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:
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