Another epic-looking kung fu flick from the Shaw Brothers empire. This one is familiar to many others in that it pits five good warriors against five evil warriors. That's the plot. The first hour and twenty minutes of the film consists of lots (and boy, do I mean lots!) of action and minor bouts, characters dying tragically, the bad guys doing evil things, and training in preparation for the event. The final twenty minutes offers up some top-notch martial arts fight sequences in a variety of scenic settings (a wood, a river, a field, a mountain).

It's well-filmed stuff with some of the genre's top martial artists (Chi Kuan-Chun, Gordon Liu, Ti Lung, David Chiang et al) strutting their stuff, plenty of stunts, fun plot elements (the finger and cup (!) signs that the Shaolin use to communicate with each other) and heroism.

The truth is that the five bad guys in this movie have all of the coolest fighting techniques! There's one guy who swings a huge axe blade around on a rope to chop up and slice apart his enemies, another who whips people to death with his long ponytail by breaking their necks! Another baddie uses Bruce Lee's "fingers of fury" technique from THE BIG BOSS to unpleasantly dispose of another hapless victim. After losing their fights for the entire movie, the good guys decide to train for a year (!) at the end of the film.

Baddies are blinded, two are impaled on a spear, and a massive pole fight takes place in a river which is spectacular stuff. The film doesn't skimp on the violence either with plenty of people dying bloody deaths and a high body count. FIVE SHAOLIN MASTERS is a typical kung fu flick from the Shaw Brothers studio, and it makes for an action-packed way to spend an evening.