Kung Fury

Dir: David Sandberg

2015

*****

David Sandberg's dazzling homage to 1980s movie pop-culture is a masterpiece in independent film making. After leaving the world of advertising and music videos behind him, Sandberg asked an audience to crowdfund an idea he had had after making lots of joke films with his friends. The idea was to make an 80s action, b-movie spoof featuring lots of elements that were popular during the decade. He got his total, enough to make a short film but what he did with the relatively small amount he received is absolutely spectacular. Featuring a crazed arcade machine/robot, Lamborghini surfing, a police officer with the head of a Triceratop (called Triceracop), a time-travelling Hitler, the Norse God Thor (standing around 100 metres high), a giant golden Reichsadler, a Nazi-munching tyrannosaurus rex, a lot of martial arts fighting and a cop, the title character, Kung Fury who gains special powers after being struck by lightning and bitten by a Cobra simultaneously. It's epic and has pretty much every element you could ask of that we all loved about 80s action movies. It's ridiculously inventive, gets the satire down perfectly and is as hilarious as it is original. Sandberg is clearly a clever nerd, his film making skills are outstanding and he achieves so much with little tricks and knowhow. Some of the scenes must have been utterly painstaking to produce but nothing is ever cheap looking or looks rushed. The detail is exquisite but because this is a celebration of retrospective style and method, scratches and blips are added, so it looks as if the viewer is watching it on an old VHS. This was used rather cunningly when an actress in the original trailer wasn't available for the main short. Sandberg scratched her scenes off the tape, so when she appears it looks as if the VHS was over-paused during her scene and given that she was scantily clad, this adds extra weight and a suggestive nod to viewers in more than one way. It's hard to know whether that was an example of healthy serendipity or totally intentional, given how clever and knowing the rest of the film is. To make it even more authentic it features a David Hasselhoff cameo. I'm going to unfairly generalize now and say that the youth of today, the ones born well after the 1980s, have a very different idea of what the 80s was like. Many people of my generation seem to have forgotten too and mistakenly (and sometimes intentionally) refer to glossy half-truths and myths when relaying what it was really like. Kung Fury is of course an exaggeration but in terms of 80s ideas, it's actually very accurate. In a decade that gave us things like Rude Dog and the Dweebs, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and The Garbage Pail Kids it's actually pretty authentic, it's just highlighted by the fact that all these awesome ideas are concentrated into just half an hour. What a glorious half an hour it is too!