“Kung Fury” Promotional Poster
David Sandberg – star, writer and director of the viral short, Kung Fury – is bringing his titular character to the big screen. For the feature film version, he’s recruiting Michael Fassbender (Alien: Covenant) and Arnold Schwarzenegger (Aftermath) to star, along with David Hasselhoff, who’ll be back as “Hoff 9000”.
According to Variety, the feature film will be set in 1985 in Miami, which is kept safe under the watchful eye of the police officer Kung Fury through his Thundercops police force. After the tragic death of a Thundercop causes the group to disband, a mysterious villain emerges from the shadows to aid in the Fuhrer’s quest to attain the ultimate weapon.
The 2010 original short is an over-the-top action comedy that featured arcade-robots, dinosaurs, nazis, vikings, norse gods, mutants and a super kung fu-cop called Kung Fury (Sandberg), all wrapped up in an 80s style action packed adventure.
We’ll keep you updated on the film’s progress as we learn more. If you haven’t seen the short, here you go…
Enjoyed the original, not quite sure if it will work at feature length, but I’m definitely intrigued.
Call me a fuddy-duddy old Grandpa, call me a stuck-in-the-mud moron, but this trend of pure parody and meaninglessness thats increasingly brought to the action-film, means that the product is empty and of little value. Thats not to say special effects and over-the-top staging cant be done incredibly well – look at Kung Fu Hustle – but it seams that the kids are so numb these days you have to shoot someone in the face at close range to make them feel anything.
I’d agree with this. For me the whole concept of ‘Kung Fury’ recalls the points Martin Scorsese raised about what is “audio-visual entertainment”, and what is “cinema”? This is a good case to argue that yes, they are 2 different things. ‘Kung Fury’ is a fun piece of audio visual entertainment, would I call it cinema? No.
Same boat here. It never made any sense to do an “1980s action homage” when you’re doing the complete opposite of what 1980s movie did (no visual FX). Same thing goes for the recent Samurai Cop sequel… they totally missed the mark when trying to replicate the original (it’s something that has to happen accidentally – and it has to age like fine wine to get to that sweet spot of so-bad, so-good vintage cinema), as explained here: http://cityonfire.com/samurai-cop-2-deadly-vengeance-2015-review/ That said, the director of Kung Fury definitely has talent, vision and the potential to create something meaningful and entertaining, but this is not a movie – it’s an over-the-top fan vid.