KUNG FU KORNER: 2 Champions of Shaolin (1978)

Wu Tang Clan ain't nothing to eff with...

2 Champions of Shaolin is a hyperreal, over-the-top, ultra-goofball Kung-Fu-flick-to-end-all-Kung-Fu-flicks that raised the bar on jaw-droppingly incredible non-stop action. It took a lot out of me. I can't stop sweating. I might need to take a break from Kung Fu flicks for awhile, as this one really punched a hole straight through my brain. Clearly, having cranked his turbo-charged, runaway imagination to eleven, director Chang Cheh has deftly captured on film a veritable Kung Fu orgy, of epic proportions. The jigsaw puzzle-like story may take a few weird left turns and the characters are cartoonshly one-dimensional but my god, the fights in this one are at holy-s**t levels of un-believable. 2 Champions treats you to an unusually high concentration of totally fantastic, awesomely acrobatic, blindingly high-speed, air-tight Kung Fu choreography that is so, so much fun to watch. I honestly can't think of another Kung Fu film I've seen that's as consistently good as this one - not a single fight scene failed to wow me, each one easily topping the last.

The narrative of 2 Champions of Shaolin, on the other hand, had me scratching grooves into my scalp. Several times while watching this film I found myself flipping back to previous scenes in order to try and wrap my brain around what was happening. In the 'classic' Kung Fu flick tradition, the wafer-thin story is designed to yield as many action scenes as possible and as a result it is... weirdly plotted. The whole thing's got this unnatural, herky-jerky rhythm. Here's the set-up: The Shaolin school is full of Ming loyalists while the Wu Tang school choose to support the new Qing Dynasty. Some Shaolin strong guy named Tong teams up with Hu, a Shaolin fancy boxer. The Wu Tang killed their families, revenge, blah. Something about flying boomerang daggers. Then, a Wu Tang double agent named Wei comes to warn Hu about Master Gao and the Yuen brothers, who practice monkey style boxing - and right there's about when the whole thing falls apart. In the VERY NEXT scene, Tong and Hu are befriended by some mysterious scholar coincidentally named, uh, Master Gao who also happens to have monkey-like servants. Inexplicably, these fools immediately trust him, busting down that fourth wall in the worst way and slamming the brakes on a story that was seemingly going somewhere... comprehensible, at least. It makes absolutely no sense, unless of course the implication is that Tong and Hu are complete idiots with poor short-term memory functions.

As if to further punctuate this sudden glitch in story-logic, each subsequent scene takes you further along a parabolic curve of confusion, making the movie exponentially weirder and weirder. What's actually impressive though is how the momentum of the story's meteoric rise in goofiness runs directly parallel to the gleeful, mounting crescendo of bloody, bloody violence. 2 Champions, a gore festival like no other, culminates in a spectacular final showdown with everybody fighting everybody - blood pouring out of their mouths and swords sticking out of their guts. The camera frantically cuts and zooms as 20 - 30 highly-skilled Kung Fu superstars simultaneously kick, punch and back-flip over each other at inhuman speeds, using their weapons in increasingly ingenious ways. It's an all-out blood bath with zero breathing room, all building up to the single most shockingly violent oh-no-they-didn't finishing move I've ever SEEN. I literally recoiled in horror on the couch, laughing hysterically at having just witnessed something so viscerally mind-melting. And then, like a huge sigh of relief, the final shot of the film: bodies littering the ground. Everybody dies. It's absolutely glorious, and I won't soon forget it.

Check out what music video director Joseph Kahn did with 2 Champions of Shaolin for this Chemical Brothers video: