Product Description

Writer/director Steve Oedekerk (The Nutty Professor and Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls) creates an off-the-wall comedy and a new martial arts genre that substantially alters dubbed action footage from a 1970's martial arts picture with a brand new twist in the story line and altered dialogue. The story follows The Chosen One (Oedekerk) as he seeks to avenge the death of his parents at the hands of the evil and seemingly indestructible kung fu legend, Master Pain.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3681 in DVD
• Brand: TCFHE
• Released on: 2002-07-23
• Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .20 pounds
• Running time: 81 minutes

Amazon.com
Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is best enjoyed with low expectations, if only because it might surprise you with genuine belly laughs. Writer-director Steve Oedekerk uses digital trickery to make himself a costar in the 1976 Hong Kong action flick Tiger & Crane Fist, just as Woody Allen turned a Japanese spy thriller into the comedy spoof What's Up, Tiger Lily? The results are both technically impressive and stupendously stupid. Oedekerk is blandly appealing as "the Chosen One," who sets out to avenge the evil Master "Betty" Pain for killing his family when he was still a kung fu-fighting infant. This stock setup is a cheap excuse for Oedekerk's 80-minute buffet of chop-socky spoofery, with gags lifted from The Matrix, Oedekerk's "Thumbation" comedies, and the rich legacy of Hong Kong action. Featuring "gopher-chucks," a kung fu cow, aliens from France, and enough bad dialogue to choke a crouching tiger, Kung Pow! is mildly spicy, but mostly it's full of nuts. --Jeff Shannon

Customer Reviews

One of the funniest
Kung Pow is one of the most hilarious movies I have ever seen. I've seen it more than 15 times, and I still laugh out loud every time I see it. This movie uses footage from an old 1970's Kung Fu movie and splices it together with some new footage made specially for this movie. This mishmash is then dubbed with cheesy sounding voices. It's a completely nonsensical and silly movie. You won't be able to resist laughing. Perhaps the most famous scene in this movie is when the hero happens to find a cow and this cow jumps up and challenges him to a fight. There is even milk shooting out like the bullets in The Matrix. If you have a craving for a goofy movie, this is my top recommendation. If you don't like goofy movies, then avoid it.

Spoofs a Genre Readily Spoofable
Sometimes a movie's best charm is in perfectly hitting upon a certain relaxed pace that lets a viewer just flow with its light screwball comedy. This movie did that for me. Sometimes specific episodes seemed like they'd be tedious or boring in some movies, but this movie set its mood so precisely that they were welcome here. A movie like CROUCHING TIGER HIDDEN DRAGON, with its dead-serious tone demanding a creedence that was certainly stretched by scenes seeming to defy gravity and other things, invites having minor fun poked at it by a spoof like this. As such this movie is timely, and that perhaps increases its charm. Should someone call this film stupid, that would be hard to refute, but if stupid, it's delightfully stupid. Maybe its success is due to being perfectly attuned in what it demands from its audience. I've seen movies that were stupid but begged to be taken seriously, and watching them can range from embarrasing to insufferable. But KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST begs only to be taken for precisely the farcical diversion that it is.

Surprising, in light of how it was made
I understand that TIGER AND CRANE FISTS was a serious martial arts flick, and then the creator of this took that flick and dubbed it with new sound to make a comedy. Seems the video portion of the original was surprisingly adaptable for this purpose. If you thought that CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON was a cinematic gem, then you might find tinkering with martial arts films like this to be a sacrilege. But if you thought CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON was overrated, then you just might think it could stand some of the same treatment that created this present spoof. Those who like farce should find a lot of laughs in KUNG POW! ENTER THE FIST. For those of us who find martial arts films to be a hit-and-miss proposition, a spoof like this can be a refreshing diversion. It had me thinking what other films I might like to see twisted this way, not necessarily with total disrespect for the originals. I thought of Jackie Chan movies, for example. I really sort of like Jackie, but surely I'm not alone in finding that plot lucidity is sometimes not the strong suit in his movies. So it got me to wondering if any of his might be given this sort of treatment and maybe even produce sometimes a movie more coherent than the original. But for that matter, why limit it to the martial arts genre? It's equally intriguing to wonder what this kind of re-dubbing might do with THE VIRGIN SUICIDES or VANILLA SKY or INSOMNIA. Maybe even WHAT DREAMS MAY COME or MEET JOE BLACK? Well, that might be asking too much.