Kung Fury

As a lifelong horror fan, it would be remiss of me to say nothing about the passing of Christopher Lee this week -- he was Fu Manchu in the 60s, Dracula in the 70s, he was Saruman at the turn of the millennium and even, like another pop-culture icon we recently lost, lent his voice to the Kingdom Hearts video game series. In addition to making Benedict Cumberbatch sound like a tenor in comparison, Lee was a badass in so many ways it seems improbable. He was related to czars, kings and Ian Fleming. He caught dysentery six times in one year, prevented a mutiny and was an agent for British Special Ops before the SAS even existed, making him a proto-secret agent. He made two heavy metal Christmas albums and whatever this wonderful thing is. And he could out-"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" Kevin Bacon himself, as he was reportedly the most connected actor in all of cinema.

Rest in peace, Sir Christopher -- you will be missed. Unfortunately, Netflix and Amazon Prime have a very sparse selection of Hammer horror films, and the ones they do have aren't the best. Instead, let's take a look at a recent release you probably knew I would have to review sooner or later if you know anything about me.

Kung Fury (2015)

So I grew up in the 1980s. You can say any decade has its silly aspects, but the 80s were uniquely ridiculous, and vastly entertaining as a result -- not just in retrospect. More on this later, but Kung Fury is more or less a half-hour joke about how absurd the 80s were. Kung Fury (that's his name) is a cowboy cop who became the world's greatest kung fu master after his partner/father figure Dragon was killed by a ninja and Kung Fury was bitten by a cobra. He's also the Chosen One in a kung fu prophecy. Naturally, he clashes with his superiors because he won't play by the rules and refuses to work with his new partner Triceracop, and turns in his badge just before someone makes a call to the police station and guns everyone down. (As in, fires into the other phone, and the bullets come out of the receiver and hit everybody.) It turns out Adolf Hitler made the call, as he was the reigning kung fu champion of the world during WWII and wants to kill Kung Fury so he can take his position in the prophecy.

Kung Fury joins forces with Hackerman, the greatest hacker of all time, who puts together a computer algorithm that allows him to travel back in time to kill Hitler before he vanished from the pages of history. An error results in Kung Fury being transported back to the Viking age, where he meets some dinosaur-riding barbarian ladies and Thor, son of Odin. Traveling forward to the 1940s, he goes up against Hitler and his Nazi army in a fight to the finish.

That's basically all there is to it. Kung Fury started out as a trailer produced for around $5,000, and a successful Kickstarter campaign resulted in a $600,000, half-hour-long movie. There are some things that work, and some that don't. What it gets right, it gets perfectly. The Laser Unicorns logo at the beginning and the cell phone commercial are uncannily accurate, and there's a bit later on with a spot-on pastiche of M.A.S.K., one of the more obscure cartoons of my childhood. I remember those shitty VHS distortion lines like it was yesterday -- and of course they show up during the cool parts, because you always rewound the tape about a million times until your VCR chewed it up. And the song (sung by David Hasselhoff, of all people) that plays during the end credits is absolutely flawless. Listen to any number of 80s power ballads and you start to detect a pattern: there's always something about the wire, the edge, the game (and the importance of winning it, because like Cheap Trick says, there's no points for second best), a heart (possibly burning), survival, the spirit, or the night. And at some point, someone will yell "HEYYY!" between verses. I just watched Kickboxer again for the first time in about 20 years yesterday, and the song from the tournament montage in that has about 90% of those things in its first two lines.

That's kind of why Kung Fury doesn't entirely work, though. I propose a theory to anyone thinking of making something like Far Cry: Blood Dragon or Kung Fury: No joke about the 80s, however accurate, will be as funny as the 80s actually were.

Kung Fury gets a lot of things right, but the special effects are way better than anything we had back then, which can actually be distracting, and it's also sometimes too clever by half. There are too many nudges and winks. The Power Glove, David Hasselhoff -- all that stuff was funny, but joking about something that was already funny seems unnecessary, unless you're going to do build it all up to something new and meaningful, as Ernest Cline does in Ready Player One. If you want to make fun of the 80s while simultaneously kind of admiring how endearingly cheesy they were, all you need to do is post a film clip or a music video from the 80s.

See, that is hilarious -- and it isn't even a joke, that's actually the way things were 30 years ago. Maybe it's just my tendency to find unintentional comedy much more entertaining than a show or a movie that expects me to laugh when it wants me to. And there are certainly moments in Kung Fury where you'll laugh. It's an entertaining movie, and what the hell else are you going to do for 31 minutes? At the same time, I mean -- just watch this. This is like shooting the 80s directly into your veins, and it's not even supposed to be funny. Vintage 1987 kung fu garbage.

Kung Fury also has a few too many jokes that have been done to death in modern pop culture. There's a triceratops cop, and a bunch of jokes about Hitler and how he had jet packs and robot eagles and so on. It's more like an Axe Cop short film than a 1980s action movie, and having grown up in the 80s -- I was born in 1979, so those were my prime childhood years -- I can honestly say that, while Kung Fury is enjoyable, it's funnier when you let the 80s speak for themselves. Or at the very least, play it straight. Tom Savini's Planet Terror, for example, is a near-perfect 80s zombie spoof. That said, Kung Fury is funniest in its subtler moments -- granted, something I doubt you'll hear many people say -- like when Kung Fury has two police badges on him in one scene even though he slammed his badge down on the chief's desk earlier in the movie, or the slightly off-center framing when the camera goes in for a closeup.

Ultimately, this may be an imperfect movie and an imperfect parody, but it's got its heart in the right place and succeeds often enough that I can overlook its more ham-handed jokes and enjoy the bits where it does hit what it's aiming for.

Available On: YouTube, Steam.

The trailer:

The movie:

Yessir, The Check Is In The Mail

Sorry for the delay on this latest article, but I wanted to see if a rumor that had been floating around this weekend would be confirmed, and it seems it has been. It seems we're getting a remake of John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China, with The Rock taking over Kurt Russell's role. I have feelings about this, most of them not good, but first let's get into what makes the original so great.

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

Carpenter hasn't done much directing in the last ten years, and what he did direct hasn't been great. For about a decade, though, from roughly 1979 to 1989, Carpenter was solid gold. Practically everything he directed was fantastic. Some of my favorite movies ever came from Carpenter's heyday -- 1978's Halloween, 1980's The Fog, 1982's The Thing (a much more faithful adaptation of its source material, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?", than the 1951 version), 1987's Prince of Darkness (a Lovecraftian horror story masquerading as religious horror), 1988's media satire They Live! -- just to name a few.

Big Trouble in Little China is probably his most insane movie. It's...well, let's call it an action-horror-fantasy-comedy. Trucker Jack Burton (Russell) shows up in L.A.'s Chinatown and gets in over his head when his friend Wang's girlfriend Mao Yin is kidnapped by the Lords of Death, a local gang. There's an underground turf war going on between multiple Chinatown gangs, but all that pales to the real threat -- David Lo Pan, an ancient Chinese sorcerer played by the incomparable James Hong, who pretty much steals the show. Whatever Lo Pan is, he's no longer human. He's an evil dream, or a magician who made a deal with a demon, or was cursed by a demon, or "a ghost playing at being a man," but he is, in his own words, "beyond your understanding." He's also intent on possessing Mao Yin, as a prophecy has said that if he marries a girl with green eyes, he can become mortal again, his soul no longer scattered across eternity.

Wang and Jack team up with lawyer Gracie Law, Wang's friend Eddie and bus driver Egg Shen (the late, great Victor Wong), who also happens to be Lo Pan's rival in sorcery. The crew descends into Chinatown's hidden subterranean depths, a labyrinth full of monsters, traps, magic and centuries-old evil. There's a gorilla monster, a Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons, a giant neon skull, Lo Pan's three henchmen Thunder (Hong Kong movie star Carter Wong, who I'd watched in a dozen Saturday-afternoon kung fu movies on WGTW-48 during my early teens), Lightning and Rain, and all sorts of other craziness that has to be seen to be believed.

"Oh my God, no, what is that, don't tell me!"

There are some mostly apocryphal stories that Big Trouble in Little China was originally meant to be a sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and if I didn't know better I could believe it, because this movie is just as ridiculous and the dialogue is just as weird. It's a movie steeped in Eastern mysticism and Western bravado, and it could only have been made right smack in the middle of the '80s. Movies back then had their directors' fingerprints all over them. You could recognize a John Carpenter movie about two minutes in.

Which is partly why I'm wary, to say the least, of any attempt to remake it. It's relevant as a snapshot of '80s culture, and I have vivid memories of Chinatown actually being a lot like it is here when I was a kid (minus the cave-dwelling monsters), but a modern remake just seems like it would be sort of meaningless. Both cultures, American and Chinese, have moved on, independently and relative to one another. Potential racial insensitivity aside, what's the point of making this movie again?

"I'll have you both rolled off to the Hell Where People Are Skinned Alive,

it's that simple, understand?!"

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against remakes on principle. Sometimes they offer a new perspective on the original, sometimes they let the director refine his or her own vision, as with Takashi Shimizu's American remake of Ju-On: The Grudge. Lately, however, it seems to me as if a lot of remakes are just missing the point. RoboCop did away with the original's sharp satire and over-the-top gore. Total Recall didn't even take place on Mars. If they ever remake Starship Troopers -- well, I hope they don't, enough people misunderstood that one the first time around. I haven't seen the new Poltergeist, but everyone seems to be saying the same thing: as with the rest, it's blandly inoffensive and essentially pointless. Like chewing cardboard for an hour and a half. It's as if producers know people liked these movies, but they never even think to imagine why people liked them.

The whole point of Big Trouble in Little China is fairly subversive for its time. A lot of movies had the all-American hero and the Asian sidekick, who tended to be played by a non-Asian actor, such as Joel Grey as Chiun in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (I love Joel Grey, but he is not the best casting choice for a wise Chinese mentor). Jack Burton thinks he's the hero of the story, and the audience is invited to believe this as well -- he's Kurt Russell, after all -- but Wang is the real protagonist, and it's Jack who's the bumbling comedy sidekick. When the final battle starts, he fires his machine gun in the air and ends up knocking himself out with a piece of the ceiling, and then he ends up spending most of it pinned down under a pile of guys who keep getting killed on top of him. I just can't see The Rock doing that.

"Oh sure, and sorcery!"

On the other hand, I like The Rock. I like him as an action star. I like him as a serious actor. I like him as a comedy actor. He seems like a cool guy in real life, and onscreen he has charisma to spare. He also says the original is one of his favorite movies. But I'm not sure anyone involved gets the whole thing about Jack being the sidekick who thinks he's awesome, but seems perpetually out of his depth with each new turn in the maze. Maybe they'll do the same thing here, and set him up as the star only to turn audience expectations on their heads.

I guess we'll see how it turns out, but in the meantime, check out the fantastic 1986 original, which will, I'm about 99.99% certain, be better than even a remake that does it justice.

Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.