The Modern Spoof/Why I Hate Kung Fury

First off, I'd never heard of Kung Fury until it showed up here because I'm old and not in touch with the pop culture zeitgeist. .

Personally, I couldn't get more than 2 minutes into this garbage. I understand completely what they're doing, but I hate it.

Kung Fury is spoofing 80s action, going so far as to even include bad VCR playback as a joke. My problem with this film is that it is making fun of the 80's and trends of that time without any admiration. The makers of this film seem to hate the thing they are making fun of. This style of film making comes off more like the bully giving wedgies to the nerds. The only way to be in on the joke is to think of the style it's parodying as a stupid era.

I can't stand this approach. Part of it is because I genuinely enjoyed growing up in the 80's and 90's. I learned to truly love film in the time that this film is mocking. That said, I don't just hate this style because it's making fun of something I honestly enjoy. I hate it because of that bully attitude. Even if it was making fun of fifties style b-movie sci-fi, an era which I appreciate but have no direct tie with, I would still hate this form of finger-pointing humor. It's condescending and mean spirited.

Conversely, if you watch one of the truly greatest parody films of the last 20 years, Hot Fuzz, you can see that the people behind and in front of the camera honestly love the films and style they are mimicking. Hot Fuzz (and the other two blood and ice cream films) never treats those old films and tropes as something to disdain. By making films that both parody a genre while still being a good film within that genre, Wright and his crews show a level of maturity that trash like Kung Fury could never achieve.

I just wanted to get this out there.

__________________

I have no interest in this movie, whatever it is.

I didn't feel like that at all. I didn't end up hating it, which I thought I probably would. For me the problem with this was the same as most of these modern exploitation films - it's too knowing and it tries to hard.

__________________
5-time MoFo Award winner.

I think the problem I saw was that it had no charm. I love stuff like this, but it just missed. The Hoff video is perfect in comparison.

I never got the impression that Kung Fury was supposed to be a mean-spirited mockery of '80s action movies. The detail involved in capturing the '80s aesthetic is a testament to how much the makers appreciate the decade they're referencing. The problem is that their parody comes across as a compromise between sincerity and irony, which is somehow just as bad as straight-up derision. This much is demonstrated by the action sequences, which try way too hard to be improbably awesome. At one point, Kung Fury attacks an enemy by driving his sports car off an incline, then getting out and riding on the roof while shooting said enemy. Am I supposed to think this is awesome or funny or both? The attempts at verbal humour come across as pretty poor attempts to both replicate and exaggerate the style of old cop movies as well, what with all the gruff one-liners that fall flat.

The Cornetto Trilogy might be good examples of how to do affectionate parody, but they are accomplished with some degree of technical polish and are relatively grounded in reality (even the ones with horror/sci-fi elements). You should be comparing this to films that also try to replicate the aesthetic shortcomings of retro trash. My point of reference for Kung Fury was the SBS TV series Danger 5, if only because it also shares the same "kill Hitler" plot and a lot of the same elements such as dinosaurs, time travel, bad effects work, and so forth (plus it starts spoofing the '80s pretty mercilessly in season two). While I don't think Danger 5 is all that great on its own, it does a far better job of accomplishing what Kung Fury was trying to do - as I noted in my review, Kung Fury lifts its funniest gag straight from Danger 5 (the one where a gun is fired down a phone to kill someone). Another important thing to keep in mind is that retro parodies like Danger 5, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and Black Dynamite do at least try to effectively mimic the aesthetics of their chosen decades through the use of practical effects and deliberately inferior filmmaking techniques. Kung Fury, on the other hand, relies way too much on CGI effects and technical slickness to make its '80s parody feel totally affectionate - while there are parts of the film's aesthetic that I appreciate, the overuse of CGI just pulls me out most of the time and more or less forces me to think of this as ironic emptiness.

So, while i do disagree with bouncingbrick's assertion that this is nothing but finger-pointing humour, I do reckon that this film isn't a good one because it seems like it's both trying too hard and not trying hard enough to replicate the '80s. That's without mentioning how much it just seems to throw whatever "awesome" stuff it can think of at the wall in order to see what sticks, and apparently this is supposedly to appeal to an audience jaded by cynicism yet susceptible to anything that promises to be "awesome" in quotation marks. Whether it's a sincere parody or a mean one, it still feels like it's pandering to a very particular set of expectations and fails to satisfy anything outside of said set.

__________________
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace mention

Darkplace does have something of an advantage over other retro-trash parodies thanks to the framing device where Garth and Dean talk about how the show-within-a-show is some sort of under-appreciated masterpiece that tackles serious issues and challenges viewers' perspectives, which is then contrasted against the extremely horrendous mess that is the show itself.

The major problem is Kung Fury is nothing like an 80's action film except for the stupid one-liners. There are no older action films where a video game comes to life and blows up peoples heads and a guy comes riding in on top of his sports car to kill it. Other than the tracking jokes (I use the word "jokes" in the lightest way possible) and one-liners and goofy costumes, I'd have no idea they are making fun of 80's action films. I never saw an 80's action movie where a dinosaur and a viking and whatever other crap teams up to fight Hitler.

However, I've seen plenty of films that rely on the tropes used as jokes in the Conetto Trilogy. I've seen plenty of disaster movies that rely on the tropes played with in Airplane! I've seen plenty of old westerns that rely on the tropes made fun of in Blazing Saddles.

That's why Kung Fury comes off as condescending. Hot Fuzz is a parody, but it's also a good film of the genre. Airplane!, for all of its nonsensical moments, is still a disaster film.

I don't even know what Kung Fury is trying to do. Is it making fun of 80's action films? Because if it is, I have no idea what 80's films it's trying to parody. Is it trying to be "awesome"? Because it's not doing that either.

I certainly feel it's trying to be "awesome" (and it doesn't work for me because I'm not of that mindset) because that seems to be the millennial thing. Concept is all. Execution? Well, let's cross our fingers and hope for the best (it's actually a lot closer to punk.) However, considering the money and talent involved I feel it's unfair to compare this to any 'professional' film of similar ambition. That doesn't mean that it's better because it cost less, but titles such as Black Dynamite and Airplane! shouldn't really be thrown around in comparison in terms of quality. Those films have the budget, talent and contacts that the makers of Kung Fury could only dream of.

As for tone? Well, is this going for the same thing? I don't think it is. I'd also throw in there that this isn't all about action movies. It's the 80's. So much of what I saw yesterday was referencing 80's arcade games, styles, moves, etc. Probably moreso than action films, though I might be mistaken there. Plus, this isn't the 80's presented by those who lived through it. It's by those who have experienced it filtered though the mediums of the day. I didn't live through the 60's, but I'm confident that what I'd have expected to see/experience from the impression I got of it from the 80's and 90's would be markedly different from what it'd actually be like.

It's worth mentioning that Kung Fury started as a Kickstarter project that was originally going to be feature-length but due to it not quite raising the necessary funds it had to be cut down to a thirty-minute short. Still doesn't excuse how it doesn't even take the time to properly establish personalities for the characters to make it so that we care. It once again invites comparisons to Danger 5, which was able to develop its cast's personalities in the space of half an hour of weird action.

I have no interest in this movie,

Thank you for the contribution, banned user with a website name in your username.

I was actually kinda looking forward to the movie, and I was pretty disappointed with what we ended up getting.
Some film makers need to step it up, parodies are a dying film genre.

Sounds like one of those stupid sharknado movies. I suppose they have their place.
On the background of a party where you don't actually watch it.

Nah, this movie's place is on the Internet where it can be wolfed down by millennials whose concept of what makes for The Best Most Awesome Movie Ever Made is so heavily rooted in fake nostalgia and ironic detachment that they'll treat this gaudy Chuck Norris joke of a movie as a cancer-curing Second Coming.

But yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if this got played at the kind of party where people take it in turns to show each other YouTube videos, though that doesn't exactly make it background noise.

Iro, witty remarks are no substitute for legitimate criticisms. So, why do you think it has an 8.2 IMDB rating?

This is true, that is why I got the legitimate criticisms out of the way first by making them in not only my review but also in the first two posts of this thread. As for why I think it has an 8.2 rating on IMDb...honestly, it doesn't matter what I think so I can rattle off whatever reason I want. Because IMDb voters are easily wowed and will vote highly for a lot of surprising things (just look at how much the Top 250 fluctuates and will occasionally include some flash-in-the-pan new releases like Age of Ultron or Kingsman, plus Birdman went from the Top 100 to being downvoted out of the list entirely once it won the Best Picture Oscar). Because there were enough people who disliked it enough to stop it being a perfect 10. Because it's shamelessly pandering to the Internet crowd who are into the idea of '80s kitsch rather than '80s kitsch itself. Because it's a glorified viral video. Because it's got a low number of votes but a concentrated fanbase that means a third of the votes are 10s. The list goes on...

A glorified viral video I think is pretty acurate, everything else you said was absurd gibberish. Most of your criticisms are just extreme prejudice and double standards, not to mention your imaginative assumption about it's target audience, which was way off and probably psychological projection.

You don't think IMDB has unreasonable/knee jerk reaction ratings? Was Kung Fury not aimed at a 80's kitsch audience?

I don't think Kung Fury can be merely reduced to kitsch status, even if it does have that element. I also think that Iro missed the point in regards to the IMDB rating.


In this thread, and Iro's review, I see too many assumptions passed off as facts, and too much subjectivivity passed off as objectivity.


I also see a lack of honesty when Kung Fury is criticised for things that movies it's critics praise can also be criticised for.


I'm not saying that people here don't have valid criticisms, but I also don't get the impression that those criticisms are the real reasons for the low rating. If it really is as bad as Iro says it is, then I think sites like IMDB would probably reflect that a little bit more. Less than 1% of the IMDB ratings were negative. I think that says something that Iro isn't willing to admit to himself.