RogerBW's Blog

2015 action comedy, dir. and starring David Sandberg: IMDb / allmovie

The toughest martial arts cop in Miami goes back in time to kill kung fu Hitler.

This is what quick-fire comedy ought to be. With a scant half-hour running time, the film can't afford to stop and mess around: we're in "Miami 1985" in the first ten seconds, and the first explosion comes before the thirty-second mark. By the end of the first minute there's an arcade-machine robot on the rampage.

Characterisation is basically irrelevant, and plot nearly so. Kung Fury was struck by lightning and bitten by a cobra, which gave him awesome kung fu powers. But he works alone: he resigns from the police force rather than accept Triceracop as his new partner. Meanwhile, Adolf Hitler (also known, perhaps inevitably, as Kung Führer) arrives in 1985, and guns down the police chief and half the department via a mobile phone. Clearly the only thing to do is go back in time to kill him!

"Fuck! That's a laser raptor. I thought they went extinct thousands of years ago."

There are explosions, decapitations, and busty female Vikings riding dinosaurs. This is a film for any of us who've enjoyed cheesy 1980s martial-arts films while accepting how cheesy they were: nothing is taken seriously by the audience, but at the same time the humour is non-diegetic, and everyone within the film plays it entirely deadpan.

It's a microbudget production by modern standards, using lots of greenscreen and compositing. To me this was only really distracting during the big fight against the horde of Nazis, where the background milling-about is clearly happening separately from the side-scrolling action in front. When watching, bear in mind that the budget could only stretch to one police uniform.

Not world-changing stuff, of course, but highly recommended. The full film is available via YouTube.