Kung Fury/Commando Ninja

And The Scourge Of Fast Money

I first saw clips of “Kung Fury” on, of all places, TMZ. It stuck with me – the phony shot-on-video look combined with excessive greenscreen, stretched to feature-length? Most certainly it affected me much more than it did my cohorts, who saw kitsch and moved on. My memory remained locked for years, however – yes I wanted to hear David Hasselhoff sing as a cop rode a dinosaur to kung fu-fight Adolf Hitler. Who wouldn’t?

There’s a backstory as to how this not-even-feature-length gag (which you can watch on YouTube in its entirety) saw the light of day, but I tend to accept the mystery. The flimsy storyline for this film has an 80’s cop named Kung Fury partnering with Triceracop, a dinosaur with naive views of law enforcement. Kung Fury is already burnt out, despite having accomplished endless physical feats, but he is still nursing wounds from the loss of a previous partner. So he doesn’t take it easily when Hitler basically pulls a “Shocker” and uses a phone connection to slaughter a number of cops. So begins a time-travel odyssey that takes Officer Fury to the beginning of time.

This is cheeseball garbage, down to the obnoxious synth score. It’s either your jam or it isn’t – this won’t convert anyone unfamiliar with this cheap low-fi aesthetic. It’s either dumb about being smart, or the opposite – they’re mocking the omnipotence of nerds in front of a keyboard in action movies with a character named Hackerman, but then Hackerman does pretty much exactly what you’d expect to move the plot forward. David Hasselhoff, meanwhile, sings the unbearably catchy “True Survivor”. All gags about Hasselhoff the meme aside, this is a jam.

We were supposed to get “Kung Fury 2” by now, which was slated to costar none other than Michael Fassbender and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and I just want to let this sentence sink in a little. Anyway, COVID and some shady financiers put the unfinished movie to bed forever. But we do have “Commando Ninja”. Like “Kung Fury”, it was funded through Kickstarter and debuted on YouTube, capitalizing on the vibes and attitudes of 80’s genre movies. Unlike its predecessor, however, “Commando Ninja” was not a wacky greenscreen affair, but instead a not-at-all-sincere recreation of shot-on-video martial arts films, fueled by the kind of omnivorous cultural references that powered “Kung Fury”. Yes, there is also a synthwave score.

“Commando Ninja” stretches over the one-hour mark, so its tale of ninja soldier revenge does get a little tedious. The plotline involves drug deals and serial killing ninjas, but it merely apes the conventions of 80’s action movies crisply, pausing for a considerable amount of practical blood. Action nerds will note that a large chunk of the violence takes place in Val Verde, a remote South American country found in “Die Hard 2”, “Predator” and “Commando” but not actual real life (…yet?).

I would think the prospect that all of this stuff is crowd-funded means that you are required to end with a bang, giving people motivation to contribute to future endeavors. “Commando Ninja” builds towards a violent time-travel climax and a nonsensical cliffhanger that would place a sequel in a completely new genre. Allegedly a sequel is still being promised. There is a prequel online somewhere, but I might just be fully satisfied by now.

Someone getting out of prison would probably see movies like this and it would reignite desire within them to make a film, reasoning that anyone could make “Kung Fury”, particularly given the excessive greenscreen. I spoke to many men who wanted to leave prison and engage in all these broad entrepreneurial plans. It is not a knock on them that these plans are often quickly discarded. Because of one of the biggest problems with criminal thinking in modern day: Fast Money.

Much of the criminal activity that sends you to low security federal prisons involves chasing Fast Money. Why sign up for direct deposit? Why work two weeks for a check? Get the money in hand quickly. It makes sense. Prison does nothing to assuage people of these desires, so when they get out, they have two reasons for Fast Money – one, because they’ve been without it for so long, and two, because they probably have a family to support immediately. The problem is, they’ve been incarcerated in a place that doesn’t much care that their sole purpose is to ensure you’re sedentary and docile for several years.

There is a sense that they are getting out of prison with a need to immediately make money. But no one wants to acknowledge that money led them there, led to statutes being employed to keep them there. The government, in other words, wants to make the issue about money as long as it benefits them. But money is what poisons the thought of people needing help, and it causes the kind of compromise that results in illegal activity. Money is the narcotic fueling repeated criminal behavior. And it’s that sort of recidivism that is ensuring money keeps fueling the prison industrial complex. None of this is an accident.