CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

A_Different_Drummer When you do the math, you will find that, prior to Bruce Lee, there were very few avenues for westerners to discover the "kung fu" production line films being cranked out of Asia by companies like Shaw Brothers (and others). The only way I am aware of was being fortunate enough to live in a cosmopolitan city with a substantial Asian population, which, generally, gave you access to theatres playing these films. And EVEN THEN the subtitles accompanying these films were in every conceivable language EXCEPT English! Which in turn meant that plots were optional for the dedicated Kung Fu or Wushu fan. This film in 1972 changed all that. Understand there is nothing "special" about this film. Pretty standard plot, pretty standard cast, pretty standard quality. Even the "iron palm" technique is not new and would pop up in these films every few years. (Based of course on real ancient texts -- I recall a Youtube video of an actual Iron Palm practitioner, in real life your hands double in size because of the constant bruising and healing). So what makes this film special? It was the first film of its type to be "tested" in the N.A. release channel to see if there was a market for a typical product from Asia, dubbed. Did it work? Do bears (^(++ in the woods? Many more followed and ultimately the western studio saw a market they missed, leading to films with Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal, and many more..

mikelcat I remember when this came out it was the first kung fu film ever seen around our way and we were all excited about seeing it for sure .Although the action was mediocre at best it gave us our first taste of kung fu and our first taste of bad dubbing as well as bad film making or more precisely the way Chinese people were making films at the time . They were admittedly inferior wlthout question but there was entertainment value here and that caught on for sure . The kung fu craze had begun and Bruce Lee and ''The Chinese Connection'' would soon follow either that or ''The Chinese Boxer'' with Jimmy Wang Yu . In any case this film was chosen to lead the way .

winner55 Five fingers of death: Although previous Shaw Martial Arts epics had shown the influence of the American cowboy genre, none had paid such open tribute to it as this one, especially in the saloon fight scene. And though Shaw Bros. films had borrowed from the Japanese chambara (swordfight) genre before, none had done so with such success as this one. i suppose some of this had to do with the fact that the director originated from Korea, and thus brought a non-Chinese perspective to such borrowings, which certainly raises some interesting questions about culture; but in any event, this film presented real innovations in technology and technique in Hong Kong action films. for the first time in Hong Kong, the camera was given access to the whole of any given set, which meant shots from many different angles, such as the low-angle interior shot showing the ceiling of a room (the original American innovation of which usually credited to John Ford), or the high angle long shot that allowed visualization of a large ground area, or the frontal tracking shot.It is true that this was not the first hand-to-hand combat film of real cinematic substance - that remains Wang Yu's 'Chinese Boxer'; but on a commercial level, Shaw Bros. were right to choose 'Five Fingers' as their first major release to the West because, one might say, it was the 'least Chinese' of their action films, that is, the least dependent on purely Chinese theater traditions. Although this made no impression on the American critics at the time (who universally trashed the picture), it wasn't lost on American audiences, especially among African Americans, whose culture had always been - by necessity - an eclectic patchwork of borrowed elements and innovation. In 'Five Fingers' they were given the opportunity to discover the core of the story, in the earnest young man forced to make the extra effort to overcome social barriers and betrayal in order to have his merit recognized. This seems to be an issue universal to Modernity, but each culture has its own way of expressing and resolving it; 'Five Fingers' presented it in a way many Americans could relate to as well as Chinese.So is the film now only of historical value? Certainly not. For one thing this issue hasn't gone away. Secondly, some of the innovations leave much of the film looking as fresh today as it did on first release. Also the action is well-staged, and the performances, though a little too earnest, are crisp. The film is a might over-long, but the story does cover a lot of ground. And there are marvelous set-pieces through-out, such as the saloon confrontation, the fight on the road to the contest, the odd double finale.definitely looks better on a theater screen, but still impressive for home viewing: recommended.

tavm Having recently seen Grindhouse, I was browsing in Video USA looking for some movies that might have played in real grindhouse theatres in downtown areas during the '70s. The Hong Kong action flick Five Fingers of Death seemed just such a picture. The cartoon-like sound effects and the quick jump cuts seemed a little distracting at first but after a while I was so involved in the story and the characters I didn't care. Parts of the music score sounded like the "Ironside" TV theme song that was subsequently used in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill movies. Some scenes involving the hero's fiancé seemed to border on parody but they were so brief that they didn't ruin the film. The most exciting parts involve the tournament and some revenge segments after that. Well worth seeing for kung fu fans!