THE FOUR INVINCIBLES is nothing more than a cheap B-movie version of the Shaw Brothers classic CRIPPLED AVENGERS, featuring almost exactly the same plot as in that film. The story opens with an aged and respected clan leader dying and his cruel student taking over leadership of the clan by crippling his rival, smashing his leg! The rival, Ku Feng, just about manages to escape with his life before travelling to the countryside where he recruits three newly-handicapped guys to form a team of fighters. After much training, the four men return to the clan and battle the traitor to the death.
This is silly stuff indeed and yet the occasional bad taste outrageousness of the narrative sees it through. Given that the main characters are disabled, there's a lot of mugging and overacting going on here. My favourite character is Kwok Choi Hon's deaf mute who runs around performing unlikely feats and pulling funny faces. Dean Shek has a cameo and Cecilia Wong plays a woman with unclear motives. The film is quite gruesome, featuring a severed arm early on, and the bits in which various characters are blinded, lose limbs, and are deafened are quite violent, although the low budget means that there aren't many special effects and those that do occur are quite unconvincing (the one-armed guy obviously has his arm tucked down the back of his shirt, for instance).
Some fun comes from the main bad guy's "insane devil palm" technique although it doesn't really do much (I was hoping for something like Lo Lieh's special method in KING BOXER). There are some brutal training sequences and one moment of gratuitous nudity. The villain has massive sideburns but is otherwise quite undistinguished in the fighting stakes. The funniest thing about the ending is the use of the 'four invincibles' fighting style in which the characters wander around like drunken zombies. THE FOUR INVINCIBLES really is a piece of so-bad-it's-good film-making.
This is silly stuff indeed and yet the occasional bad taste outrageousness of the narrative sees it through. Given that the main characters are disabled, there's a lot of mugging and overacting going on here. My favourite character is Kwok Choi Hon's deaf mute who runs around performing unlikely feats and pulling funny faces. Dean Shek has a cameo and Cecilia Wong plays a woman with unclear motives. The film is quite gruesome, featuring a severed arm early on, and the bits in which various characters are blinded, lose limbs, and are deafened are quite violent, although the low budget means that there aren't many special effects and those that do occur are quite unconvincing (the one-armed guy obviously has his arm tucked down the back of his shirt, for instance).
Some fun comes from the main bad guy's "insane devil palm" technique although it doesn't really do much (I was hoping for something like Lo Lieh's special method in KING BOXER). There are some brutal training sequences and one moment of gratuitous nudity. The villain has massive sideburns but is otherwise quite undistinguished in the fighting stakes. The funniest thing about the ending is the use of the 'four invincibles' fighting style in which the characters wander around like drunken zombies. THE FOUR INVINCIBLES really is a piece of so-bad-it's-good film-making.