#342: The Crippled Masters

Release Date: December 31st, 1979

Format: Blu-ray

Written by: Law Chi (uncredited)

Directed by: Law Chi (credited as Joe Law)

3.5 Stars

Remove the exploitation gimmick from The Crippled Masters and what you have is a good-but-not-great kung fu revenge flick, about two thugs seeking payback after being left for dead by their gangster boss, Lin Chang Cao (Chen Mu-Chuan). The flick is a low-budget affair from journeyman director Law Chi, and it’s a Taiwanese production, known for their shaggier and arguably inferior kung fu flicks than their Hong Kong counterparts.

But what’s the gimmick? 

The movie employs two physically disabled actors as the leads.

That’s a doozy of a gimmick for a kung fu flick, and in the words of film critic Will Sloan, it transforms The Crippled Masters into “a complicated object.” 

First there is actor Shun Chung-Chuen, who was born with thalidomide syndrome, a condition that can cause malformation of the arms (in Chung-Chuen’s case, a missing right arm and a severely malformed left-arm that’s, for lack of a better description, flipper-like). His leading co-star is Thomas Hong Chiu-Ming, a man with withered legs that he folds under his body so that he can “walk” on his hands.        

Their characters, Frankie and Jackie, are shown as able-bodied in the film’s opening scenes, before their evil boss Lin cuts off the arms of Frankie and pours acid on the legs of Jackie (it should be noted that the evil boss character is also shown as differently abled; the actor is given a hump to wear under his shirt). 

Suffering and severely maimed, the two men team up with an elderly kung fu master to train their skills around their new limitations. In the film’s final boss showdown, Jackie harnesses himself onto the back of Frankie and the two fight together: Jackie will do the punching, Frankie the kicking.

Sounds pretty must-see, right? It is! Like any exploitation movie worth its salt, The Crippled Masters provides its audience something that a major studio would never have the guts to film.

Just how exploitative is this exploitation movie, though? That’s where the intrigue of The Crippled Masters lies, beyond that climatic showdown. 

Our hero protagonists are shown as resourceful, tough, talented, and brave. One could argue that the movie celebrates their “otherness.” On the other hand, one could also argue that the inclusion of their physical malformities is nothing other than stunt casting, and cheap stunt casting at that. How much these actors were paid and the intention behind writer/director Law Chi’s script is unknown. 

Further complicating the film’s ethos is the fact that Taiwanese and American audiences were most likely celebrating our heroes and laughing at them when this was playing in cheap grindhouses in the early ‘80s. The predominant mood must have been, ‘This kicks ass, and this is so weird.’

“Weird” is a loaded word. Is it weird that we are watching physically disabled actors? Or is it weird that the physically disabled actors are kung fu heroes? Or is it weird that we’re watching this film and we don’t know exactly how to feel about it?

How one ultimately feels about The Crippled Masters is subjective, of course. At the risk of being labeled an ableist, I must say I really enjoyed the film, and I hope its intentions were good. It’s possible they weren’t. A complicated object indeed.

Postscript: Shoutout to Will Sloan and Justin Decloux, hosts of The Important Cinema Club, for providing an audio commentary for The Crippled Masters Blu-ray release from Film Masters. I normally prefer writing about films before studying them in-depth, but I felt like I needed an entry point for such a unique, exotic, and ethically challenging film.