L'invincible bagarreur

How do you rate a movie like this? Was I totally engrossed, with nail-biting tension? No. Was I dumbfounded? Yes. Looking at the 'cinema' of this movie, this doesn't deserve a 1. But, looking at it from the bad kung-fu fan perspective, it is a classic. Horrible acting, implausible action, schizophrenic editing, and dialog that makes you wonder if the over-dub actors actually had a script or were improvising. This is to kung-fu movies as Ator is to bad barbarian films: a pinnacle of the worst. For a fun evening, I highly recommend.

Not warming.worming. as in, after you watch this, you probably want to get de-wormed. This is uniquely incoherent even in this genre. About half way through I asked my wife if she thought it was supposed to be a comedy. She was asleep. I still don't know what it was.about. I kept hoping it might get better and then it didn't.

There are three basic types of martial arts films. The good ones generally have crisp prints and captioning instead of dubbing. And, most importantly, they have great martial arts action and are made by highly skilled and choreographed actors/martial artists. Many others, however, are quite lousy with horrible dubbing, ridiculous stories, prints that look like they have been rotting in a musty closet for centuries. And, most importantly, the martial arts is terrible--with blows clearly coming no where near connecting. They are chock full of punching and kicking sounds consisting of lots of celery being smashed and sticks being slapped. Of course there is the third category of films that fall a bit towards the middle--deficient in one or more areas but not all that bad in others. These films most often actually were originally good films but were ruined by inept dubbing and horrible prints--but the action and choreography is not complete and total crap.

In this final category is where I would place "Invincible Obsessed Fighter". The kung fu is clearly competent and the action very, very fast-paced. But it's also accompanied by more celery twisting and slapping sound effects than you'll find in two or three bad martial arts films put together. And, sadly, the film has dumb voice actors and the print is amazingly poor considering the movie isn't that old. I truly think the DVD was made by filming an old videotape--as the picture clearly is cropped. As a result, this is NOT a film to watch around people who cannot appreciate this sort of effort--your friends and family will just keep asking you 'why do you watch this crap?!'--and that gets pretty old after a while! An additional problem is one I have seen in quite a few martial arts films. When they try to be funny, so many times they are painfully unfunny--and this film clearly is not funny even though it tries with countless goofy faces and lots of mugging that make the Three Stooges look like thespians in comparison!! Some actors, such as Jackie Chan, can do humor AND martial arts--most films in the genre, however, should probably just stick to the action!! I would discuss the plot some, but frankly it didn't seem to have all that much plot--mostly a lot of fighting and goofy comedy.

In its present crappy form, I'd give this film a 3 (and that's being VERY charitable). If it is available without the crappy dubbing and with a decent print, I would probably give the film a 5--it's not bad...but also not very good either.

When i saw magnificent natural fist, i seriously thought it couldn't get much more crazy.......well i certainly will eat my hat. this film is sick, crazy film with wicked soundtrack. no red nosed cook in this though, shame that would have boosted it to a nine on my tables. the end fight is probably the most unoriginal fight seen I've ever seen, punching girls into trees and punchin his head so hard it actually spins around making creaky door noise, yeah smashed it mate! the fighting in the film isn't too good really but the story line makes up for it, and so does the non stop craziness that seems to follow Elton wherever he goes........

INVINCIBLE OBSESSED FIGHTER is your run of the mill kung fu film for the most part, with the odd addition of some cult and wacky elements to the plot which makes it stand out a little from the crowd. Sadly it's so cheap and slapdash overall that it's a film that's difficult to enjoy, which is no surprise given that Tomas Tang directs under a pseudonym.

The story is about the usual hunt for stolen treasure and there's plenty of low rent action to help the running time fly past. The film seems to have been shot or produced in South Korea like so many IFD films and it stars the infamously-named Elton Chong to boot. Sadly, INVINCIBLE OBSESSED FIGHTER is constrained by a very low budget and not very good fight scenes, which is a bit of a problem when there are so many of them. An interlude involving a crazy maggot-eating priest and his army of the dead is a highlight, as are the lowbrow cross-dressing antics of some of the cast.