Five Deadly Venoms
1978 film by Chang Cheh
Five Deadly Venoms (Chinese: 五毒), also known as The Five Venoms, is a 1978 Hong Kong martial arts mystery film directed and co-written by Chang Cheh and produced by Runme Shaw for the Shaw Brothers Studio. It stars Chiang Shieng as Yang Tieh, a martial arts pupil who aims to follow his master's dying wish: to find the new identities of the master's five previous pupils, and kill them if they have turned towards evil. While doing so, Yang stumbles onto a web of murders and investigations involving all five pupils. Each of the master's previous pupils (the titular "Five Deadly Venoms") practices a unique animal-themed style, with the animals being based on the Five Poisonous Creatures of Chinese folklore.
Five Deadly Venoms is considered one of the most popular martial arts films of its era, and has gone on to be considered a cult film. For their roles, Shieng, along with Lu Feng, Sun Chien, Philip Kwok, Wai Pak, and Lo Mang (who portrayed the five fighters), would become collectively dubbed by international audiences as the Venom Mob.
Plot
The dying master of the powerful Poison Clan dispatches his last pupil, Yang Tieh, on a crucial mission. Worried the skills he taught are being used for evil, he orders Yang to locate an old compatriot, Yun, and warn him that the fortune he amassed from the clan's activities is under threat from five of his former pupils, each an expert in his own lethal combat style. Yang must discover their whereabouts and true identities, and decide which, if any, he can trust to join him in his mission.
The five pupils are the Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Lizard, and Toad.
“Five Deadly Venoms” enters the record as 1978 film by Chang Cheh. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Five, Deadly and Venoms can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3828759. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978.
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This entry incorporates text from “Five Deadly Venoms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.