Kung Fu Hustle (2004)
Directed by Stephen Chow
It's the 1940s, and the notorious Axe Gang terrorizes Shanghai. Small-time criminals Sing and Bone hope to join, but they only manage to make lots of very dangerous enemies. Fortunately for them, kung fu masters and hidden strength can be found in unlikely places. Now they just have to take on the entire Axe Gang.
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19 films that influenced Kung Fu Hustle
What critics say influenced Kung Fu Hustle
This laugh til your sides hurt flick pays comical homage to movies as disparate as "West Side Story," spaghetti westerns, 1940's dance musicals, "Spider-Man," "The Matrix," "The Mask," "The Shining," Bruce Lee movies, "The Seven samurai," film noir and Warner Brothers cartoons.
Chow manages to create some of the most screwy comedy I’ve seen in a long time, while he manages to spoof much of his influences such as “The Shining” and “Thriller” as do all the directors whom have been impacted by pop culture.
There's a great gush of blood reminiscent of a similar pictorial element in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," and a sudden blossoming of Spanish guitar music that seems to derive from the taxi sequence in Martin Scorsese's "After Hours."
References to GANGS OF NEW YORK, THE SHINING, and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS are among Chow’s many other tips of the hat to Hollywood movies.
Pigsty Alley is a delightful mix of the downtrodden and the optimistic, reminiscent of both Robert Altman�s Sweet Haven from Popeye and Jean Renoir�s slums in The The Lower Depths.
Martial arts sequences are akin to dance scenes, and Chow mirrors a poster for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in TOP HAT with a man holding a woman at knifepoint.
Pigsty Alley is a delightful mix of the downtrodden and the optimistic, reminiscent of both Robert Altman�s Sweet Haven from Popeye and Jean Renoir�s slums in The The Lower Depths.
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There's a great gush of blood reminiscent of a similar pictorial element in Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining," and a sudden blossoming of Spanish guitar music that seems to derive from the taxi sequence in Martin Scorsese's "After Hours."
Sing and a mute street vendor develop a relationship that recalls Chaplin’s Little Tramp and the blind flower girl in CITY LIGHTS.
The movie refers glancingly to dozens of Hollywood classics, from West Side Story to City Lights, but at heart it is a debt of honor richly paid by Stephen Chow to his martial-arts forebears and to the traditions that shaped his sensibility.
And Pig Sty Alley looks like something out of Jeunet and Caro, including a swinging pig sign lifted straight from the credits of Delicatessen.
As with John Ford's Wagonmaster or Jacques Tati's Playtime, the absence of a central star reinforces the sense of community that's integral to the creative vision being presented.
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The orchestral score gives way to traditional Chinese music (original music by Raymond Wong, non-original music by Pablo de Sarasate from various works) and the three sided tenement known as Pig Sty Alley, run by a sleazy, aluminum hair-clipped Landlord (Yuen Wah, "Enter the Dragon") and his battle axe of a wife, the indomitable Landlady (Yuen Qiu, "The Man With the Golden Gun").
Original, it is its own piece, but forced to compare, I might say that "KFH" is a sort of Chinese "Pulp Fiction" with a vibrating funny-bone and a taste of "Matrix."