When I was a kid Sunday afternoon was where I came to appreciate badly dubbed Asian cinema. When I wasn't cheering on the Tokyo crushing hijinks of Godzilla and his stable of giant monster friends, I was marveling to kung fu insanity. I imagine it's much the same way that Ric Meyers experienced such things and led him to write his love letter to kung fu entitled "Films of Fury". As a companion piece to his book, Lux Digital have delivered this 80 minutes of chop socky history and, while it's not the most exhaustive documentary out there, it offers up a good history of the sub-genre for lesser fans and gives us plentiful ass-kicking clips to enjoy.

Seeing as I was more of a "horror kid" growing up, kung fu movies always sat in my peripheral vision. Sure, I'd enjoy watching them on weekends and I couldn't deny the outright coolness of Bruce Lee in stuff like Enter the Dragon, but my viewing of them was limited at best. As I grew up, I began to appreciate them more having a brief obsession with Jackie Chan efforts (for the record I still think Police Story is his best one), digging kung fu influenced fare like Blind Fury, and enjoying more modern day efforts like Iron Monkey and Kung Fu Hustle, but I still never dove back into the 70s when releases from the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest took fighting to all new levels.

This is exactly why I found Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Movie to be perfect for me. Even the animated set up is geared towards casual fans as our narrator (portrayed as a video store clerk) walks a customer through the history of kung fu taking time to mention some of the bigger names, focus on the influence they had on North American films, and touching on the genre's tonal shifts over time. It covers, in brief vignettes, the genre from its early days right up to the recent Hollywood hit Kung Fu Panda with stops along the way to focus on the gunfight ballet of John Woo films and even give Steven Seagal a quick segment. A good chunk of the running time is dedicated to a whole lot of clips and there's nary an interview in sight but I found the narration to be fairly compelling and got more than enough information to interest me in a lot of the flicks they show here - Hell, it's even made me want to finally throw the Mr. Vampire DVD I bought all those years ago into my player, though I was disappointed there was no mention of the insanity that is Crippled Masters.

Maybe the hardcore fan will walk away from this disappointed and I would've liked to have had at least a couple of interviews with some of the notable kung fu figureheads (even author Meyers doesn't make an appearance), but this was still an entertaining and agreeable time and gave me a pretty big list of flicks to seek out. As part of the resurgence of film-centric documentaries out there it doesn't quite reach the level of Mark Hartley's contributions (Machete Maidens Unleashed!, Not Quite Hollywood) or the fun of Corman's World, but it's pretty equal to Lux Digital's past releases American Grindhouse and Nightmares in Red, White and Blue. (Chris Hartley, 1/21/13)

Directed By: Andrew Corvey, Andrew W. Robinson.
Written By: Ric Meyers.