IRON FISTS AND KUNG FU KICKS / CERT: E / DIRECTOR: SERGE OU / SCREENPLAY: GRADY HENDRIX / STARRING: SCOTT ADKINS, JESSICA HENWICK, JUJU CHAN / RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW
The producer of the hugely enjoyable Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films brings us this great documentary about the Kung fu genre; cultivated within Hong Kong cinema, and how it slowly infected popular culture and influences Hollywood to this day. There have been many documentaries about Hong Kong cinema and the key players from Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan, so it can be hard to say something new, luckily Iron Fists, includes a lot of information about lesser known Kung fu sub-subgenres, complete with great footage and enough interesting talking heads to provide anecdotes.
We start at the spiritual beginning, with Shaw Brothers studios, discussing how they were the powerhouse of the ‘60s and ‘70s with Run Run Shaw knowing what the public craved – historical epics and much blood and guts, apparently. The talking heads are mainly film critics, but they manage to secure Wilson Yip (director of the Ip Man series) and Cheng Pei Pei (female Kung fu royalty). We get an inevitable Bruce Lee section, but more interestingly, the phenomenon of ‘Bruceploitation’, a ridiculous period of time after Bruce’s death, where studios made a series of films with Bruce lookalikes, trying to cash on the star. There’s even an interview with a director who mercilessly spliced together footage of an early black and white Bruce, with a colour Samurai film, which was meant to be his ancient ancestors; you couldn’t make it up. We also get a nice examination of the popularity of Kung fu in black culture and how breakdancing was inspired by Kung Fu moves, culminating in films such as Black Samurai (1976) starring Jim Kelly. We then get the likes of Cynthia Rothrock, Richard Norton and Billy Blanks talking about their experiences and differences between making a film in Hollywood and Hong Kong, much more bruises in the latter basically. Finally we come full circle with The Matrix (1999) the first Hollywood production to employ Hong Kong choreographers.
The documentary does skip over Jackie Chan and Jet Li’s contribution, with only a passing mention and some footage from their movies, which is a sacrilege for some, but to be fair their stories are well known and it’s clear from the Cannon film documentary that Veronica Fury enjoys the weird and wonderful. It would have been beneficial to have more talking heads from Chinese filmmakers, Yuen Woo Ping and Donnie Yen would have been great, yet the only real missed opportunity is Sammo Hung, they do interview him but he only says a handful of things, a true legend of the genre, surely had more to contribute.
We end with a fun reminder of the reach of Kung fu, with an introduction to the Ugandan action film industry and how an American enthusiast got involved after viewing a film on YouTube. The message is that Kung fu is now truly universal, from Oscar glory with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) to developing countries creating their own films. After watching, if you’re not compelled to throw on a classic, then you’re not the target audience.
