**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Steve Oedekerk, Jennifer Tung, and Leo Lee
Directed & written by Steve Oedekerk
2002 PG13
Re-dubbed and re-edited clips feature Fei Lung, Ling Ling Tse, Lin Yan, Chia Yung Liu, Hui Lou Chen, and Chi Ma.
I’m not going to lie. If I had been ten-years-old when I saw “Kung-Pow: Enter the Fist,” I would have probably thought it one of the greatest movies ever made. This movie has everything a ten-year-old boy craves: flatulence jokes, gay jokes, wedgie jokes, silly voices, pants falling down, hits to the groin, cartoonish violence by the truckload, a magic tongue, infants and barnyard animals who know kung-fu, a wise old narrator not above using the word “crap,” and brief flashes of cleavage that parents will probably let slide.
Despite its rampant idiocy, “Kung-Pow” is also an impressive technical achievement, in its cheap-ass way; only about a third of “Kung-Pow” is original footage. The rest is comprised of two different low-budget kung-fu flicks from the 1970s, whose names, although mentioned in the opening credits, escape me now, although I’m sure they were a combination of the words Killer, Dragon, Tiger, and Crane. Whatever they are, they have been re-edited and dubbed to create a new story. Through computer wizardry, modern comic Steve Oedekerk is seamlessly inserted into the older movies, while actors from the ‘70s flicks are seamlessly inserted into his phony digital landscapes. Oedekerk himself does the dubbing for all the characters, with different voices at varying levels of inanity, with various inappropriate accents.
“Kung-Pow” is a spoof in the style of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies, like “Airplane!” or “The Naked Gun,” only with a slightly lower brow, and the occasional scrape of knuckles along the ground. While “The Naked Gun” spoofed cop movies and “Airplane!” targeted disaster movies, “Kung-Pow” is a parody of the aforementioned kung-fu flicks, a style already so absurd that it hardly needs parodying. Titles in this prolific genre, which reached its zenith in the 1970s, include “18 Jade Arats,” “The Five Fingers of Death,” “Monkey Kung-Fu,” “Master of the Flying Guillotine,” “The Life of Ricky,” (a more modern fight movie), “Seven Brothers and a Sister Meet Dracula” (a cross-cultural kung-fu experience), and, my favorite, “Drunken Tai-Chi,” in which the Wise Old Master knocks out a bad guy’s teeth using a hand puppet. What Bruce Lee was doing at the same time looks like “Masterpiece Theatre” by comparison.
These films are always in some way bad, but usually entertaining and energetic, packed with utterly unbelievable violence, and never use subtitles when hilariously inept dubbing will do. The plots are all basically the same, and “Kung-Pow” is no different. Usually there’s a hotheaded kung-fu Student who has been wronged by a kung-fu Master, who has murdered some combination of the student’s parents, siblings, friends, or girlfriends. The Student trains to avenge his slain loved ones, but is always cocky and attempts to defeat the Evil Master prematurely. The Student barely escapes the encounter with his life, at which point he meets up with the Wise Old Master (who always looks suspiciously like a young man in make-up), who trains the Student better. Then the Student is victorious in the climactic fight with the Evil Master, which is often fought shirtless so we can see how ripped these guys are.
At his disposal the Evil Master has either numerous henchmen, a trap-filled dungeon, magic powers, a secret weapon, or his own breed of kung-fu that seemingly cannot be defeated. Unless he’s disguised as a shopkeeper or a beggar, the Wise Old Master usually has his own dojo, where other students spend all day sparring or getting the tar kicked out of them by the Evil Master. The Student usually has a girlfriend to egg him on, unless she’s already been killed, and it doesn’t hurt to have some kind of tournament along the way.
“Kung-Pow” sticks with this formula to the letter, although to squeeze in all the gags things get a little more convoluted than in a real kung-fu movie. We meet The Chosen One (Steve Oedekerk), whose family was murdered when he was an infant by Master Pain (Fei Lung). We know he is The Chosen One because a little face is animated onto the end of his tongue. When he grows up he lives for vengeance against the dread Master Pain, but first he must train with Master Tang, and woo Ling (he must woo a girl named Ling, not train with someone namd Woo Ling…never mind). Along the way The Chosen One fights a cow, punches a hole clean through a guy, and does backflips over entire houses. A lot of mileage is squeezed out of bad dubbing: characters rattle off what looks like the Gettysburg Address when all we hear is a single monosyllable; we see The Chosen One’s dog bark but don’t hear it for another two or three seconds, if at all; or dialogue will be spoken in a flat monotone when the speaker’s expression and camera movements suggest enormous amounts of passion.