Once a millenium,
a chosen one is born.
An avenger with fists of fury,
a warrior with blazing speed.
He is known as...
The Chosen One
The Cast
The Chosen One.............
Steve Oedekerk
Master Pain, aka Betty....
Lung Fai (voice)
Master Tang.....................
Chen Hui Lou (voice)
Wimp Lo...........................
Lau Kar Wing (voice)
Ling...................................
Tse Ling Ling (voice)
W'hoo...............................
Jennifer Tung
The Story
I spanked you as a baby, I'll spank you now, bitch.
In the opening
sequence we see a poor
Asian family in their home, a
baby wrapped in a blanket is in the arms of its mother while the father sits at a worn wooden
table with two small children. It's immediately revealed that there is some
secret about the baby that can not be told, as the mother cries over the child that "no one can know about."
BONG
Yes, the stereotypical gong noise.
Enter the
bad guys, led by Master Pain who immediately kills the father, then the rest of the family. The baby, the last
victim, is in its cradle as the goons crowd around it. With pudgy arms and mildly freakish backflips and other
martial arts skills a baby shouldn't have, he fends off his would-be
assassins. He is, after all, the chose one.
In a final attempt to
dispatch the powerful baby, Master Pain locks him in the little
hut and sets fire to it. Unfortunately for him, the kid's got some mad leaping skills and out of the
inferno and down a hill he goes..rolling all the way. He ends up rolling to the bottom of a
gully, we are told, and is raised by various rodents. He lives under constant attack from unsuccessful thugs.
I won't ruin the rest of the movie, suffice it to say that the Chosen One is trying to locate his family's
killer. He learns some things about his
destiny and Tonguey, his tongue. That's right...his
tongue has a name. Has a face too, as well as a tongue of it's own. It's kinda bizarre that way.
My Opinion
I'm sure on some planet your style is quite impressive, but your weak link is...this is Earth.
I think the
value of this movie isn't in the story because frankly that's one of the weakest parts of the whole thing. No, the value is in how it was created and in the hilarious lines the freakish characters have.
Instead of trying to recreate the Kung-Fu movie style..they simply took
Hu He Shuan Xing, a 1976 Hong Kong released film, and dubbed over it. That's not
all they did, they completely redid the sound and they used computer tricks and blue screen effects to put new characters in, as well. Kinda like
Forest Gump did. An example of this is that in every scene
Steve Oedekerk is in...well...quite obviously he wasn't in the original
movie. They did the
blue screen...put some little
tape lines for
reference points and spliced him in with the
actress who played Ling or someone else. There's also a robust Asian gentlemen with a
boom box in several scenes...I'm pretty sure when they made the
film in the 70's they didn't have someone dancing in the background to
MC Hammer's, Hammertime.
The
voice-overs themselves are funny to behold. They add so much to the characters, re-formed as they are, that you can't help but
laugh. You have a southern
American accent emerging from one character...a
nasal whine from another. Some are semi
Stooge-like. And of course, they are all several seconds behind the movement of the lips. Even the dog barks 30 seconds after the action. Sometimes there was 3 minutes of action for
speech, and only one
word was actually said. They had fun with this simple little
effect.
Another thing they did with the sound was add
bizarre noises in. When
Wimp Lo walked...he squeaked. Added to his name, which depicted his character very well.
The characters in the movie are
insane, which adds to the
funny as well.
It's bad and it's wrong. It's B'dong.
First you have the Chosen One, who is the only
white boy in the film. Born to Asian parents, in
Asia somewhere (this is to my knowledge never actually pointed out) he by all rights
should be Asian. But he's not. He doesn't even have an
accent. Of course, that could be because he was raised by rodents...
Eeny, meeny, miny mo...I wonder where my glove will go..."
Master Tang is a crude, vulgar, disgusting man. From feeling up a wounded man causing his
death when the wounds won't heal, to shivering martial arts students who fear his
Fist of Power, he's a
pervert through and through. He's also the
wise instructor our hero comes to for advice and help.
But master, I wanted to be the Chosen One some day.
Wimp Lo is the
jealous sidekick-like character. He wanted to be with Ling, he wanted to save the village, he was purposefully trained incorrectly so Master Tang could get a good laugh.
eeoo-eeoo-eeoo
Ling is a twisted
sadistic bitch. Maybe. She's described as being shy, ten seconds before she's
exposing her soft curves to the Chosen One behind Master Tang's back. She also has this tendency to make this high pitched whiny
noise that is apparently unique to her
family.
A tiny net is a death sentence. It's a net and it's tiny.
Master Pain, who decides early on he should be called Betty by the other characters, is out to get the Chosen One. Why? Cus he's the only one who can defeat the mysterious
Evil Council. Who are they? I'm getting there. Betty has these two
metal triangles embedded in his chest, apparently these are the source of his power. They're very sharp and hurt your hands. Naturally they are difficult to remove.
You must trust the power of the tongue.
W'hoo is this mono-boobed flying chick that gives somewhat sage advice to the Chosen One. We don't know much about her, she's only seen three or four times. But she has
one massive
breast.
Oh yes, the Evil Council. We don't know much about them. What do we know? They have a
plan. And it's
evil. It's so evil. It is a bad bad plan that will
hurt many people. That are good.
One of the joys I have in this movie are the well placed
advertisements. They don't even try to hide them. There's a blatant mention of
Radioshack, Neosporin,
CNN and
Taco Bell. I think the Taco Bell ad is my favorite.
And last, but not least, there a few references to other movies made in it. Two of the more blatant are
The Matrix, when the
computer generated cow shoots milk bullets at our hero and he evades them Neo-style. The other is Mu Shu Fasa..the
kung-fu Lion King in the clouds who offers the hero some help, and some smart assed comments.
All in all I think that aside from the general bad rap it gets cus "it looks dumb" it's a pretty funny movie when you actually sit down and watch it.
References:
Official Movie Trailer, http://www.kungpowmovie.com
Kung Pow, the movie