Kung Phooey is for anyone who has deliberately forced themselves to watch every eastern and western martial arts chop-socky schlock flick known to man, although only a few of these genre fans will truly appreciate where KP is coming from (and ultimately going to). As bad as this film is to any sensible movie critic, the first few minutes alone will have you spurting out your favourite beverage through your nose - the intro recreates the "Kung Fu sanddune walkabout" Zucker-style with many of those bizarrely unrelated visual tidbits to keep you guessing every few seconds. The rest of this film however takes itself about as seriously as a secondary school stage play and is probably just about as interesting, at least on the surface. The seemingly $2.50 budget does not give one much expectation for world-class fight choreography or acting for that matter, but if you are willing to forgo these "small graces" then there are many mildly amusing filmic, cultural and (the all-important) stereotypical send ups to be savoured here. Basically, Kung Phooey is the martial arts spoof home-movie that you and your mates have always wanted to make but were truly afraid to see through to fruition.
As far as sustaining this one-joke-wonder into a 90 minute foray it inevitably falls short of the mark, well below that of the joke-per-minute classics like Flying High (er, Airplane). Instead, the filmmakers decided that if they couldn't be overtly hilarious, then they should at least try and be clever about the self-contained universe that all martial arts films seem to live in. The humour is thence derived from the characters often using real-world logic to dismantle their own movie-world actions and motivations that occur around them (and vice versa if that's possible). If you can, grab the DVD to watch the making-of featurette which shows all the heavenly glory of Z-budget film-making as well as the fun you can have when you really put your mind to it (you can't make a dream come true unless you have a dream). The deleted scenes also go further into a couple of other characters who should have had equal screen time with the Muscles from Brussels when he finally gets his comeuppance in the most painful way imaginable. And of course, don't forget the outtakes! If you have watched (but not necessarily enjoyed) Kung Pow: Enter The Fist for its unique take on this undervalued film genre, who knows if you will get into Kung Phooey or not ... maybe having a bottle of the cheapest booze on hand will help. But one thing is almost certain with this movie ... it will not have a sequel!
