Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002)

Kung Pow! Enter the Fist is not your average martial arts flick. For one thing, it stars a white guy- with a face on his tongue. Plus there's a dastardly villain called Betty, a climactic fight with a cow, and a mysterious one-breasted woman who shows up in one scene and is never seen again. And no, I am not on crack as I write this, just Mountain Dew and gratuitous amounts of AC/DC.Anyways, as you've probably guessed, Kung-Pow is intended as a send up of all those campy, poorly dubbed kung-fu movies from the Far East. Those of you who are Woody Allen fans or have particularly long memories may remember a film called What's Up, Tiger Lilly, in which Allen took two low budget Japanese spy movies, moved some of the scenes around, and completely re-dubbed it to create an entirely new, entirely nonsensical plot. Here, writer/director/producer/leading man Steve Oedekerk takes things a step further, digitally replacing the original film's star with himself, and adding completely new scenes, like the aforementioned one with the cow.Like What's Up, Tiger Lilly, Kung Pow! Is utterly ridiculous, and makes little if any sense, which is the whole point. Exhibit A is the dialogue. As stated before, all original lines have been replaced by new, hilariously nonsensical ones. Seriously, half the lines in this movie have nothing to do with anything. Ling, the Chosen One's love interest seems to be voiced by the same actress who does Miss Piggy. And in a nod to the usual quality of dubbing in Asian films, many characters sound just like fifth-graders reading from a Chinese-to-English dictionary. There's even a part where the guy's mouth keeps moving forever, and all he says is "no." And this is far from the only aspect of traditional martial arts movies that gets lampooned. The training sequences, the requisite close up of each fighter's face accompanied by dramatic music, the dramatic last words of the hero's dying sensei, and many more clichés are stretched well beyond their logical limits. Just for good measure, they even threw in parodies of the Lion King and the Matrix.And just in case the ludicrous re-dubbing and slaying of clichés weren't enough, Oedekerk goes for further laughs by suspending all attempts at believability and adding whatever random ideas popped into his head. One suspects that much of the story for this movie was fleshed out by guys sitting around a table taking bong hits, which if true makes this one of the best things ever created as a result of drugs. Besides the fight with the cow, there's also a fight between the bad guy and a baby, and several fights set to hip-hop. And there's that tongue-face, who has lines of his own and proves key to defeating the Council of Evil. Add an intermission straight out of Monty Python and a trailer for a fictional sequel, and you get one of the most oddball productions in many years.From this review it may sound like the filmmaker is desperately trying to inject humor any way he can, which may be why most critics panned Kung Pow! upon its release. But I personally could not stop laughing. This movie is simply to oddball and too original not to like. Even its flaws, like the sub-par CGI, only add to the campy feel. It may not engage your intellect, broaden your horizons, or make much sense, but if you have any experience with its source material, Kung Pow! Enter the Fist will have you laughing too hard to care.

Kung Pow- Enter the Fist is a parody movie. Wait…do not run away just yet. Unlike the mass of lackluster parody movies that are produced these days, this movie is actually very funny. Its vehicle is that it uses old footage of kung fu films such as Enter the Dragan and overlays its modern content onto them. Plus add intentionally bad dubbing and you have a movie which never for a second tries to be subtle, ingenious, or intelligent. It's clear that Steve Oedekerk and crew prided themselves on this movie making little or no sense at all. Oedekerk had himself digitally inserted into dozens of existing scenes from other older movies simply because he could and it looked ridiculous.

5.9?!? This hardly feels like a proper rating in my opinion, this movie was well made, and took as long as lord of the rings to make, I have NEVER in my entire life laughed as hard at a movie as I did this (with maybe the exception of Borat), This movie can be watched over and over again, with no more than 30 second having been passed without a joke being said. The reason the rating is so low is because 45% of users rated this movie as a "10/10", which actually get's rejected by this site, so if you agree, please vote this a 9, and write a review, this is easily my favorite movie of all time, sit down, open a bag of popcorn, and get ready for 2 hours of the funniest kung fu you've ever seen (then come back and rate this a 9).

This one gets a 3 because it doesn't sink as low as Friedberg and Seltzer's rubbish; at least it keeps its nose above the swamp.Anyway, what's the formula here? Redubbing an old kung fu film, superimposing the image of the lead actors in some scenes, and adding some crude CGI parts and other inanities. That is all. This COULD work, but it doesn't: the script is bland and adds pretty much nothing interesting to what you'd expect from a kung fu spoof, the CGI bits redefine "crude", and the jokes are... Look, ANY 15 year old kid could have written jokes funnier than these. The comedy in this film is unbelievable -- they are rarely tasteless, but most of them are utterly stupid, and stupid in a bad way. I see people here saying it's so stupid it's good, and it's actually genius and whatnot, but those are people who never watched "Airplane!"; if you watch that one, you'll realise that sometimes stupidity and genius walk hand in hand. But that is not the case here: this is just a writer thinking that the stupider, the better. There is a very clear difference in approach.Once in a while you'll bump into a good joke; say, I actually laughed about every 15 minutes in average. Unfortunately, every good joke is either eventually spoiled as well, and they sink under the weight of everything else. And the redubbing? Eventually, all it does is get on your nerves: it's just a guy whining in falsetto, anyway.I believe the extraordinarily low bits are the cow fight (spoofing "Matrix"? I know this was made in 2002, but come on!), the "Lion King" spoof (for real? Didn't the Simpsons do it way better about 8 years before??), all the bits with "Tonguey", the baby fight and many other smaller moments. Good bits include the dog with a SEVERE problem of audio/video synchronisation (a very clever target of spoofing), the flashbacks in which nothing is added to what has already been said (until it turns into a fart joke), the parody of the "dramatic zoom in" effect of Japanese films (it's slightly overdone but still works) and the nut salesman with a very loud voice ("THAT'S A LOT OF NUTS!!" That was unexpected and genuinely funny). But overall, I'd say skip this, it's not worthwhile. If you want an example of what GOOD film spoofing is, watch "Airplane!" and the "Naked Gun" films, and if you want a truly excellent comedy kung fu film, with creative storytelling, great CG effects and smart comedy, watch "Kung Fu Hustle"; skip this garbage and go straight for the real thing.