Why So Blu?

Brandon’s Blu-ray Wishlist – April 17, 2014

My pick today is a movie that was one of those glorious films that get dumped in Januarys.  Yep, I’m about to ask for a movie that got an 11% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes (68% audience score though).  A film so bold, it scored a 14 on Metacritic.

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Kung Pow!  Enter The Fist (2002)

Comedy writer and director Stever Odekerk’s passion project, Kung Pow! Enter The Fist came in the January dump month, yes.  However, it did make its money back.  This film was really poorly marketed as well.  I had only seen TV ads, and they all focused on the worst scene in the whole whole movie.  I’m of course talking about the scene where the Chosen One has a bullet time fight with a cow.  In 2002, Matrix parodies were already incredibly tired.  It just appeared to be an incredibly stupid comedy that instantly had the “skip this” label to it.

When it hit DVD in the summer of 2002, I was working at Circuit City and some people kept recommending it, but I still wasn’t about to take the plunge.  Then, my roommate, James Brindel, rented it one night and I was like “oooohhhkayyyy I’ll watch”.  And holy crap!  We laughed our asses off.  The ads I saw were hiding what the hell this movie actually was.  Granted, I don’t know how they would have marketed it.  But, if you would have told me this was a very Mystery Science Theater 3000 style movie where a guy took an old kung fu film from the 70s and inserted himself in it and redubbed all the parts, I would have been there opening night!  I’m pretty sure James and I watched the film 3-4 times that weekend.

The film not only just throws Odekerk in the movie as The Chosen One, but it also had filmed a few extra scenes as well as a few inserts.  There are also props and other things CG’d in as well.   And, clearly there are some comedic moments assisted by some edits and playing with the film’s speed and such.  Its a film that feels almost like a project you would screw around with doing as an experiment for your own personal enjoyment and on your own time as opposed to a theatrical product, but it actually works for an audience as well.

Kung Pow is not without its faults.  There are a few really terrible scenes in the film.  One is the aforementioned cow-Matrix fight.  The film gets off to a pretty rough start.  It opens with this fight featuring a CG baby.  Maybe there’s people that find this kind of funny, but I thought it was kind of embarrassingly bad and maybe something that would make some people turn off the movie in the first 30 seconds because its “soft”.  Fear not, keep with it!  Things improve and get much much much better.  Don’t let fighting cows and babies that don’t take up much screentime in the grand scheme of things (and happen relatively early in the film) scare you from this funny film.  The humor in the film is of the relatively silly stupidity brand, but nothing like these 2 scenes I mentioned.  When there’s a lot of jokes flying, not all are going to stick, but I think for the most part this film’s do.

This film hasn’t seen the light of day since it dropped on DVD, but there is a cult audience for it if a distributor is willing to give it a shot.  Hell, it could find new life in an audience that seems to be more up for this kind of film.  With the snarky, mean-spirited tweeting generation we seem to have in today’s social media-infused film going, this film might just work for them.  Maybe it was ahead of its time.  20th Century Fox owns the rights to it, and honestly its not going to need an amazing transfer restoration to look great on Blu-ray.  Bring it to Blu-ray Fox!  Until then, I’ll just be here “Swingin’ the chains, swingin’ the chains”.