To be completely honest about the film, the only real attraction there should be is for the fact that it’s so completely bizarre and disgusting. That doesn’t make it without merit mind you, and for some this is probably a drawback, but you have to take the film for what it is and it most certainly isn’t going to be for everyone. It’s a cult film for cult fans, to say the film is targeted at a niche market would be understatement. When you get your first glimpses at Frankie Shum with his protruding nub where an arm should/would (I assume he was born the way he is, if you get your arm cut off I doubt there’s any way to grow a defected hand-thing out of your shoulder) have been, you’ll know if this film is going to be up your alley. As disturbing as Frankie’s arm is, I find his partner Jackie Conn’s weirded out legs to be far more mind bending. I literally have no idea what may have happened to this man’s legs. I’ve thought about the idea that maybe he has no bottom torso and they glued a couple of fake legs on to him, but when you see the bottom of his deformed feet, you can tell it’s real. He looks like a grown man with the legs of a seven year old Ethiopian child, but his upper body and even his feet seem to be in perfectly fine shape. In the film he has some kind of acid poured on his legs that makes them shrivel up the way they do, I question if perhaps something similar happened to him in real life. After staring at his legs for an hour, it’s enough to drive any man to madness, and the fact that he seems to have two cavity’s in his front teeth doesn’t help anything when watching the film. I don’t demand that a film contain beautiful people, and maybe I’m shallow, but birth defects and deformity’s really freak me out. Body abnormalities aside, the film actually contains some decent Kung Fu from our Criplled Masters. Frankie Shum uses his half-hand to toss around a staff with which he lays the beat down on people, and Jackie Conn throws his half-body around either smacking his enemies with his rear or punching them from the ground. The Kung Fu it’s self is what makes the film even more interesting, just the fact that these men are able to overcome their disabilities and come out as super heroes is quite the sight, although I doubt the producers were going for a film to uplift people with a story of the disabled overcoming adversity. The film was made to display a couple of crippleds who beat the crap out of people, and if you can get down with that, you’ll find that it’s a relatively fun film to just sit with and let the time pass bye. Other than our two main characters, the film also gives us a few strange characters worthy of even a Jimmy Wang Yu film. The lead villain, Ling I think his name was, is one incredibly strange bad guy, and I mean that as a compliment. He has a gigantic scar on his face that is never actually explained, and looks as if someone just threw a few anchovies on his cheek, but that’s not all, he has a gigantic hump on his back made of metal. That’s right, like the hunchback of Notre Dame, but with one made of metal. Is the hump ever shown with his shirt off? No, you know how the audience knows that it’s made of metal? Because every time someone hits it, or he slams it against someone, it makes a giant clanging sound. Talk about a weird and pointless weapon. His Kung Fu on the other hand is quite great, and the way in which he uses the metal hump ranges from absurd to quite impressive. The two other big characters would be Black and White. Black is a fairly large bald man who dresses all in black, while White is a smaller guy who dresses all in white (obviously) and even wears white makeup over his face. What purpose do these two serve? Nothing other than being somewhat cool. The acting by all involved is on the terrible side, no one except Frankie Shum seems to have any kind of on screen presence that wades through the terrible English dubbing, and I might only favor Shum because he favors the late Victor Wong who all genre fans tend to admire. It doesn’t really matter though, because no one would watch a film like this for acting, I’m just covering the bases. The direction is pretty low, even for a film like this. Continuity is a dirty word when discussing Crippled Masters. The way in which they try to hide Jackie Conn’s disability is shoddy, during the final fight sequence the fight starts somewhere and then when we cut to a different scene and return, it’s in a completely different location. Too far away for them to have ran to from the first destination. Then there’s the terrible attempts at storytelling that just comes off as rubbish, but you know what, who cares. This is a film about a man with no arms teaming up with a man with no legs in order to fight a metallic-hunchbacked villain. Why would common sense enter any of this?
Crippled Masters is a b-movie, so it should be treated that way. There’s not a lot of really ‘good’ things one can talk about in a review, it’s more about the good things you individually find in it. To put it bluntly, this is a party movie. You invite some friends over, you tell them you have the strangest movie they’ll ever see and you pop it in. End of story. It’s the kind of film that won’t reach out to a crowd that considers themselves “sophisticated”, this is dumb fun just like mama used to make. With that in mind, that doesn’t mean I’m going to give it a very high reward. Maybe I’m giving it a three because I want to deviate from my previous films in this Kung Fu marathon that have almost all garnered a four rating, but I like to think that I’m giving the film what it deserves. I think everyone out there who can stomach this kind of cinema should see it, but when watching it alone, the film can be fairly gross to sit and watch and although the pacing is actually fairly quick there are moments that seem to take an eternity. It’s a one of a kind film and if you’re the least bit interested you should seek it out and prepare to freak out your friends. It’s a classic of b-cinema, no doubts about it.
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