Like Turbo Kid, which I reviewed last week, Kung Fury is a parody of/homage to the low-rent action films of the '80s. Only this one's much heavier on the irony. See, for example, the plot:
Sometime in the early 1980s, Miami-Dade Police Department detective Kung Fury and his partner Dragon apprehend a red ninja in a back alley, but Dragon is sliced in half by the ninja while Kung Fury is suddenly struck by lightning and bitten by a cobra, giving him extraordinary kung fu powers that enable him to defeat his foe. Years later in 1985, after defeating a rogue arcade machine robot, Kung Fury quits the force when he is assigned to partner with Triceracop, fearing that he would lose another partner in the line of duty. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler, a.k.a. "Kung Führer", enters the timeline and remotely guns down the police chief and attacks the precinct through a mobile phone. Intent to avenge the chief, Kung Fury has computer whiz Hackerman send him back in time to kill Hitler in Nazi Germany. A glitch in the system, however, sends him back into the Viking Age. After Kung Fury meets the Viking valkyries Barbarianna and Katana, the Norse godThor sends him to Nazi Germany for him to finish his job.
Or consider the fact that Kung Fury (Sandberg) opens the doors to his Lamborghini Countach by shooting it. Or the scene where two Nazi guardsmen argue, in fake German (it's really Swedish) over who has the more Aryan mustache. Or the VHS glitch effects that periodically reappear. Or the fucking amazing Mitch Murder soundtrack, which features David Hasselhoff on vocals:
Indeed, Kung Fury may be the ultimate film for that certain kind of person who both seeks out a certain kind of ironic humor and enjoys a bit of '80s nostalgia--ironically, of course. For others Kung Fury may lay the insanity on a bit thick. Personally, I thought it was funny as hell, but also noted that, in comparison to Turbo Kid (and the comparison is inevitable), it's a pretty superficial film. And that was even more apparent second time I watched it, when all the surprises had already been sprung.
At the same time, Kung Fury is only 30-minutes long, which is just about perfect for what is, in essence, a superbly well done one-note symphony. Oh, and Kung Fury's partner, Triceracop? Yes, he is an anthropomorphic triceratops--something that remains thankfully unexplained.
The Math
Baseline Assessment: 6/10
Bonuses: +1 for the concept of Triceracop; +1 for the amazing soundtrack: +1 for TOTAL INSANITY.
Penalties: -1 for the moment when the joke starts to get a bit old.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10. "Well worth your time and attention."
***
POSTED BY: The G--purveyor of nerdliness, genre fanatic and Nerds of a Feather founder/administrator, since 2012.
Reference: Kung Fury, directed by David Sandberg [Laser Unicorns/Lamprey, 2015]
More like a finger to the eyeball than a fist to the face.
The Meat:
The Entropy of Bones is technically the third book in Jama-Everett's Liminal series, but one that stands on its own quite nicely. At least, this was my first experience with the series and I never felt lost, never felt in over my head. Like Chabi, the main character, the reader is expected to keep up and move with the flow, adapt and still manage to kick ass. Metaphorically, of course. The book is a wild ride, starting as a rather straightforward martial arts story that slowly shifts, that slowly draws out to be something different, something infinitely weirder and much more interesting, filled with superpowered people, time travel, and a large number of explosives. Basically, if you're looking for a book that hits and just keeps on hitting, The Entropy of Bones will do wonderfully.
The novel shines thanks in large part to Chabi, daughter of a Mongolian father who left her very young and a black mother who has slowly been stitching her life back together. Born mute, Chabi eventually found a voice, but not one of sound. This Voice, which speaks directly into people's minds, is part of Chabi's powers, part of whats her special. Of course, that she starts training with a rather unbalanced martial arts master and swimming thirty miles before lunch also helps to set her apart. She becomes a living weapon, a young woman in tune with her body, trained to take anyone attacking her apart. The fight scenes in the book are worth the price of admission alone, Chabi's body filled with a violent grace, and the prose of the battles is visceral and cinematic and fun. Chabi's voice throughout is wry and a bit damaged, is sarcastic, fun, and quite smart.
The novel also paces itself quite well, with the possible exception of rushing through the ending. But the story builds in a tantalizing spiral up, bringing Chabi first into a mundane world of drugs and thieves and then moving her laterally into things much, much darker. Along the way she explores her own past as she begins to figure out that something is going on in the world that her teacher never taught her about. By the time explanations are needed to catch readers up to what's happened in the setting because of the first two books, things already have a momentum that pushes right on, that keeps things immediate and compelling. Even when time travel and an epic war between groups of superpowered individuals are revealed, it doesn't' feel at odds with the story, and there's no time to doubt as the action keeps right on ratcheting up.
If The Entropy of Bones was a sandwich, it would chip your tooth. If it was a drink, it would make you blind for a few panicked seconds before the world returned. The ending is relentless, breathless, and tragic. Chabi shines as she takes on an entire hotel filled with superpowered assholes, killing and maiming and generally badassing her way to save the day, even if it comes with a price that left me a bit numb. The novel does not pull its punches, and the ending offers the only ending possible, the only ending that would have made sense, even if it wasn't the ending that I wanted. Still, there is a feeling that the story, for all that it wraps up with lightning speed, is left open. A feeling that this isn't the real ending. And while it gives the conclusion a bit of an incomplete feeling, it also leaves things open to be picked up later, leaves Chabi with a chance of appearing again.
Mixing the sharp visuals and sound of broken bones of a Kung Fu movie with epic urban fantasy and a twist of contemporary music, The Entropy of Bones manages to be an incredibly fun read. The mythology of it is complex, and if I'm being honest I probably don't have a great idea of what's going on even after reading the book. But it does leave me hungry for more, curious to see where the story goes from here. As a standalone novel set in a series' universe, it manages to be mostly accessible and definitely entertaining, and well worth checking out.
The Math:
Baseline Assessment: 7/10
Bonuses: +1 for kinetic action and brutal fight scenes, +1 for mixing magic, music, and time travel in a way that I wasn't put off by
Negatives: -1 for leaving some unfinished business at the end, -1 for some unanswered questions in general that I'm guessing are answered in earlier books
For some of you younger gamers, your marathon playing sessions might have taken place around an XBox and Halo multiplayer. For others, it could have been a PS3 and Modern Warfare. For those in my generation, it was Mortal Kombat. Sure, we played a lot of Street Fighter, Tekken, and Virtua Fighter, but the coup de grace was Mortal Kombat. Just as with Grand Theft Auto, our desire to play Mortal Kombat was inversely proportional to our parents' desire to keep us away from it. This was the first game to add in a bit of the old Ultra-violence to keep kiddies coming back for more.
The House
I'm sure many of you are already recalling fond memories of the places you spent days upon days of your life playing this bloody and beautiful game with its over-the-top murderous "fatalities" and masterful control scheme. For me and my crew, it was "The House." Five friends rented a house from one of their moms the summer after we graduated from high school. While it was Brandon's mom's house and it had been rented by five different friends, we never referred to it as "Brandon's mom's" or "The place the guys rented." It was simply known as "The House."
This little two-bedroom, one-bath may look unassuming, but it was the site of thousands upon thousands of battles to save Earthrealm from Outworld and its evil emperor, Shao Khan. For an entire summer, we played MK2 on my Sega Genesis from 9-10 a.m. until somewhere between 2 and 4 a.m. No exaggeration. I wasn't there for every last game, but they were a constant in our little pre-college gathering place nearly every single day. If you weren't there for the beginning, which usually consisted of only the tenants and one or two people who might have passed out, you just found a seat when you got there and entered the rotation. The marathon was simple: Win and you keep your controller, lose and you pass it to the next person. With the plethora of buttons and spectacular graphics in today's games, it's sometimes hard to understand how our attention was held for eighteen hours at a time by something with such basic graphics and such a simple controller, but it happened.
Three buttons?!!
Yup, three buttons. And we knew every last special move and fatality, even some of the stranger additions like "babalities" where opponents were turned into babies upon defeat. One of the major attractions to MK2, as mentioned before, was the over-the-top violence. Removing someone's entire skull and spine with one carefully timed mash of buttons? Even today that's pretty sweet.
My love of fighting games started, as I'm sure many of yours did, with Street Fighter. It had state-of-the-art graphics, more buttons than anything we'd ever seen, and a plethora of special moves that were easy to master given a small amount of effort on the player's part. You didn't need to master all the characters, just get Blanka nailed and you stood a chance.
However, there was something missing. Sure this game was violent, but I was in my upper teens. There isn't a less-desensitized group on the planet than 18-year-olds. These people are old enough to be on the cutting edge of everything technology has to offer in the way of weird, and they're too cool to be put off by any of it. If you have an 18-year-old, stay off their computer and be thankful you haven't seen the things they've seen. It's a brutal, disgusting, melange of reasons the human race should no longer exist. Trust me.
In my later teens, I was the same way. Tarantino couldn't make me cringe and neither could Ryu and Ken. Into that void stepped Mortal Kombat 2. This was everything I wanted in a game. Violence beyond the scope of reality. A tense gaming experience with seemingly endless ability for player improvement. Public outcry from concerned parents. MK2 had it all!
I would guess it was the nearly endless ability to improve your skill by learning new characters' special moves and fatalities that, along with the extreme violence, leant this game to marathon sessions of nearly twenty-four hours. The same could be said of today's best multiplayer games. Modern Warfare allows for nearly endless improvement of your character with its leveling and the ability to "Prestige." Halo has taken it a step further and allowed players to create their own maps, thereby providing endless options for gamers who prefer a long-term commitment over campaign-based games that, once completed, aren't good for much beyond a second playthrough with the exact same story line and outcome.
Getting old
I've picked up the newer iterations of Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. While they have definitely done a massive overhaul on the graphics and these games provided a certain level of nostalgic fun, I'm afraid the magic is gone. I, like many non-classic gamers, have moved on. We've come to expect more from our games than simple gore and special moves. We want an immersive experience with a plausible story to boot. We've simply grown up, right along with our video games.
That said, the only games that come close to MK2 when comparing basic time spent for me are the Elder Scrolls. Other than that, nothing comes close. I had a few marathon days with Oblivion and some 12-hour sessions in Skyrim, but nothing like the good old days at The House playing Mortal Kombat 2. One drawback to online gaming is the inability to whack the controller out of an opponent's hand if you're losing, but enough people still play each other on the same couch that this time-honored strategy gets some use, even today.To you younger gamers out there, enjoy your 16-hour MW3 multiplayer sessions with all your friends. You may not be playing together at The House like we did, instead taking advantage of today's technology and sitting in the comfort of your living rooms. Still, games will never be as completely life-consuming as they are right now. Enjoy it!
The Math (Adjusted for 1995 scores)
Objective Score: 9/10
Bonuses: +1 for being the most violent game released at that point in time. This was the 2 Live Crew of video games. They were holding hearings in the House and Senate because of this game. The only thing that comes close to the impact MK2 had on gamer society is Grand Theft Auto. This is one of the historic landmarks in gaming history, for better or worse.
Penalties: -1 for having a plotline that worked okay in a video game setting, but translated to film about as well as Spider-Man is translating to Broadway.
Nerd Coefficient: 9/10. Very high quality/Standout in it's category.
Have you ever seen a movie where a character in a fight realizes he has lost, commits harakiri, but, before dying, has a change of heart and attempts to strangle his opponent with his own steaming intestines?
No? Then you haven't seen Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky.
TCM Underground screened this Hong Kong martial arts/prison movie the other day, which is stunning, because when I first saw it about ten years ago, its reputation was as literally the most disgusting and violent movie ever made. It turns out that the movie isn't nearly that -- not unless you find Itchy and Scratchy cartoons on The Simpsons legitimately disturbing. Anything by Gaspar Noe, anything that may or may not depict actual cannibalism, anything with graphic depictions of rape or child abuse, Twilight: Breaking Dawn, those are far, far more disturbing films because they appear to depict actual human beings in distress (or, in Twilight's case, actual audience members). Riki-Oh is a live-action cartoon that deposits gallons (what's a larger quantity than a gallon? hectares?) of blood at the audience's feet and says "I dare you not to tell your friends about me."
So if you are a fifteen-year-old boy, or an insatiable fan of Hong Kong action movies, or are high, then you will probably totally dig the following things that happen in Riki-Oh:
Several heads are punched (yes, punched) clean off
Ricky ties his own tendons back together with his teeth after being cut in a knife fight
Several intestines are punctured, either with knives or fists
A dog is kicked in half
At least two people are literally punched in the brain
Razor blades are consumed like candy
Several eyeballs go missing during fights
If right now you're struggling to contain your excitement, let me be very clear that none of this looks and/or feels any more realistic than accidentally spilling ground beef on your kitchen floor while trying to make chile rellenos. But if you're still excited about it, then by all means, hit up your local indie video store and bring this baby back to your dorm room.
The Math
Objective Quality: 4/10
Bonuses: +1 for the sheer inventiveness of finding this many ways to kill and maim in the least realistic ways imaginable; +1 for the evil assistant warden who keeps his breath mints in his glass eye; +1 for the warden himself, who seems to confuse the concepts of "kung fu" and "actually being a giant demon in human form."
Penalties: -1 for, well, most everything else.
Cult Movie Coefficient: 5/10. Problematic, but has redeeming qualities.
[See explanation of our non-inflated scores here.]
Empress Wu has a problem: she's trying to build a massive buddha statue for her coronation and important people connected to it keep bursting into flame. And it's not any normal flame either, but one that comes from within, and is triggered by sunlight. She suspects the Prince, or another rival, because some people don't like the idea of a woman ruling China. Or maybe it's because she keeps killing dissidents? Or maybe it's both. Unclear. Regardless, she's got a problem.
Thankfully, the Chaplain (a sort of magical mystery monk) appears as a talking deer and tells her to hire her old enemy Detective Dee, who is in jail because he opposed her rule (either because she's a woman or because she keeps killing dissidents, or both). Despite this idea being pretty illogical, she decides to go ahead and do it. Only, when she sends her right-hand woman, Jing'er, to let Dee out of prison, she finds a crew of assassins already there, and hellbent on assassinating someone (though who, exactly, is not clear). Despite his reservations about the Empress, Dee agrees to head the investigation. Weirdness ensues.
If a heavy dose of kung fu action peppered with steampunk and salted with a pinch of Tim Burton sounds like your thing, then you should check out DETECTIVE DEE AND THE MYSTERY OF THE PHANTOM FLAME. If not, then fairly warned be thee, because that's exactly what this film is.
There's a lot to recommend here. It's a visually arresting, big budget flick starring many of Hong Kong's finest, and in the realm of Chinese action films, it's a highly original concept, executed with flair. (Oh, and there's a character named Donkey Wang. Yes, that's right: Donkey Wang. And did I mention that he's not only a licensed physician, but an accomplished black marketeer? Let me repeat: there is a character named Dr. Donkey Wang, and he's the man to see if you need some illicit fire beetles. 36 chambers of awesome.)
Unfortunately, all this comes at a price, and that price is the mystery narrative all this is built around. It's confusing at times, and downright illogical at others. I won't spoil things for you, but suffice to say that when plot twists are revealed, they often render earlier actions unfathomable and purposeless. As many "woah!" moments as the film provides, there are just as many, if not more, points where you just look at the screen and say "huh?" Then the film ends in a sort of "well, we had to do it like this, because it's expected of us" way that will make sense if you've watched a lot of medieval kung fu period pieces, but feels unsatisfying when it could have gone a lot of different ways. This kept DETECTIVE DEE from achieving greatness in my eyes, but I still felt like it was a lot of fun, and worth watching.
The Math
Objective Quality: 6/10
Bonuses: +1 for the art direction; +1 for originality; +1 for Dr. Donkey Wang, the greatest character name in Chinese film history
Penalties: -1 for serious problems with the mystery narrative; -1 for the drab ending
