Crippled Avengers is a 1978 Shaw Brothers Martial Arts Movie directed by Chang Cheh, starring Philip Kwok, Lo Meng, and Chen Kuan-tai.
Master Tao and his son Tao Sheng, a powerful father-son duo of martial artists whom were masters of the Tiger Style kung fu are indiscriminately terrorizing a village. When four warriors who tried to challenge them ends up being crippled, losing their sanity, sight, hearing and speech (in that order), they will undergo a rigorous training sequence to make themselves the best crippled warriors, in order to avenge their defeats.
The movie's title isn't really aiming for subtlety, to be honest...
Not to be confused with Crippled Masters, a martial arts exploitation film featuring Disabled Character, Disabled Actor.
Crippled Avengers contains examples of:
- The Blacksmith: The town's resident weaponmaster, Wei Da-ti.
- Blind Weaponmaster: Hu Ah-kuei after losing his sight from having his eyes gored out by Tao Sheng.
- Die Laughing: Wang Yi in the finale.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The four heroes are warriors crippled by the villains and are out to avenge their defeats.
- Eye Scream: Courtesy of Tao Sheng's gauntlet. Complete with a gory close-up of both fingers into the victim's eyes.
- Match Cut: A shot of Keeper Wan gloating is cut to a pattern on an antique chair which suspiciously resembles a smiling face.
- Handicapped Badass: The entire movie is built revolving this trope. There are fighters without arms, blind warriors, deaf warriors, mute warriors, mentally handicapped warriors... just name it.
- Martial Arts Headband: Worn by all the Crippled Avengers after they completed their training.
- Power Fist: After Tao Sheng lose his arms as a child, his father Tao Tien-tu immediately had iron gauntlets with razor-sharp fingers built for his son, allowing Tao Sheng to learn a higher level of deadly fist-to-fist kung fu.
- Super-Hearing: Hu Ah-kuei gains the ability of hearing even pins dropping on the floor as part of his training to compensate for his blindness.
- Training Montage: Wang Yi, Hu Ah-kuei and Chen Shuen all undergoes a training sequence after becoming handicapped in order to improve their skills and defeat Master Tao and his son.
- Walking Shirtless Scene: Hu Ah-Kue in most of his training scenes.
- Worthy Opponent: Master Tao finds all four Crippled Avengers, after they've completed their training and returning for a rematch, to be this. But that doesn't mean he will go easy on them in the final battle.
