If you’re like me, you’ve got a few things going for you: you’re pretty stressed out, you’re kind of drunk right now, and you’ve got a special place in your heart for bad kung-fu movies. Now, most people will kind of laugh and say that they enjoy bad movies. Maybe rent a Van Damme movie, or I’m told that Van Helsing is a good time, have a few laughs, and pat themselves on the back and walk away generally unscathed. If you are like this, you are weak. You have not seen Crippled Masters.

Before we get going on this, how’s about you kick back and watch the trailer for this masterpiece. Fair warning, this is a movie is about exactly what the title says…

…which is physically disfigured martial artists working together to fight for justice and get revenge against the man responsible for their disfigurement. IMDB tells me this is a sequel to Crippled Heroes, which is about these same two guys, each on some individual quest; their paths eventually cross, they fight, and, I don’t know, maybe they do the Rocky III ending. I can’t speak on this, because I’ve never seen it. I do own Crippled Masters, though I had no idea what it was when I bought it. I was naive. They were happier days.

Crippled Masters is a movie about two martial artists seeking revenge against a gang of evil kung-fu bullies responsible for their injuries. One has his arm cut off by the gang, the other has acid dumped on his legs. This movie is all about ridiculously disturbing training scenes fully designed to first exploit the injuries of these two men and later show how they’ve adapted and learned to cope and can do some pretty cool stuff. This comes after a scene where the man with the deformed arm thrashes around in a river trying to stand up, and another where he chases a chicken. It’s awful. There’s no point in trying to explain the rest of the story, because it’s so terrible that I think I have PTSD from watching it the first time and that my brain is only letting me selectively remember parts of it. That I can even remember owning this movie is a testament to the talents of my therapist.

This is the worst kind of bad movie, not because it is poorly produced, written by a 2nd grader, or that the acting is laughable. All of these things are true, but there’s something more. This is the worst kind of bad movie because it is a freakshow disguised as legitimate entertainment. The message of this movie isn’t that the physically disabled are still people, it’s that they are objects to be mocked and exploited. I think anyone reading this site agrees that Asian cinema has created some of the most amazing films in history. This ain’t one of them.

Some of the threads I came across writing this article praises the movie as one of the best cult-films of all time. That seems pretty outrageous to me. I’m not going to say that I know what qualifies something as a true cult classic, but I do know that there is a big difference between people dressing up and throwing big sing along parties for movies like Rocky Horror or The Sound of Music, or even people who dressed up for midnight openings of everything from The Lord of the Rings to Snakes on a Plane… and people who got anything out of Crippled Masters. Just saying.

As for the epic conclusion? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Up next, I’ve got two words for you: Jackie Chan. Two more words: Abraham Lincoln.

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