Kung Fury Unleashed!

I could just summarize this short film in the following manner: what would happen if 1980s action cinema imploded on itself and became a quantum singularity?

What you’d probably get is something like Laser Unicorns’ action comedy movie Kung Fury. 

As it is, what we have here is an excellent example of some Eightiesploitation — a time frame of media made into a genre — that is in and of itself a parody, a nostalgic love letter, and a cinematic crack-fic of pure and mad fun. And you have it all here: ravening packs of punks on the lawless streets of Miami, arcade cabinets, ridiculous one-liner puns, blocky clunky elder cellphones, a ton of martial arts in gritty industrial settings, quintessential 80s synthesized music, cheesy neon 8-bit computer effects, and — of course — the Nintendo Power-Glove. Hell, you even have a blatant commercial parody of another product placement in the film itself and a clever use of periodic static at the edges of the film: to imitate what it would like if it really were a dated VHS tape from the eighties. Even the cartoon segment of the film resembles a faded eighties era example of animation.

As for the rest of it, what you see is pretty much what you get. As eighties action films go, the premise is simple and thin to allow for maximum gratuitous kick-ass. Kung Fury, a policeman, goes back in time to defeat his ultimate opponent: Adolf Hitler. How he gets his martial arts abilities is pretty much irrelevant and through some ridiculously awesome choreography (and once he gets to the right timeline) he gets to slaughter some major Nazi ass with the help of Viking women, dinosaurs … and Thor.

And yet it’s even more strange. In its own weird way, Kung Fury‘s thinly veiled plot to release a lot of nostalgic kick-ass does have its own logic and it manages to tie itself together, somehow at the end, and leave the film open for a sequel with the potential for even more fucked up glory.

Laser Unicorns’ Kickstarted film delivers on its ridiculous violence and fun: parodying the time period of cinema its derived from, and loving it as hard as its own explosions.  This would definitely be an excellent film to see at the Toronto After Dark and it was an absolute pleasure to watch it burn.