This week, The B-Movie Boys enter a completely different dimension of cinema with Kung Pow! Enter the Fist, a movie that isn’t just bad on purpose… it’s surgically, lovingly, absurdly bad on purpose.

Steve Oedekerk takes a 1970s kung fu movie, splices himself into it like a cinematic parasite, and somehow creates one of the most joke-dense, commitment-heavy fever dreams ever put to screen.

We break down:

1. The insane technical gymnastics behind digitally inserting a new movie into an old one
2. Whether intentional incompetence still counts as incompetence
3. Why this might be one of the most committed comedy experiments ever made
4. And how a $10 million budget can be used to simulate a low-budget experience

Also discussed: cow fights, limited time fast food offers, and a shocking amount of respect for a movie that absolutely should not work but somehow... does.

Mentioned in this episode:

1. Tiger and Crane Fists (1976)
2. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (2007)
3. Titanic (1997)
4. Jimmy Wang Yu
5. Jackie Chan
6. Bruce Lee
7. Kevin Nealon
8. Catherine O'Hara
9. Fred Willard
10. Taco Bell
11. McRib
12. Timex

Our Links:

1. BMovieBoys.com
2. Official Discord
3. Patreon
4. Facebook
5. Instagram

Incoming transmission. Incoming transmission. Let's boogie.

Welcome to the B Movie Boys, where bad movies get the love they deserve and the respect that they don't.

I'm Dave Michaels.

And I'm Bryan Betz.

And this week on the program, we are talking about one of my favorite movies from this century. That's a long time, and that's a weird thing.

Also, it hit me that we could start saying this century, and there's, like, an amount of time to measure it by. That's like, significant.

Yeah, that's. Wow. I don't actually like that. I don't. I don't like that at all.

I apologize that you don't like it, but we're a quarter done with this bitch right now. This century. For making this century our bitch.

And for the first 25 years of this century, this film has been towards the top of my list for all the right and wrong reasons. Because again, this week on the program, we are talking about Kung Pao. Enter the Fist, directed by Steve Odokerk.

When I first read his name, I thought he was related to Bob Odenkirk.

Different names, different names. And I still think it every time. And I've seen this movie countless amounts of times at this point. And every time it's like, but is he.

And it's not the same.

He looks like a weird combination of Kevin Nealon and Ben Stiller and, like, pieces of different actors from different eras. And at one point I was like, he looks like Steve Carell.

But it's mostly Kevin Nealon.

But it's a lot of Kevin.

Almost entirely Kevin Nealon.

Face some Dana Carvey in there. I don't know how he's doing it.

He's doing a whole lot. He's. Oh, man. Chef's Kiss. Doing it already. Bryan, have you ever seen Kung Pao before?

No, I have never seen this movie.

And I want to just ask you. It's a personal question. How many years have I been telling you that you should watch this movie because you would love it?

Honestly, I can't. I can't tell you because I don't think I was listening.

We're nearly at a decade, buddy. Oh, wow.

Then probably about that long.

And now that you finally have listened, it wasn't even me. The AI picked it. And I just. Listen, let it happen, because I loved every second of it. Now that you've seen Kung Pao, don't tell me if you like it.

Love it, gotta have it. Just tell me how your life has changed in the past 48 hours. Since you've consumed this.

Well, when I wake up in the morning, the sun's a little brighter, food tastes better. It's easier to laugh.

It's nice to laugh again, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah.

Especially after the last episode where we watched the cross dresser Eat dog's shit that came straight from the dog's butthole. That happened. Pink Flamingos still never forget.

It's cool that I was ready to not talk about that anymore. And here we are.

Here we are. It's probably going to come up every week now because we bonded.

Because how could it not?

We went through something together.

We've been changed.

All of us who were there watching our midnight movie that was at 10pm or whatever, we're going to end up calling that together.

The Artist Formerly Known as a Schlock Hop.

We all went through something and we needed a palate cleanser. Kung Pao into the Fist is the perfect palate cleanser.

Perfect palate cleanser.

Do you think it's a perfect B movie?

See, now that's a good question. And we're going to get into that with our patented schlockometer with its 10 categories that we will rate in our arbitrary way. That we do.

But it's super scientific, actually, so don't listen to that arbitrary thing.

There was like weights and measures and scales and there was a Bunsen burner. We came up with that.

There was a Bunsen burner.

Oh, no, sorry. Crucial. That was us burning with Bunsen.

Oh, right, right, right, right.

Blowing that sweet cotton with me. I don't know. It's gotten into me with this one, man. I have a big case of the nighttime sillies while we're recording this. And it's also Kung Pao.

Yeah, I mean, it feels appropriate to have the nighttime sillies with this movie. So I was saying the schlock ometer the category, the first one is the Audacity.

But before we can decide how audacious the movie is, we need to regale you with a tale of Kung Pao. Enter the Fist.

And our epic tale starts with a baby. But it's not just any baby. This is the chosen one. His whole family's gonna get got by a guy with just these metal pyramids in his chest.

The kid's gonna survive because he's got Ally McBeal dancing Baby Kung fu reflexes. And he's got a talking tongue named Tonguey.

It's an appropriate name.

I feel like you know what you're getting yourself into with this movie when the Baby yeets itself down a hill to escape the bad guy and it rolls for forever. Forever. It, it gets picked up by an old lady who's walking across the road. And the lady picks up the baby and goes, aww, so cute, my boy.

And then rolls it down the hill farther and we get a smash cut to the opening credits. This movie tells you exactly what it's going to be.

Instantly you know what you're in for.

Fast forward enough years that our sweet flippy Chosen One baby is now a grown ass man wandering through the desert looking for payback against the man who killed his entire family.

He rolls into a dojo run by Master Tang, who's this legendary sifu who spends half his time coughing up a lung and the other half being completely senile.

He's your Mr. Miyagi type. If Mr. Miyagi just ate bugs and

coughed a lot, Mr. Miyagi choked on bugs and couldn't do any kind of

kung fu and just would be walking at one point and then in bed being questioned why he's in bed in the literal next cut. Holy fuck, I love this movie.

Oh, he's real good at flashing back though.

He's the best at flashing back and filling in context.

Tang sees the magic tongue and goes, yeah, that thing in your mouth is pretty fucked up, but you're definitely the guy. Welcome to the squad. Which is mostly you since I'm dying and stuff.

And it is mostly him because who we meet now is definitely not helping. Because enter Wimplo. He's a fighter that's so weak that the Ally McBeal dancing baby can give him a beat down. He hates the Chosen One.

He has squeaky shoes. But what he doesn't have is a lady friend with curly cues on her face that's making everyone so hot right now.

Can't even focus.

Can't even focus with those things on her face.

I love that they purposely trained Wimplo wrong as a joke.

I love that how they just all over this character. A child can beat him.

Speaking of lady friends with curly cues on their face that make everyone hot right now. Ling Ling is the daughter of the local master. She's got a big old crush on our hero, the chosen one. But there's a catch.

Every time she talks, she makes this high pitched noises that sound like a jawa experiencing a bidet for the first time.

You gotta figure a jowl would lose their mind at that, right? Mostly because like they got the big old robes, they gotta lift those up, they gotta find a thing to, you know, bidet on.

It's not like a climbing thing where you're like, belay on.

Yeah.

Is that what it is with climbing? I don't know the difference between climbing and cleaning toilets, apparently.

So I stayed in Airbnb recently that had a bidet, like a proper separate from the toilet bidet.

Did you do it?

I didn't do it.

Why not?

Because I didn't want to be ruined right before my cruise.

What do you mean, ruined?

Well, they don't have bidets on cruises.

You're on the ocean, which is just like the world's bidet.

I think they frown upon you dipping your butt off the side of a cruise ship. If it had been like a bidet attachment on a toilet. On the toilet, I would have been okay with it.

But because it was a whole separate unit, I was like, I don't even know which way to face.

It's part of the fun of figuring it out.

Yeah. So I also didn't want to get water all over the bathroom. Then I wanted to clean up somebody else's bathroom. Not into it.

Not into it at all. Barely want to do mine. Totally get it. But also, missed opportunity from you big time.

I regret it.

So our big bad, he's finally going to show up again, and his name is Master Pain. But halfway through his big entrance, he's like, actually, you know what? Call me Betty. He's the guy with, like, the metal spike pyramid things.

He demonstrates powers by letting all his goobers kind of just beat on him with sticks and whatnot. They start him, like, in the groin, and he shows off his really strong testicles. I don't know. Everyone gets really jealous of Betty's balls.

It's wild.

Everybody wants to have balls like Betty. They take a licking and keep on ticking. Oh, that's Timex. Never mind.

Hey, you know, it'll be a fun thing to mention right about now.

What's that?

The movie. How it's kind of made and what it actually is.

The movie is already a movie, isn't it?

It already is a movie, isn't it? Because writer, director, everything, Steve Oudekerk bought the rights for Tigers and Crane Fists, the savage killers.

Yeah.

Who's a big name in kung fu during that whole Bruceploitation era. We're going to talk about that later. I can't wait to talk about that later.

But Jimmy Wang Yu was basically completely, digitally replaced in this movie by Steve Oedekerk.

This movie sounds really, really silly. And it is really, really silly. Super silly. But the craftsmanship that went into making this silly thing is unbelievable.

It's actually incredibly impressive.

It's not so much ahead of its time, because it's not, but it is super advanced. What they're doing here with this digital replacement and this compositing and this fixing of colors and shadings and gradings, everything like that.

It's what Forrest Gump did. Putting Forrest Gump into all of these.

Yeah.

Clips and stuff. And it's what they did in Gladiator after the trainer man died. Proximo. And it's what they did in the Sopranos after the mom died.

It's what Zack Snyder did in army of the Dead when Chris d' Elia was revealed to be, like, a pervert. And they were like, let's put take Notaro in the movie instead.

That's a crazy change. And I'm all bullish.

And they changed none of the dialogue, which is incredible.

Even better. Technically, this movie's unbelievable.

Completely agreed.

You know, it's the thing in.

The only thing you remember from this movie.

But this thing is a B movie for. Oh, God, it's so many reasons in here. And it's another variation of what B movies actually are. And we're gonna get there. We are. We are. We are.

Technical incompetence that's going on for this movie. Should we just talk about that now?

We might as well.

It's not an incompetent movie at all.

No, I would say. I mean, sometimes it's obvious that it's green screen, sometimes it's not. Sometimes they do a really good job of blending it.

There are fun editing gags in this movie that show a very high level of competence.

There's a lot of things they had to do for matching.

Insane.

That's commitment to the bit.

That's absolutely wild.

This is only 50% new movie.

That's so complicated and almost needlessly so.

Is it needless?

No. No, it's not. Because the end product proves that this was needed.

It's very needed. And it's more needed now today than ever.

More than ever. The world needs Kung Pao. Enter the fist.

Can I score technical incompetence now, please get out of the way, because this is not an accomplishment movie at all. I'm going to go like 1.

I like it. 1.

And it's because I want to give it something because it probably shouldn't get a one because it's a very competent movie. But I like it. Damn it.

I agree. Hey, sometimes the green screen compositing isn't perfect. Might be able to go with it, too.

You're 100% right.

They thought of everything.

They really did. I love the dancing man with the boombox. That's like very clearly superimposed, but you're like, that's perfect.

It's so fun. Whenever he starts playing I like big butts, he kicks yours.

Mm. That's the way it is. So about only half this movie being new.

This next part is a new part of the movie because suddenly, and I do mean suddenly, this warrior woman named Whoa drops from the sky. And she only has one paper mache chesticle. One third of a total recall, if you catch my drift. A lady Lance Armstrong, if you will.

She's got a unicycle instead of a bicycle, but instead of wheels, it's boobs. You picking up what I'm putting down?

You're basically saying we got a Tom Green situation.

I'm saying we're probably gonna give half points when we get to the.

The boob part.

Holy trinity.

No, we're all right because.

No, we are all right.

She did a whole flash a coup earlier.

She's really shy at first, and then she flat. It's very funny.

It's very funny. This whole movie is very funny.

Whoa. Warns the chosen one that Betty is way out of his league and he's probably gonna kick his ass.

And then she just kind of flies away, promising to return in the sequel.

And that right there is a fun joke too.

It really is. I love when they break the fourth wall in a sequel. It's a very Mel Brooks style joke.

It is. And we're weirdly gonna get there later. Also for the Mel Brooks, there's a running tally for this one. This is wild.

This is probably the most we'll get there we've ever had.

Do you think we're going to get there? Honestly?

Maybe I'm half of them.

Well, that would be pretty good. Honestly, the amount of times where we wrap up recording and like, the next day, I'll just be like, we never got there.

I had a pretty fun thing for that.

Sometimes as soon as we hit stop on the recording, I'll go, oh, I had this in my notes.

Should have, like an afterthoughts thing where it's just like me in the shower the next morning. It's like, oh, hey, guys, happy Thursday.

It's just Dave here in the shower naked, talking to you about things that I forgot to mention about Kung Pao out of the fat.

You start going through your list of the things you didn't get to, and you're like, but we'll get there. And you forget half of that list. You got to do another second. Like, Bathtub Edition, man.

ADHD is awesome.

We're having fun.

We're having a great time. Our hero is going to ignore the warnings, and he ends up in the field fighting the most expensive thing in this movie. It's Moo Mew the cow.

The thing you remember from this movie the most. Moo knew the chosen one and the cow fight.

And they make sure that they checked the box on the mandatory bullet time spoof that was required of this time period, even though this might have been even a little too late.

Honestly, as is tradition.

Question mark. But our chosen one, he's gonna win. He just milks the cow to death, and the cow's just utterly deflated about it.

There's maybe 1% of her left, 2% at most.

How much more do you want to go with this? You're really skipping the bottom.

Oh, I got a whole bunch of them.

So you know how Catherine o' Hara died?

Yeah, Well, I don't know how, but I. I do know that she did.

So I've been going back and watching a lot of her things. You know, remember laughing, she's the absolute best.

But going back and Watching Best in Show and watching Fred Willard as the announcer of the dog show and that. I get just these random thoughts now in my head of Fred Willard, and it's like my inner monologue of just bullshit things that I just thought.

Like, when you were just doing cow puns, the first thing that popped in my head was Fred Willard saying, now, do you think if the brown cow is going to make chocolate milk, Fred

Willard's one of those guys with a face that you're like, oh, I know him from the thing, and I can never remember his name until somebody says, Fred Willard. And they go, fuck, yeah, Fred Willard.

Or you get it the other way, where you, like, you see him and you hear him and you forget his name, and it's like, I love him,

but yeah, Fred Willard, great. Catherine o', Hara, great.

How now brown cows. Great.

How now brown cows.

Fantastic.

Master Doe, not so great. Ling's father, he tries to step up to Betty and gets absolutely smoked. I mean, he doesn't stand a chance.

And Master Tang tries to save him by massaging his wound from Betty's iron claw things.

He's got an iron claw he spins on a chain. He throws it at people, and it hurts like crap, man.

Yeah. And the area that hurts most is around this big bloody wound that the

man's hand is just rubbing.

Yeah, Master Tang's just kind of like rubbing his chest. Master do dies, and that makes Ling very sad.

Chosimba.

It's just a ghost lion. Karate man up in those clouds, and he's given Chosen One some advice, a pep talk. It's something he's saying words to him.

I don't know why this scene's in the movie. Doesn't really need to be.

I don't know if it's trying to tie something together, if it's planting a seed that's going to come back later just for one little punchline. It is.

It is.

That's exactly what this is for. But God damn it, do I need some Taco Bell right now? For some reason,

some of the best product placement I've ever seen. And, yeah, I also want some Taco Bell.

There is a bit of product placement in this movie that is possibly the best product placement I've ever seen in a movie.

It's making me want a damn enchirito.

It's mostly just because they Put it in song form out of nowhere. Taco Bell. Taco Bell.

Oh, shit. They were really trying to pull one back there then.

Or is this like a Szechuan sauce for the Rick and Morty crowd, kids who didn't understand what the episode was actually talking about? That one.

I don't like whenever food has a life like that. I don't care for that.

Yeah. And also, I don't believe you that this is the last time I'm gonna be able to get a McRib.

It never is. And they keep bringing it back. And for some reason, it's like, you know what it's missing? Onions. You're like, it's never missing onions.

It's never been missing that. It's all onions with a little bit of rib with a lot of. Bit of sauce in a box.

So much sauce. One pickle.

One pickle. Does the pickle need to be there? No.

It's your last chance to get a McRib. It's going away forever until six months when we bring it back out again for a week.

You fool us once, shame on you. You fool me twice, shame on me. You fooled me three times. Shame on me. You fooled me four times, though. Shame on me five times, though.

Five times. Shame back on you.

Fuck you, McDonald's. Your games and your bad toys now. Your bad Happy Meal toys. They're terrible now.

They brought back changeables. What are you talking about?

They brought back changeables because they had to take a break from Sonic 3 and putting Knuckles toys in every single meal that they had for forever. The Changeables. And then they brought back Sonic 3 Knuckles exclusives again.

And then they went to Squishmallows, and then they brought back Sonic 3 Knuckles again. The movie's been out for, like, two years, and they keep bringing it back at McDonald's.

They made a lot of Knuckles toys.

Okay, McDonald's famously doesn't sell chili dogs. Maybe they should start. It sounds like they're going to clean up. They're going to collect all the gold rings.

We mass produced all these Knuckles toys. So I guess we're just going to have Knuckles as our Happy Meal Toy for the next five years.

And Toy doesn't do anything. He just kind of like Rolls. You have to put him in, like, a hula hoop type thing, and he just kind of rolls away. That's not what Knuckles does.

And they're like, wow, we're McDonald's. We don't give a shit about you go in our ball pit or just suck on our ball pits in our pants. Fuck you.

Yeah, fuck you. We're still the cheapest way to eat food, though.

This is our way to do it, where we're just going to be mean. Because our heyday of having the weird clowns on the street 10 years ago that no one's talking about anymore, that was it.

That was our time for clowns. Why is no one talking about that time anymore? I don't understand.

What was that? Why was that happening? Hey, speaking of Knuckles, he's got, like, these pyramid things on his fist, right?

Well, our hero realizes that Betty's weakness is probably those pyramid spikes on his chest. And that's how you do a segue.

That's it. You hopped on both of those wheels. You either did die or didn't die. Unsure if that's of urban myth or not.

The Chosen One trains in a montage, trying to rip metal spikes out of wooden dummies with his bare hands until his fingers are basically hamburger meat. And he throws a little hissy fit. Ling rubs some lemon juice, salt, and mercury into his wounds.

As you do.

As you do. And then gives him a little pep talk, maybe some bandages. And now he's ready for the final fight.

We're finally at the final fight, even though both nothing and everything has happened simultaneously.

So much of nothing has happened.

The Chosen One and Betty, they meet at the temple, and they're throwing fists, and the skies open up and you're thinking, mushu fasa. You're finally back. But no, it's the Evil Council. Oh, the Evil Council that's backing Betty up. And it's actually French aliens and floating pyramids.

And they give Betty these supernatural powers. And now it's looking all grim for our Chosen One hero. Until he remembers that silly lion's advice of something about the stars.

He sticks out his tongue. That's what he does. He uses tonguey.

He uses Tonguey.

Launches the tongue out of his mouth like a deathbed would launch at a lady trying to escape the one room.

Exactly like that. It is the same thing.

Hero's gonna save the day just like that, because he uses big old tongue to just destroy the alien mother ship, I guess.

He licks it real good and. Well, there's precedent there, too. In Pink Flamingos.

That's right. We couldn't fully escape it.

Tongue magic.

I don't want you to ever say tongue magic with your mouth again.

Never.

What else?

What do you want me to say it with?

You could do it with your asshole while you're singing Surfing Bird to me.

Oh, okay. Yep. Now we've done it.

Yeah, we're back. Fully.

I regret bringing it up.

As you should.

The hero rips the spikes out of Betty's chest, saves the girl. Then there's a whole loop of him going to dead bodies that aren't dead.

It's very good how he keeps going to his friends that got killed. I'm like, ling. Oh, I'm back. Oh, Master. Oh, he's not back. Dog, dog. His dog's back alive. Oh, Shirley Wimplow.

Still dead.

Then him and his squeaky shoes.

Still dead.

But that's the movie.

Or is it?

I couldn't believe there was a post credit scene.

I was shocked.

And in this post credits scene, Master Tang's legs just getting eaten by a golden eagle as you do. Fades the black. Sure, that wound is smelling a little like almonds or something. It's a nice way to leave a theater, right? Yes. Infected.

Give the man his flowers.

The awe. Audacity.

The audacity, Ted. Here's the way I see it.

Oh, boy. Okay, here we go.

Dubbing over a kung fu movie.

Yeah.

Not that audacious.

Not at all.

Releasing that dub as a motion picture. Asinine.

Not audacious.

Pretty audacious.

You went farther. Yeah.

No, I don't know if I can

give it a 10, though I am. And it's because. Exactly what you said. Just dubbing over a movie. Not that hard to do, but dubbing over a movie. And you're the actor. Director. Writer.

Because he wrote this movie entirely in the editing room. Because on set all he did was speak gibberish to ensure that no line would ever line up with anything he ever said.

Amazing. Also, he dubbed every voice.

Every single one. Except the one boob lady. Yeah, that's it. It's all Steve Oedekirk in this movie.

Audacious 10.

Sticking with it.

10.

He had to make this thing look bad.

Yeah.

On purpose.

Yeah. And I was saying just so it

fit the style of the movie that he bought.

As is the tradition of the time. No. I would say that speaks to the next category. Heart.

I don't remember how many movies Steve Oudekerk watched. But this was his plan. Yeah, he was going to do a facial swap movie and I think he watched like a hundred something kung fu movies.

And this was the one that he picked. And that's significant because he had to buy the rights for this movie.

And the only person that he could find was from the original production was kung fu movie legend Jimmy Wang Yu.

Oh, that's awesome.

Jimmy Wang Yu has a bit of a history because he's looked at as one of the all time tough guys from Hong Kong films. He became a really big name during the era of Bruceploitation, where after Bruce Lee died you get all these other Bruce Lee knockoff type movies.

And that's what this movie is spoofing is those.

Yeah.

But this movie has so much heart because Steve Oedkirk had to go to Jimmy Wang Yu and tell him what he was doing with this movie. Let me give you a little background. Jimmy Wang Yu and why. That's audacious in itself. There's no real way to beat around the bush.

Jimmy Wang Yu had triad connections and he was very deeply connected.

Holy shit.

Jimmy Wang Yu lived. The other three didn't. Jimmy Wang Yu went on trial for first degree murder for allegedly ordering a retaliatory hit. Not even this one where he lived.

And he got acquitted. Wow.

And Steve Oudekirk, this fucking goofball had to go to him and say, I want to buy this movie that's going to be forgotten in history and I want to erase you from it. Apparently Jimmy Wang, he was very quiet about the whole process.

And this little known actor, this Jackie Chan.

Little known actor. Yeah.

Jackie Chan is what ended the Bruceploitation period.

Yeah.

Jackie Chan finally gets a big offer from a studio, but he's already contractually offered to a different producer. Jackie Chan takes the big offer from the studio.

Yeah.

The producer doesn't like that. The problem with that is that the producer has triad connections too.

Oh, no.

So Jackie Chan has to go to Jimmy Wang Yu to ask him to mediate this with the Triad.

What the fuck?

And Jimmy Wang Yu is possibly the reason Jackie Chan's got a career A and B is alive.

That is absolutely wild. Holy shit. So, yeah, this is the guy that this Kevin Nealon looking dude walks up to and says, hey, I want to erase you from this movie.

That's exactly what happened.

That's insane.

Yep.

I would say this shows some heart.

I would say it shows a lot of heart.

You know, if you flip that heart upside down, it kind of looks like balls.

It sure does. Betty's balls are Betty's balls moving and getting hit. I don't know where you were going with that, but fuck the hearts to the roof on this thing.

Yeah. I read somewhere that Steve Oedekerk chose this movie in particular because of the Betty's Ball scene, actually, but really?

Yeah, it's because of the scene of all the villains hitting him in the crotch with the sticks. And he wasn't flinching.

Basically what this movie is, it's just a school versus school. It's a Cobra Kai. Like, it's not a crazy story by any means. It's very simple story.

But what Steve Otekirk did was something that was very advanced for the time and unique.

Very unique.

Bryan. I'm going ted for Hart.

10 for heart.

I can't imagine the hours he spent watching these old kung fu films and trying to figure out just ad libbing until he arrived at an insane level of jokes per minute.

It's hard to say because he wrote the entire script in the editing room just to see what would work.

Absolutely bananas. The fact that he knew what would

land and what wouldn't, that is crazy in itself.

Ten for heart we already scored technical incompetence at A1, which leads us to low budget ingenuity. Now, this movie did not exactly have a low budget. It was a $10 million movie.

This movie did not have a low budget at all. But it does something very cool with the budget that it does have.

Where it's not so much a Master of the Universe, which had twice the budget that this movie did. Because Master the Universe is trying to do its own thing. I don't want to say sincerely it wasn't. It was a money grab. We all know it.

But what Kung Pao is doing with the $10 million budget that it has is it's trying to give us, the audience, a B movie experience.

Right. A lot of that money went to recreating the scenes like you said in Mexico and special effects to make this thing look cohesive.

But I think that's the thing I love most about this movie, is that it does have its budget, it does have studio backing, but it's set out to purposely honor the type of B Hong Kong movie where you're more going for the speed than the quality.

Right.

You're showing the brushstrokes of everything that you do. And I think that itself, this movie has so much B movie DNA. And I can understand why people would say it's not a B movie. I get.

Yeah, I understand that too.

Do you think it's B movie?

I do. I think it's a B movie in spirit, mostly in what it's trying to achieve. Like, yeah, it got a wide release, it had a big budget studio backing.

But that's not what makes an A movie.

No, I mean, this movie checks a lot of boxes for what a B movie is because it's going out of its way to simulate it. Right.

And that's a really cool experiment to see, like by screwing up the film and purposely putting in mistakes to show, like, no, this is made with speed. Not so much quality. Like, we got to pump these things out. And then you also have the writer, director, star doing it all. The one man band.

And that is a major trope. It's achieved a cult status at this point.

Absolutely.

And it is literally reusing a movie to make another movie. Whereas a lot of B movies, things that we've seen of reusing like sets, costumes, whatever it might be, this reused an entire movie.

You borrow whatever you can when you're making these movies. And this borrowed actual portions of another movie. I feel like it's using its $10 million budget to create a low budget experience.

That's all it is.

Which is kind of subverting the category of the schlockometer in a fun way.

It's trying to. But we caught it. Cause science.

Cause science. We're like, ah, I see you.

What are you thinking?

This one's hard to call because the low budget ingenuity is there, but is it really ingenuity if it's being done with a high budget?

I mean, sure. I don't know. I feel like you're leading me somewhere here.

I absolutely am. Because this movie here, for $10 million, allegedly has 2,000 VFX shots.

Damn.

And Steve Otickerk is on record saying. And again, who's to say if it's serious or not? Because the man's a funny man. We know that.

Right.

But he said that this movie at the time, had the most effects shots of any movie in history. And the movie he compared it against was Star Wars, Episode one, the Phantom Menace.

All right. If you're talking effects to budgetary ratio, this is clearly in B movie territory.

I think that they absolutely nailed it with the money they had. That's a lot of vfx shots for 10 million bucks. And these are not easy to pull off.

No, no. You have to be very precise or

unprecise because they told the crew that they had to do worse in order to make it look like it was rushed. God, that's. They thought of everything for this movie. It's unbelievable. I want to go eight.

Okay. I was going to say seven. Yeah. So, okay.

I want to go eight. Eight, yes.

Eight is.

God, I don't know why I'm fighting so hard.

I don't know. Because you like it. Damn it.

I love it. Damn it. We're in a totally different realm.

One of the best movies of this

century of the past 25 years. Right behind Mad Max Fury Road.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Genre exploitation. I mean.

I mean, it's a specific genre that it's spoofing.

I feel like the walk hard defense works here, too, being that at this time in American cinema, kung fu movies were absolutely at their height.

I mean, you had Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Romeo Must Die, Shanghai noon, Rush Hour 2, the one, all came out in the two years leading up to this. And then afterwards you get what, like Shanghai Knights and Kill Bill, which were likely already in production when this came out.

And then it dies down big time.

You get like, Kung Fu hustle, Rush Hour 3, Ip man, over the next 10 years, that's like, all you get until they have to reboot the entire kung fu genre with a CGI panda.

So you're saying that Kung Pao, Enter the Fist did kung fu movies? What Walk Hard did for the musical biopic, where it just killed it.

Killed it for, like, at least a decade. Yeah.

That's amazing to me.

Yeah, it's huge.

I mean, I'm going huge on this one. This is going to be probably an 8 again. Like, we're floored with some big boy numbers here, and I'm fine with that.

We are.

You want to pull that back down to Earth?

Me?

Yeah.

I wanted to go up.

What is happening?

Oh, I think this movie exploits the shit out of the genre.

Okay. So I was trying to be reasonable and I was lying when I said eight, because obviously I want to go 10.

But if you're going to be unreasonable, I will happily meet you there. Yeah.

I was absolutely ready to give this a 10 for genre exploitation.

God damn it. This is a good movie.

This is, like, the most clearly defined genre of anything we've watched so far.

And it's true.

And it sends on every level. There's a part where there's a dog that barks and they mismatch the dub on the bark. It's so good.

But it's not even that, because that moment comes directly on the heels of a punchline.

Yeah.

Where you have the punchline, it cuts to a dog who does the bark and doesn't do the bark. Then you hear the bark, like, three seconds later. It's like, oh, my God. This is like Gatling gun jokes here.

Like, you're not letting any of these settle in. This movie needs to get seen a lot more.

This movie deserves way more appreciation than it gets.

It is so stupid in the best possible way.

And it is one of the dumbest things I watched in a long time, but I had the best time watching it.

It's also been the happiest I've been in a long time. Yeah, that's sad in itself, but all right.

We teased this one a little bit earlier. The Holy Trinity, the blood, the boobs and the booms. We get a little bit of blood.

It's a little bit PG13 metal.

PG13 blood, which is totally reasonable. I mean, we got him with eyeballs on all of his fingers at one point, like they're Bugles.

We also got boobs. We got three of them.

We got three boobs, which Meatloaf will tell you is pretty good.

Meatloaf is going to be confused at

three boobs because he's not used to three out of four. He's used to two out of three.

66%. That's as high as he goes. Anything more is just overkill for that man.

Oh, yeah, 75%. What do I do with all these boobs? Booms. I don't remember explosions at the end

with the alien spaceships. Oh, yeah, that's really it.

It's just the mothership, though. The other ones all kind of fly off.

Well, they got scared. They ran away. Just like the French. Yeah, makes sense.

So French.

Classic French. Sacre bleu.

Hire some Betty to do your dirty work and then run off at the sight of a first tongue, you see.

So Bryan's known me now for a long time. He knows whenever we bring up France or French people, I just yell sacre bleu. Right. He finally knows where it is from.

I understand now.

Watching this movie was a lot. Just it was making the Dave.

A lot of it really was.

My stupid sense of humor comes directly from this stupid movie.

It was filling in a lot of gaps of why you are the way that you are. Okay, so we get a little bit of blood. We get three clothed boobs and a CGI boom at the end.

Seven.

Seven. I dig it.

We'll give it the full two thirds. Yeah. Feels like it earned it. Didn't earn more. That's fine.

Definitely didn't earn more. Might have earned less. Who's to say?

Not us. It's not us to say. We're. We're moving on now. That's in the past.

Exactly.

Don't look at that.

It's already done. We said the word you say. Memorable characters.

All of them. Every single one of them.

I mean the chosen one for sure. But more importantly, Tungi.

Tungi. Wimble Ling. Betty, Betty's assistant is one of my favorite things in that movie.

The magic color changing shirt is one of my favorite things in this whole movie.

It's one of my favorite quotes in any movie. Hard stop. Where Betty just yells at a man. I am a great magician. Your shirt is red. And then give it a minute because he walks by Yashuta's blue.

Just jokes written in. It's so good to the bad cutting.

And they do it even earlier where the one master man eats the bugs because he started coughing, I guess while they were filming it. So they CGI'd a bug the land on his lips. And then a couple seconds later they do it again. And he sits down, he goes, what are the odds?

It's like all this stupid shit is

written in the ventriloquists.

Yeah, it's such a good joke.

So good.

Folks, you gotta watch this movie. I can't stress it enough.

Definitely worth it.

You're going to get dumber, but you're going to get happier. And there has to be a trade off.

That's. I mean, that's the correlation, right? The less I know, the happier I am.

Perfectly balanced. It's all things should be. Thanos had it right the entire time.

So what are you giving characters?

I'm going to go six, seven.

Oh, six, seven. Yeah, I'll allow a seven.

Fine. Fair enough. And the only reason I was going to think that is.

The most memorable thing about Whoa. Is that she has one boob.

That's it.

That's her whole character.

That's not a character.

There's a cow that has a name, but you don't need to know the name. Just remember that it's a cow.

It's a cow. And it cost $2 million to do that scene in this $10 million movie. That's so stupid. It's the dumbest scene in this movie.

So there's a kung fu cow. There's a tongue with a face. Yeah, that's definitely a seven worth of memorable characters. I have a feeling this next one's going to be a biggie.

Quotes.

I'm going 11. It just made me Jade. Shona. Jameson. LAUGHS

There are so many quotes in this movie. This is a very quotable movie.

It's one of the most quotable movies. It's a movie I've been quoting since the day it came out. Shirt Ripper is just. That's so good. And it happens twice in this movie.

Our sexual preferences are our own business.

Let's all just settle down. We don't want anyone losing any more toes.

Yeah, 10 though.

10. No, I'd go higher. Honestly, for me, like, personally. Yeah. This is one of my most quoted movies by a long shot.

Soccer Blue.

So you do whatever you need to do and then do the math to balance it. I trust you.

We're going to call it an eight.

Deal.

Okay. And personally, I think that's a lot of nuts.

Is a great line in this movie.

Again.

Again.

Okay, fine. A9.

You're starting to make me feel like a make a wish kid. And I'm not complaining. I love it.

Well, we have that one in technical incompetence. That's kind of balancing everything out.

Right? Right. The one because they were too good at making movies. Ah.

They did too good of a job. Punish them. Entertainment value. My God.

I mean, this has to be an 11, right? And I don't know if it's just because we were watching it together and that's what made it, like, work really well.

And that is kind of the idea behind these midnight movies at 10pm that we've been kind of doing the slack hop.

Yeah.

These movies are meant to be enjoyed as a group.

They are Significantly less funny on your own.

I think there's a reason why when we watch these all together, we leave the chat open for everyone.

Yeah.

Not the voice chat, the text chat. We're not psychopaths, we're not crazy.

We're not talking over the movie.

But just watching people talk about it and just make their own jokes and enjoy it together. That's what this is about.

Absolutely.

Entertainment value. It could have been because we watched this group. It could have been because we all needed a good laugh. I'm going 11.

I had a problem with some of the repetition of some of the jokes. Not a problem. I won't call it a problem. At a certain point. It got a little belabored toward the end of the movie.

The way you're stumbling over this makes it feel like you're trying not to say the word war. That you're a Republican. Just say what you're feeling.

For me, it's more of an eight. So like maybe we meet in the middle. Or ten.

It's fine. If that's the case.

Nine for entertainment value. Still pretty good.

It's very good. Are you kidding? They don't get much better.

The final category, cult ability.

I want it to be higher.

I agree. I feel like it has the potential.

I don't see this being a midnight movie. And that's my biggest issue with it.

I think it's a big ask to have a group of people come out to watch this all together at once on a midnight somewhere.

It's missing something.

Yeah.

Like it doesn't have the pink flamingos. Let's get together at midnight and eat chocolates at the end of the movie. It doesn't have the room. Let's drink skotchka and yell at a bridge.

Exactly.

It doesn't have the bird Demic. Get your clothes hangers out. No, not for that reason. So there's something.

There's something missing.

And it could be because maybe it's a little too family friendly and we're just not really there yet.

That might be it.

Actually.

If there was like an R rated cut of this, I think it would be there. That could be it.

It'd be much worse.

I think that's what makes the midnight part so accessible. Accessible is the wrong word. Intriguing.

You need the After Dark.

That's the draw. You want the After Dark?

Yeah. All right.

You want the Frank N. Furter. There's got to be something naughty about it.

If I were watching this movie on a 13 inch tube TV with a VCR, that's attached. It's an all in one. You all know exactly what I'm talking about. I turn this thing on and it's on a channel I definitely don't get

if my parents don't pay for hbo. But I can kind of see this movie happening in between the squiggles. Am I staying there?

I'll suck it up knowing that there won't be a boob. That's important. It's an important distinction.

That is an important distinction. Am I going to put up with all this for zero boobs, or am

I just going to go get the second tape of Titanic somehow not rewound?

Just always ends right at that scene.

Right at the scene. The boat always just starts sinking all of a sudden, just out of nowhere.

It's weird. That second VHS tape just gets run down so much faster than the first one.

Cult ability. I'm going three.

Three. Wow.

Yeah.

You think it's that low?

I do think it's that low.

I'm trying to picture, like, a group of people waiting in front of a theater for it to open, to reopen at night and have the poster out on the wall and I'm not seeing it. I'm with you.

I'm not seeing it.

I thought you'd go a little higher than that, though.

No, this is where I get my street cred, where everyone realized, like, I wasn't being unreasonable the entire time.

Entertainment value is an 11. But he was. He was real about the cult ability.

He's being very real about the one thing to come back down to earth at the end.

Final score. Kung Pao. Enter the Fist was a 74.

Yeah, it's too low.

Well, it's remarkably higher than anything it's been given by any of the rating systems out on the Internet.

Well, yeah, we have better taste, Obviously.

Has a 13% critical Rotten Tomatoes score and a 69 audience score.

Nice.

Nice. Big spread.

This was such a good pick for this week. I'm so happy. This is a lot of fun. We got to watch this, got to talk about it, got to have some laughs. Again.

Palate cleansed.

And now that our palate's cleansed, are you ready to dive right back into that shallow end of the pool head first?

I guess so.

I once again reached out to our AI bot that's been picking the movies for us, and it's kind of got a cool vibe going on right now. I'm really loving, like, the direction it's gone where I only gave it the first three movies that we definitely knew we were going to talk about.

And then it picked Pink Flamingos and it picked Kung Pao into the fist. And for our next episode, which comes out on April 1, April fools. This ain't no joke though. I need you to get serious, Bryan.

Very serious. Van Damme face.

Unbelievable.

Yeah.

The movie that AI has chosen for us for our next episode is only one hour and 15 minutes long.

It's a beautiful length.

Do you know what it's rated R. Approved.

Oh, I love approved.

Oh, you're scared of the claw, aren't you?

Can I give you the plot synopsis one liner thing off IMDb about this movie?

You better.

It just says scientists ponder a buzzard like Big Bird able to lift a train.

That's it.

No other context.

Hell yeah, we don't need it anymore.

Cause in two weeks we're talking about the Giant claw.

Until then, be sure to rate Review, Subscribe, Share. Let everybody know about this sweet new podcast you found about all these B movies.

I can't folks, on anything you're saying right now because IMDb is still open and it is just playing the trailer for the Giant Claw on repeat and it is distracting.

I'm very excited to check that out.

You can join us on Patreon patreon.com Kate Podcasters is the URL for now, but it will become the McGuffin Studios Patreon, where we will host exclusive bonus content for all of the podcasts that we have produced over the years. All of your Kate Podcasters episodes will still be there.

All of your Beer me bonuses and a whole lot more other stuff like Brackets and Batmanimation from back in the day. It's all still there. It's all still there.

There's so much there. It's its own show at this point. Like it's crazy how much is there?

Yeah, it's an insane amount of content for as little as a dollar a month. It could all be yours.

Patreon.com KatePodcasters you can also join us on our Discord, where we also have our Midnight movie madness at 10pm or whatever calling it. Or whatever we end up calling it. That's the pending name right now. The Artist Formerly Known as the Schlock Hop.

That doesn't really tell you what it is. It's. It's a midnight movie, but it's at

10pm it's because we're old and we have shit to do the next day.

And time zones are a thing. We gotta make sure everybody can, you know, it's a. It's a whole thing.

They shouldn't be a thing. That's a totally separate issue.

But you can find a link to the discord in the show notes. You can also reach out to us on social media @bmovieboys, on Instagram, Facebook, we're always updating those.

And you can email us directly bmovieboyspod@gmail.com.

Bryan, this has been a lot of fun this week.

This has been a blast.

Do you have anything else?

That is it for me.

Fantastic. For real life, folks, please rate, review, subscribe. This is a new show. It helps us get out in front of so many new ears. So many new ears.

Come join us for our movie nights when we watch before we record. You could come in, hang out, crack some jokes, shoot the shit with us. It's all just having a good time.

It's about the community coming together, enjoying some movies, having just some fun. Can't we all just have some fun again?

Can we just have some fun? Watch the movies you might not have seen before.

You guys are the absolute best. Thank you so much for tuning in. And don't Forget, set your VCRs for April 1st when we talk about the giant claw.

And in the immortal words of Ling from Kung Pow under the Fist. But had she been in the Master's of the Universe universe. Good journey,