halves of a whole" in order to specially train and avenge themselves against Lin Chang Kung. The master tasks them with stealing the "eight jade horses" from Lin Chang Kung who hand stolen them from him, since the statues hold the secrets to the most powerful of martial arts. When the pair break into Lin Chang Kung's fortress, they discover however that he has hired Ah Po (Chen Mu-Chuan) – a powerful fighter for hire who had previously come to their aid – and even more surprised when he lets them escape with the statues after proving his fighting superiority to them. Is Ah Po secretly on their side or just looking for a fighting challenge? Whatever the motives of the filmmakers and whether the stars felt exploited or were themselves exploiting their differently-abled but quite impressive abilities – Shun's disability was the result of Thalidomine embryopathy, a birth defect resulting from the administering of the titular sedative that had been tested on pregnant women in the fifties and sixties – watching The Crippled Masters may either be an empowering or morally-reprehensible experience; the latter most likely given how it was mainly championed by filmmaker John Waters to embarrass New Line Cinema's Robert Shaye at the DGA Awards and having reached a generation of film fans during the PD DVD days via a quippy review at badmovies.org complete with timecodes and sound-bytes. Although it vaguely follows the storyline of Chang Chech's Shaw Brothers film which featured able-bodied actors playing martial artists with disabilities – and indeed follows the template of many a martial arts film in which the hero or heroes are mercilessly beaten, nursed back to health, then trained to fight and avenge themselves or their loved ones – there is something particularly disturbing about seeing a differently-abled body treated the same way as the likes of Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and their stunt teams who we know incurred real, sometimes life-threatening injuries documented within the film or in the end credits outtakes (not to mention whether the fake mutilations enacted upon the protagonists might have been the least bit traumatic for the actors). If one can look past all of this, this Taiwanese film is otherwise very routine, poorly-written, flatly-acted, with threadbare production values and only livened up by the martial arts sequences; and even that is undercut at times by editing which makes use of jump cuts in an attempt to punch up the action but without the finesse of Bond series editor Peter Hunt. There is also something unintentionally offensive about likening a character with no arms and a character with no legs to Yin and Yang, being incomplete halves without the other; although Shun's and Hong's only other roles were in three other films together including the sequel Crippled Heroes, the modern-day drama Fighting Life, and as secondary characters in Raiders of the Shaolin Temple. Director Law Chi was fairly prolific with a career spanning roughly forty years, but apart from The Crippled Masters, his work mostly made it here as Wu-Tang Collection bootlegs and incorporated into Godfrey Ho's and Joseph Lai's IFD concoctions like American Commando Ninja which makes use of one his later shot-on-video features. 
Video
Although released theatrically by New Line Cinema in 1982, The Crippled Masters evaded VHS from the likes of Media Home Entertainment and Wizard Video, only popping up in 1996 on panned-and-scanned VHS from New Line Home Video and laserdisc from Image Entertainment at a time when they and New Line were giving The Street Fighter films the widescreen treatment. That cropped master found its way onto PD DVD from various labels after New Line's rights lapsed – although some editions lopped off the New Line logo and even the entire credits sequence – until a Belgian print dubbed in English with both burnt-in Dutch and French subtitles with the unfortunate dual-subtitle "Les Monstres du Kung-fu/De Kung-fu Monsters". It is this print that Film Masters has scanned for their release. The 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.38:1 widescreen transfers is available in two versions on the disc. The feature presentation is the "newly restored" version while the original raw scan with the aforementioned burnt-in subtitles is available in full in the extras. Comparison of the restored version and the raw scan reveals clean-up to much of the scratches and dings while the faded color has been pumped up in saturation to the point where some forehead highlights become hot and in danger of blowing out. There are also a few sequences where the pumping up of the saturation makes the visible grain in the shadows seem like more like posterization (for instance, the sequence with the coffin maker). Unfortunately, direct comparison also reveals that Film Masters have dealt with the issue of the subtitles by simply cropping the bottom of every shot in which they appear while leaving the surrounding shots alone. To maintain the 2.38:1 aspect ratio throughout without distortion, unfortunately, they have also cropped the sides of those shots resulting in dialogue scenes that are often claustrophobic and unbalanced in framing. Although it may be watchable with or without direct comparison, it can hardly be called a restoration of any sort. They would have been better off either doing the clean-up and color work to the uncropped scan or just not bothering at all and including the watchable raw scan – that is, a raw scan of a timed but faded print, not an untimed negative – on a bonus disc as part of another martial arts restoration. 
Audio
The print was in English and the main audio track is lossless English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono – along with a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 option – that was either not cleaned up or just lightly cleaned knowing that too much work would distort the worn track of a film which was likely not well-mixed in the first place. Sync is loose but the film was shot in Mandarin and even post-dubbed in that language, and the presumably unauthorized library scoring sounds a bit hot at the high ends but it may have always been the case. The Mandarin track has also been synchronized to the print in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 but the only subtitle option is an SDH track that follows the English dub. The raw scan option regrettably only includes a lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 mono English option. 
Extras
The "restored" version is accompanied by an audio commentary by The Important Cinema Club's Justin Decloux and Will Sloan which consists primarily of an oral history of the film's status as a cult item and guilty pleasure in the United States by way of television, bootlegs, and unauthorized DVDs – with shout-outs to the likes of Diamond Entertainment and Alpha Video whose budget DVD releases once glutted the video shelves in the early 2000s, promising poor transfers of films that were then hard to see and seemed unlikely to get legitimate, remastered releases before boutique labels started popping up – as well as straddling the line between political correctness, sensitivity to the performers, and the reputation of the film among "bad movie" viewers. Although they admit that they are dependent upon resources like the Hong Kong Movie Database and Video Search of Miami's Thomas Weisser's once-essential but error-ridden guides to Asian cinema, they are able to provide some information on the director Law Chi, actor/martial arts choreographer Chen, and production company First Distributors H.K. which is actually a Taiwanese company that like others added H.K. to their name because Hong Kong titles sold better to international distributors than Taiwanese ones (they are still active today). "Kings of Kung Fu: Releasing the Legends" (30:48) is a new Ballyhoo Pictures documentary featuring Temple of Schlock's Chris Poggiali discussing the history of Asian martial arts film distribution in the United States starting with Warner Bros. in production with Enter the Dragon and putting out King Boxer as "Five Fingers of Death" as a test run release, the Boston reception of which lead United International Pictures' Serafim Karalexis to impulsively hop a flight to Hong Kong, go to Shaw Brothers and pick up The Duel which he got into theaters as "The Duel of the Iron Fist" just three weeks later. He also covers the lawsuit between National General and American International with their competing releases of Fist of Fury and Lady Whirlwind (as "Deep Thrust"), the bewilderment of the public over the releases of more Bruce Lee films after his death, the Brucesploitation cycle of successors and "fake shemps", the hybridizing of the genre with others – as well as New Line's dip into the genre with the Japanese import The Street Fighter (initially released as with an X-rating but far more accessible and successful in its R-rated cut) and its sequels, as well as the second life of some of these films (and the first) on television and then on video including the notorious SB Video line consisting of appropriated World Northal tape masters, television recordings, and even camcorder recordings off theater screens.  The disc also includes a Kung Fu Film Trailer Compilation from Something Weird (18:31) – all shown in 4:3 letterbox, but hopefully some of these rare sources will turn up in another trailer compilation in 16:9 – a before/after restoration (2:21) shown in spit-screen and focusing on the clean-up rather than the cropping, the original theatrical trailer (4:05), and a 2024 re-cut trailer (3:57).
Packaging
The disc is packaged with a 14-page liner notes booklet by Philip Elliott Hopkins and Lawrence Carter-Long. In the foreward, Hopkins discusses tracking down a print of the film for Carter-Long's TCM screening series and finding one with collector Jack Stevenson who had running various film screenings in Boston in the eighties but was living in Copehagen in later years, and concerns about the scan. In his piece, Carter-Long discusses his surprise at the film's reception during screenings with audiences hungry for "disability done differently." 
Overall
Whatever the motives of the filmmakers and whether the stars felt exploited or were themselves exploiting their differently-abled but quite impressive abilities, watching The Crippled Masters may either be an empowering or morally-reprehensible experience.
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