The 5 Most Ridiculous Martial Arts Movies Ever
We don't expect much from our martial arts movies. A shallow plot (you killed my father/master/mother/wife/dog/cat, so now I'm going to kill you/your father/master/mother/wife/dog/cat) is acceptable so long as there are some serious ass kickings along the way.
You'd think it'd be a hard formula to screw up. You'd be so wrong.
#5.
The Dragon Lives Again
The movies following Bruce Lee's death filled a void for fans robbed too soon of their hero, even if they were uniformly awful. So maybe some of them can be forgiven for the incredibly classy move of cashing in on his death by trotting out imitators such as Bruce Li, Bruce Le and Dragon Lee. But not all of them; not The Dragon Lives Again. Here's the first reason why: This movie isn't about an actor playing a "Bruce Lee" like role. This movie is about Bruce Lee--the actual guy, not a character he played--dying and going to hell.
It begins with his corpse (played by Bruce Leung) getting a boner.
Sure, it turns out that it's really just his nunchucks (happens to us all the time) and the intention is to make us laugh, but when you consider that the actual Bruce Lee only died a few years prior to The Dragon Lives Again, you've got to wonder if the most respectful way to honor his legacy is casket-boner jokes. Actually, you don't have to wonder about that at all.
It quickly gets much, much worse. After showing up in Hell he goes to a bar and meets Popeye (you heard us), Clint Eastwood, James Bond and Kwai Chang Caine (David Carradine from Kung Fu--so now there's twice the sacrilege!).
It's an all-star cast! Of blasphemy!
In the next scene, Bruce utters an apology to his wife Linda (Bruce Lee's real wife) for "play[ing] around just too much." A female character next to him excuses his behavior, saying "When a man's endowed like Bruce, the girls are bound to want him. He's got to have his fun, eh Bruce-e?"
Yup, that's an adultery joke at the expense of the recently deceased. We'd say that's a dick move, but maybe Linda Lee got some much needed closure from that onscreen apology for her dead husband's never confirmed, rumored adultery, from a guy who sort of looks like Bruce in a movie made by people exploiting his name for money. We think that's the fourth step in grieving, right?
Step five is naked tea parties.
The rest of this atrocity focuses on Bruce's time in the underworld, in which he outlaws gambling for some reason, and starts training everybody in the martial arts... including Popeye. Then he almost gets a blowjob from Emmanuelle, a softcore porn character from the 70s (sorry, Linda, looks like his previous apology wasn't even sincere!) For his last trick, Bruce beats up Dracula, James Bond, Clint Eastwood, the Exorcist and the Godfather. One threat to the King of the Underworld later and Bruce Lee's sent back to Earth. The Dragon lives again. Get it? The end.
Somehow Chinese Popeye makes the most sense in all of this.
#4.
The Story of Ricky
Based on a manga (which, for those of you who don't know, is basically a comic book after it's been raped by severed limbs), The Story of Ricky follows Ricky Ho (also spelled Ricki Oh in some versions) as he's sent to prison for killing the man who drove his girlfriend to tragically commit suicide. The rest of the movie follows Ricky struggling against the corrupt wardens and gangs running the prison. Well, hell, it's just like The Shawshank Redemption! Nothing baffling about that.
Well, then stuff like this happens:
That's a dude getting his skull clapped off. The movie is a mind-boggling gorefest; the whole setup is really just a thin excuse for an endless array of gruesome horrors. Ordinary prisoners face ridiculous punishments for the smallest of infractions, such as a wood planer up the face and a cane in the eye.
What keeps this from straying into Saw territory is the fact that either the souls of the victims are being transferred to mannequins at the last moment due to some ancient curse, or they're just really bad at editing around their prop dummies. For instance, we see this guy falling face-first into a board of sharp nails...
Holy shit! This is going to be horrible!
Ah, never mind. It's a CPR dummy.
Meanwhile, the main character Ricky is more or less immune to pain, superhumanly strong and, for all intents and purposes, immortal. Using his super powers Ricky attempts to protect the innocent prisoners (what?) from the gangs, and there are feel-good moments when he goes out of his way to comfort them. You get the sense that if he could, he'd free them all. If he only had super strength, the kind you could use to break "through" things...
OK, steel doors and bars are one thing, but surely the prison walls are nigh impreg-
And it's not like he didn't know he could break through stone either. There's a whole training sequence flashback where he's smashing through dozens of tombstones with his uncle, in happier days. But the alternative script for a logical Story of Ricky was two pages long, one of which consisted of the words "Ricky goes to prison, then decides to leave." The other was just a graphically detailed crayon drawing of a smashed brain.
#3.
Chocolate
Ever wonder what the Rain Man would've been like if, instead of math, he'd been a ball-punching savant? And he had to fight an evil Rain Man at the end? Wonder no more!
Chocolate is the heartwarming tale of a mentally handicapped girl trying to save her ailing mother by extorting businessmen out of their hard-earned money via kicks to the neck.
No, really
It's all going great until the Thai mob enters the picture. They send out Yakuza assassins, and the mentally handicapped protagonist, Zen, has to fight an endless wave of mob goons using only the power of Weaponized Autism. Just when it seems as if nothing is going to stop her, the bad guys decide to fight fire with fire...
Meet Thomas, an evil mentally challenged kung fu master. What, exactly, his disability happens to be isn't clear, but it doesn't really matter: Having any kind of special need in this film translates into martial arts mastery. He's literally the only character that gives Zen a run for her money, but it's OK because his Epilepsy Style is no match for her Social Withdrawal Style.
In that clip, Zen beats Thomas by using her autistic disability to imitate his disability, which is basically just twitching in a way beneficial to fighting. You know what they say: The only way to beat a cripple is to become a cripple. Oh wait, nobody says that, because that's fucking horrible, Chocolate.
There is literally no joke we can make about this scene that won't instantly damn us to hell.
So why is the movie called Chocolate? Because the main character likes chocolate. Oh, and probably because they didn't want a title that accurately reflected the fact that their film is about people with mental disabilities beating each other to a pulp. Any theater displaying that on the marquee is probably getting burned to the ground.
I was really looking forward to Zen serving out cans of won-ton whomp ass on apparently every stunt actor in Hong Kong, until the director decided that a heart-warming story about a single mom dying of cancer was exactly what Chocolate needed, right before her abusive ex cuts off her toe and keeps it in a box (and he even had a gang of evil drag queens as his minions so the possibility of camp humor could have been huge). As for the disabled of Asia being awesome killing machines, it all goes back to Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, with his magically tuned ears that allow him to hear his foes shitting themselves when they realize that being part of a gang of 20 or 30 thugs trying and failing to kill one blind dude has probably just earned them about a billion and one years of bad karma. (Best Scene Ever: some yakuza boss is having dinner, making fun of Zatoichi since all crime bosses in ancient Japan are short-lived and apparently dicks. Zatoichi is picking his nose during all of this and when the boss bends down to pick up some sushi Zatoichi flicks a mammoth booger onto the sushi roll, which the boss then eats. Try that, Tom Cruise, last samurai my ass!)
ReplyThere's a flim called Raging Phoenix that has the girl from Chocolate. She gets roofied and so her mates use her unconscious body to fight off her attackers in a glorious union between Weekend at Bernies and the breakdance fighting scene in Zoolander. And that's the part that makes sense. The rest of it involves vampires, demons and some kind of messed up underground lair.
ReplyActually, as someone who is autistic himself (I hae Asperger Syndrome...), and who's primary "intellectual focus" is understanding how people think and act (I study a lot of psychology, philosophy, sociology, etc.)... I actually can understand what Zen may have been doing in the fight scene. From what I saw, it looks like she was focusing on Thomas's body movements and imitating them in order to gain insight into his style, his "tells", and how his body moves in order to more effectively counter him. (My own insights tend to be in being able to read people intuitively and understand motivations, social dynamics of groups, emotions and motivations people are hiding... often from themselves even... and other such things people often miss or don't knwo that they're showing. Which can cause many problems for me because as honest as I am in my interactions, and that I often react to what I see, it can cause many difficult situations.)
ReplyThis would be much like any other fighter who studies a prospective opponent pre-match, and who imitates that opponent's stronger moves in order to plan counter moves or even to just know when they're coming in order to avoid them. Zen just... well, enters a Zen-like state (no pun intended, but it's true)... and processes the information much faster and in the moment.
So, it's not "The only way to beat a cripple is to become a cripple." It's more "The best way to beat your opponent is to understand your opponenent."
Besides... speaking from experience this is actually a way many people with autism can process information within their areas of mental focus. Intense bursts of focus and insight, sometimes acting in an atypical manner in order to understand something but in ways people might not understand. For me, it can be when I am trying to understand a rule, procedure, or guideline for a class, job, or even some social activities and want to fully understand exactly why someting is done a certain way or exactly how the rules are laid out... I will ask a lot of questions. SOme sound similar, but have little nuances which look at different situations. Some understand that I'm just turnign the situation over and over trying to look at it from every angle, while others misinterpret it as me trying to win an argument I'm not even having.
I've seen #2 and it isn't as bad as depicted here. Sammo Hung doesn't do much fighting and he is not good at it, Chan has to get him out of these situations. And the story is mainly tragic with some odd humour thrown in, then again, just think about the humour of this very site you are reading. I bet the humour of Cracked would also be considered "odd" by most of the world, including my nerdy roommate that should be the right demographic theoretically.
ReplyActually I thought the choreography in Chocolate looked kind of awesome. Minus the twitching part of course. But the capoeira kicks were cool...
ReplyI donno any of the movies you have listed... lol'd
ReplyHoly s**t, the Chinese made the original Banjo-Kazooie?
ReplyI only skimmed this one, realizing the list would include mostly movies I need to watch right fricken now. (honorable mentions might go to movies like 'little mad guy')
ReplyI did enjoy chocolate. Lol @ story of ricky - I used to use the gif of him punching that guys face on my webpages. Hilarious.
ReplyI am a SB fan for life. They, in my opinion, have made the best Kung Fu movies. They have some over the top silly ones, but the rest are great.
Over the top is GREAT anyway.
Or, I should say, the movie isn't taking itself all that seriously anyway so why should we? It's dumb fun.
you've forgotten about Crippled Avengers in which a blind guy,a deaf guy, a guy without legs and a mentally handicapped guy learn martial arts for some reason or the other(i fell asleep)
Reply"Do roving gangs of mentally disabled just terrorize the streets in Hong Kong?"
ReplyThey will in the screenplay I was just inspired to write. Thanks, Cracked!
Ok, the story may be horrible in many ways (but she was trying to collect old debts, not extort anyone), Chocolate is utterly bad-ass. It's the same team as Ong-Bak. If you don't know what that means, just imagine Jackie Chan is a 14 year old girl. Well, she was in her 20s, but still... no kneepads, no stunt doubles, no hesitation to throw a wooden pallet at your star's head as she slides underneath a glass coffee table, or to have an epic brawl on a 3-story set...
ReplyI talked myself into it. Off to Netflix.
Yeah, Chocolate is f*****g awesome. And the premise kind of makes sense, if you think about it. She's not some drooling retard, she has a mental disorder which causes people to give excessive amounts of focus and attention to particular aspects of her life. For my autastic cousin, it's trains. For the girl in Chocolate, it's martial arts.
As soon as I read the title of the article I immediately thought of The Crippled Masters, was getting nervous reading through but huge sigh of relief it's at number one.
Reply#1: I just threw up.
Reply'There's a whole training sequence flashback where he's smashing through dozens of tombstones with his uncle, in happier days.'
ReplyWait, what?
Chocolate might have a weak storyline. But the kung fu is pretty f*****g legit.
ReplyHey. Chocolate was awesome. Even the clip in the article was good.
Reply"Any theater displaying that on the marquee is probably getting burned to the ground."
ReplyExcellent.
"The only way to beat a cripple is to become a cripple." are you positive that no one says this?
ReplyThis got greenlighted at FARK, and ... um... I thought it sounded like an article I saw before and !! I was right. Welcome Farkers... the old Cracked stuff is better than the new stuff anywhere else.
Reply