Steve Oedekerk‘s 2002 dubbed comedy Kung Pow: Enter the Fist is one of those comedies I’ll always have to regret liking when I was around nine-or-ten years old. It’s a sophomoric, slappy-happy rip-off of Woody Allen‘s What’s Up, Tiger Lily written with all the sophistication and charm of two middle-school boys riffing on a copy of an old 1970s martial arts feature. It probably had to do with my love of kung fu — something I still adore today — and being of the right age. This is all to say, it’s one of those black marks in my film-loving life from which I constantly atone for.
It didn’t make a dent in the box office, but I suppose it had a modern following on home video who clamored up its irreverence in a pre-YouTube era as I did then. Does that warrant the need to have a sequel nearly 13 years later? In a business where anything that was a film before can earn a sequel or a remake if it came out some years ago, apparently so. At the Dragonfest convention in Burbank, California, the 53-year-old director/star/writer/producer officially announced Kung Pow II: Tongue of Fury, first promised as a teaser at the end of the original film, would come to pass.
Details on the matter are scarce otherwise — including whether or not it’ll actually keep that title — but it would seem Oedekerk is confident enough, and has some backing of some sort, to make the announcement. Either that, or he is talking out of his ass — which is entirely a possibility, considering he’s the writer behind Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. What it’ll be about, who will fund it, what he thinks he can add to the series after all this time — all these are questions left unanswered at the moment.
The original film liberally took a lot of its footage from the 1977 film Tiger and Crane Fist, had the director digitally place himself into the feature and found him re-dubbing most of the lines to play with some of the cheesier aspects of the low-budget production. Also, to play out his bathroom humor-heavy sense of humor. Even today — as I rewatched a handful of clips just so I could remember a movie I’ve actually seen more than a couple times in my life — I can say there are still a few moments giving me a guilty laugh (“That’s a lot of nuts!”), but for the most part it’s a somewhat novel five-minute skit extraneously sketched out into an 81-minute feature. It couldn’t even subsidize an hour-and-a-half running time, so I’m not quite sure how it plays to make a whole other film based on its flimsy premise.
Likewise, I’m not quite sure who’ll really ask for this. Even when Crackle makes something like Joe Dirt 2: Beautiful Loser and placed it unceremoniously on its free website, they knew they had the C-rate star power of David Spade to keep it mildly afloat. Although Oedekerk penned some ’90s/’00s hits, including The Nutty Professor and Jim Carrey vehicles like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Bruce Almighty — not to mention Evan Almighty as well, and also kid films like Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius — he’s not by any stretch of the imagination a household name. The generation who would like this probably don’t even have a clue Kung Pow exists, and the people like me who did watch it (and liked it then) are too old to give this more than a generous visit for old times sake. This is like Cats & Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore all over again.
Again, it’s (very likely) possible Kung Pow II becomes little more than a gleam in Oedekerk’s eye. Even though he’s had over a decade to come up with material, I doubt there’s any chance this will live up to anything people who still like the original film would hope for, and then this will flutter from the public’s attention unless it didn’t make it there at all. But I’ll say this: Oedekerk, if you do make your sequel, I’ll appease the mildly toothless, bright-eyed kid in me and give it go. Much like listing to an old mixtape, though, I’ll probably just end up feeling like I got kicked in the stomach. [World Film Geek/Consequence of Sound]
