As a culture, we’re never as smart as we think we are. Our fashions fade and our trends die and the next generation holds them up and laughs. Today’s big hit is sometimes tomorrow’s big joke. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s healthy. At the very least, it’s prime territory for comedy. That’s where Kung Fury comes in. It’s a parody of 80s action movies that nails its targets with such laser-scope accuracy that you can’t tell for sure if it’s a love letter or from a poison pen. Its ultra-macho rogue cop hero (perhaps modeled on Sylvester Stallone in Cobra) goes on a mission back in time to kill Hitler and along the way he slams like a pinball into 80s cliches galore. This thirty-one-minute wonder covers the mysticism that films in the 80s often granted to computers (How does our hero travel time? He knows a hacker who figures out in ten seconds at a keyboard how to “hack” through time; also, see Tron, Electric Dreams and Weird Science). It covers Sandahl Bergman, Lana Clarkson-style barbarian girls. It covers the Stallone/Schwarzenegger one-man-army AND vintage sideview fighting video games in one swoop. It covers the shitty animation fantasy worlds (think Masters of the Universe) that old fucks my age used to eat up after school. It also covers big guns, boomboxes, robots, VHS screen artifacts, neon, gaudy logos, Converse shoes, headbands, horrible one-liners, a few gigawatts worth of synthesizer music and mobile phones the size of a Chevy Nova. This is how tacky old 80s hits look to audiences today. It’s a mockery of a distortion, a cinematic stand-up comedy impression, a joke tossed out overhanded to an audience expected to catch it.
Swedish writer/director/lead actor David Sandberg made his movie on a six-figure crowd-funded budget and then gave it back to the crowd as a free internet stream showing at a Youtube near you. Me though, I saw it in a theater when the clever souls at my local Alamo Drafthouse tacked it first on the bill of a repertory screening of straight-faced 80s shitfest Cobra. It was like dessert before dinner. Both movies got about the same number of laughs (a lot). Both movies informed each other. They exchanged energy. Stallone crumples up the garbage and Sandberg recycles it.
Your affection for Kung Fury probably correlates to your affection for the moldiest bins of 80s trash where loose cannon cops, ninjas, Swiss cheese plots and grade-Z theme music from performers you’ve never heard of and will never hear of again lay in excess. The person who hates Kung Fury and the person who loves it will likely agree on at least one thing: It’s exactly the sort of tribute that these films deserve.