Kung Pow is my favourite movie of all time

This post might not be that funny, it’s just me fanboying about a movie I love.

Everyone’s got a favourite movie, right?

I don’t actually know if this is something everyone has but I’m pretty sure most people have one and I’d hazard a guess that the majority of them have classically good movies as their favourite.

Something like the Godfather, Empire Strikes Back, the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, you know the kind of movies you’d see on IMDB and when you mention them people go “Oh yeah. That movie. Which I have heard of and/or seen”.

Well, my favourite movie is a quasi-obscure comedy film from 2002 that made $17 million dollars at the box office off a $10 million dollar budget.

It’s got 6/10 on IMDB and 1/10 from critics on Rotten Tomatos. But I stand by Kung Pow as being my hands down favourite movie of all time even though I really don’t think I can dispute the 6/10 rating from IMDB because like… it’s just a dumb movie.

So the movie uses the footage from an old Wuxia film called Tiger and Crane Fists (虎鶴雙形) with Steve Oedekerk, writer and star, digitally inserted in with all the technological power 2002 had to offer in place of Jimmy Wang Yu who WAS the main character. Oedekerk being the guy who helped write both Ace Ventura movies, the Nutty Professor of the 90’s and a bunch of other movies and TV shows. Which gives you an idea the kind of comedy you’re in for.

As near I can tell, Oedekerk did 95% of the voices in this and just overdubbed the original footage with intentionally mismatched audio. Which is a dumb bit, I mean having characters who don’t move their mouths sing “We are both ventrilloquists” to get around the fact they share an unspoken exchange later is just… I can’t argue it’s stupid, but it hits my funny bone every single goddamn time he has the heroine make a random squawking sound because there’s a lip move and no words to go with it.

The actual plot’s just a send-up to the typical Martial Arts movie plot, hero trains to avenge his family by mastering a style, that kinda thing, with the notable change that the Japanese have been replaced by the French in this, and barring one kind of dated scene where they do a Matrix Parody before the bullet-time dodge had been done to death, I’d say this movie is still one of the funniest I have. But a part of that might be because it’s me.

So I thought about it and I think that a big reason I love it so much is that it came at a certain time in my life. I first saw it in 2005 I think and was pretty much in the sweet spot for finding it funny, I just watched the DVD a bunch of times and kept finding things to laugh at and catching new jokes. Then I showed it to some friends and they also found it hilarious, a bit from the opening and the sound clip from it could be used to paralyse one of them with fits of laughter. Then I met someone who would become my best friend and one of the big things we bonded over was that it was her favourite movie too.

Which I think leads to where this ramble is going, my favourite movie of all time is what it is for two reasons. One, it’s incredibly stupid and uses that to produce maximum comedy, and two it’s had a demonstrably positive impact on my life. Which is pretty cost effective since I bought it for like £2.

Allegedly, a sequel got announced in 2015 which y’know… I live in hope.

Might watch that tonight actually…