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For years, Lee Ho (Frankie Shum) has been Master Lin's (Chen Mu-Chuan) loyal underling, but then he falls out of favour with Lin, so much so that Lin orders his henchman Tang (Jackie Conn) to hack his arms off and throw him off the premises to live or die left to his own diminished devices - and at first, it looks as if Lee Ho wasn't to make it until he happens upon a farm where the owner has pity with him and offers him a job as farmhand, something that Lee Ho shows resourcefulness enough to excel at. Meanwhile, Tang, like Lee Ho before him, has fallen out of grace with Lin, and Lin has acid poured over Tang's legs to render them unusable, then throws him down a ravine - something that Tang only barely survives to drag himself to a nearby river to ask a fisherman for help. But the fisherman turns out to be Lee Ho, who upon recognizing Tang as his erstwhile tormentor drags him to a nearby cave to torture him to death. But in the cave they find a hermit who convinces them to reconcile and work together to get their revenge on Lin, and soon enough he trains them in martial arts. Once sufficiently trained they fight and kill a few of Lin's underlings, which gets him sufficiently enraged. Then the hermit asks them to steal the fabled eight jade horses, which are said to hold the secret to an unbeatable fighting technique. They manage to get away with the horses, but eventually cross paths with Lin's new guard Ah Po, who fights them to a standstill but then lets them go with the horses and tells them to study them well should they ever want to go against Master Lin. For his treachery, Ah Po is defeated and captured by Lin and subjected to torture, and Lee Ho and Tang feel inclined to save him - but are they nearly good enough to defeat Master Lin yet?

Featuring not one but two actually handicapped martial artists in the leads, The Crippled Masters sure is in a class of its own - for better or worse really: For worse as the stars of the film are clearly exploited for their handicaps, but for better as film roles for handicapped fighters are far and few between and they are portrayed as heroes (and as a consequence, Frankie Shum and Jackie Conn would make three more movies with one another). Taken by its own merits, The Crippled Masters might not have too much to offer on a story level, it's just your typical martial arts revenge plot, and on the directorial side of things, hardly a genre cliché is left untouched, but the fight scenes are choreographed with plenty of inventiveness (mostly built around its title characters of course) and do have a good flow to them. So if vintage martial arts movies are your genre and you have a certain predilection for the unusual, then The Crippled Masters is a must-see.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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