Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (2002) [The Chosen Edition] + Contract Killer (1998) – DVDs

KUNG POW: ENTER THE FIST
**½ Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Steve Oedekerk
written and directed by Steve Oedekerk

CONTRACT KILLER
*/**** Image B Sound B
starring Jet Li, Eric Tsang, Simon Yam, Gigi Leung
screenplay by Chan Heng Ka, Vincent Kok, Cheng Kam Fa
directed by Tung Wai

by Bill Chambers In addition to putting the fear of God in us about CGI, Kung Pow: Enter the Fist (henceforth Kung Pow) makes us wish the technology it employed to seamlessly superimpose writer-director-star Steve Oedekerk into the 1977 kung fu movie Tiger and Crane Fists had been around circa Bruce Lee’s demise. Back then, the producers of Game of Death struggled to complete a half-finished star vehicle minus one star using cardboard cut-outs and a variety of unconvincing doubles. (Lee’s character, the hero, spends most of the picture with his back to the camera.) Oedekerk, playing the archetypal grown-up orphan seeking vengeance against “Master Pain” for his parents’ murder, spends most of Kung Pow looking into the lens with his tongue sticking out, the tongue itself adorned with a face that has its own tongue. Technological advances have always been either too dawdling or too hasty in serving the cinema, alas.

Meanwhile, a convoluted, unenthralling HK actioner that tells me I’ve seen too much spillover from the Asian territories, Contract Killer, finds itself further spoiled on DVD in North America by a vexing hip-hop soundtrack and a non-optional English dub so bad as to disorient the viewer for the film’s entire 98-minute running time. In fact, I can’t name a poorer example of the practice off the top of my head: The voices sound displaced, as though they were recorded in a room with wall-to-wall carpeting, and there’s an uncanny rhythm to the dialogue–words are stretched out or quashed together to fit lip movements and nothing else. There is a hilarious joke told in Kung Pow whose sole purpose is to fall perfectly in sync with the original Chinese dialogue: “What do you get when you cross an owl with a bungee cord? My ass.” Contract Killer has a dozen like moments. The difference is that you, the consumer, won’t be laughing, neither at it nor with it.

Ultimately, both releases border on hostile in their irreverence, yet I was won over by the courage of Kung Pow‘s convictions and dada sense of humour. I’m not convinced that Oedekerk, auteur of the simultaneously underrated and abominable Ace Venture: When Nature Calls, has any real first-hand knowledge of kung fu movies, though in a way that might’ve helped, as there’s a surreal freshness to the manner in which he parodies the Shaw Brothers era, like the climactic French alien invasion, or the way he spins the mentor-from-beyond-the-grave device into a Lion King gag. Impressively, its comedy doesn’t hinge on racism. Oedekerk’s “The Chosen One”‘s weapon of choice is, inexplicably, a pair of gophers fashioned into nunchucks. Characters will die and he’ll rewind the film to bring them back to life, Michael Haneke-style. A kind of less stoic-looking Kevin Nealon, Oedekerk’s the guy who’d pfft his armpits in class again and again until somebody snickered; his shtick is less clever than shameless (and less shameless than relentless), but it works in this context, and I’d be lying if I said my ribcage didn’t ache by the end of Kung Pow. On a recent flight back from Las Vegas, I was quoting parts of it to a friend and the two of us laughed like hyenas. Maybe it was the altitude.

There was no surrendering to the bit for me during Contract Killer, which merely taxes one’s patience. The film has a single inventive sequence: To establish how destitute the hitman essayed by Jet Li is, one of the chase scenes is between Li and a nickel. As I recall, it’s also one of the few examples of Jet springing into, well, Jet mode. Why do filmmakers keep handing this walking bolt of lightning a gun? Jet’s vaguely childlike assassin seems a tired nod to Leon/The Professional (the homage of choice, it appears, for current HK filmmakers (see also: Fulltime Killer)), and for what resolves itself as a Yakuza movie, Contract Killer–released in its native country as Hitman–succeeds only in giving you a hankering for some Beat Takeshi.

THE DVDs
Kung Pow arrives on DVD in a “Chosen Edition” from Fox. Oedekerk has crammed quite a few extras onto the disc, including a behind-the-scenes featurette that’s sort of an extended version of the film’s closing-credits outtakes compilation; three before-and-after visual effects montages (two involving Kung Pow‘s signature fighting cow); two alternate audio tracks (“What Were They Really Saying?” (self-explanatory) and a “Kung Pow! The Long-Lost Book on Tape Version” that reminds–perhaps on purpose–of those terrible commentaries regurgitating the on-screen happenings); a whopping fourteen deleted scenes (highlights: an omitted musical number and a prologue crawl unfortunately ruined by typos); the similarly self-explanatory Tonguey Tribute; six scenes with alternate dubbing; three Kung Pow bumpers that aired between sitcoms on Fox last winter; trailers for Kung Pow and Super Troopers; a five-part photo gallery (where you’ll find the press notes and bios); and a couple of animated snippets that feel like Easter eggs despite explicit indexing. Phew.

As we can see from footage of the original, unpolished negative, Revival Digital did a splendid job restoring Tiger and Crane Fists. So much so they should’ve done right by its filmmakers and released an accompanying, untampered-with version. Regardless, the Singapore-based outfit preserved the washed-out, aged character of the images in our memory of the period while removing most of the physical dirt and mildew, meaning that Kung Pow‘s 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is not going to wow anybody, although it should. Oedekerk and producer/editor Paul Marshal detail the painstaking process of realizing Kung Pow in their never-dull commentary, during which the former reveals that the script was written while he recut Tiger and Crane Fists on an AVID. A kooky Dolby Digital 5.1 mix–whose opening titles soar around the room–caps off the presentation.

Columbia TriStar’s Contract Killer DVD features a scratchy but clear 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer with juiced-up English Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. More thought and effort looks to have gone into the shiny cover art than the content of the disc proper, which sets no qualitative precedents. Director and cast bios, trailers for Contract Killer, The One, Meltdown, and Legend of the Red Dragon, and a brief, circuitous photo gallery round out the DVD.

• Kung-Pow: Enter the Fist
  81 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, French Dolby Surround; CC; English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Fox
• Contract Killer
  98 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround, Spanish DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Columbia TriStar