I had a small dilemma… Would it be wise to write a review about a movie I’m highly obsessed with for many years? If I had worked for a serious movie review site, probably not, but because I’m writing this for my personal site, I gave myself the “go” signal 
I am reviewing the Dutch region 2 version released by 20th Century Fox in 2003. The movie was released in theaters in 2001. This DVD release contains an additional video showing neat scenes of how the CGI has evolved over time while the movie was in production and some bonus scenes which apparently did not make it in the final cut. Unfortunately no director’s commentary soundtrack or any other extra features.
Kung Pow is VERY different than the sci-fi movie reviews you’ll find on my site, I’m not even completely sure I’d call this a B-movie technically. As it’s based on an existing old obscure 70′s Kung-Fu movie though, I thought I had found enough excuses to add it to my site 
What IS Kung Pow? To this day I’m not sure I do know, but I’ll give it a try. Movie writer/director/actor/producer and Material Arts lover Steve Oudekerk took an old Kung Fu movie from 1976 (probably because it was cheap to obtain the rights?!) , called “He He Shuang Xing” (“Tiger & Crane Fists”), quite a humor-less movie with a serious theme. He then removed the complete soundtrack and all original voices. With digital video editing technology he replaced some of the main characters with himself and a small cast of other actors, re-dubbed the movie completely (doing a lot of new voices himself and making sure the dubbing would be even worse than the original English re-dubbed version of the movie), he completely replaced the main story and completely re-edited the various scenes and added new scenes and CGI effects to existing scenes along the way.
What is the result? 80 minutes of almost pure weirdness! 
It’s a modern parody to the classic badly re-dubbed Kun-Fu films of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Although it’s weird (and believe me when I say it is), I think a strong point is that the scenes from the original movie are not chosen randomly.. It doesn’t feel like a “cut and pasted”-move, as there’s really a consistent storyline going on. The humor in the movie is sometimes absurd, sometimes clever, but a lot of the time also of very low slapstick-alike quality (how many movies do you know where main villain is called “Master Pain”, but in a random scene in the middle of the movie announces that he from that point on wants to be called “Betty”, something everybody does? Also, why is there a guy with a ghetto blaster dancing to MC Hammer when two main characters have a fight in the middle of a village? 
), I’d probably would not have accepted it or even would have found it funny in the context of a different movie… in this production it seem to be totally right and totally in place though. Of course it’s a big matter of personal taste also… if you generally require high quality literal humor in a movie before you are entertained, I’d think you better skip this one
I probably should spend some words on the story. When the movie begins, we see an evil guy (later introduced as “Master Pain”, before the name-change ) killing a whole family while he is searching for a little baby who the mother hid somewhere in in the house. He finds the baby, but Master Pain is no match for the baby though, the baby kicks his ass and manages to escape him easily. We soon learn that this baby grows up to a guy called “The Chosen One”. The Chosen One is still looking for answers after all those years… why was his family killed? Who killed them? What is the meaning of the secret power which he brings with him everywhere? It’s time for some answers!
Is the movie “perfect”? No… I think the first half of the movie is simply brilliant, but somewhere along the line I thought t it lost a bit of steam so to speak. Although generally 80 minutes (including a lot of extra scenes that are added once the movie ends) is not very long for a movie, its duration should not have been any minute longer. Especially the ending scene feels somehow very “tacked-on” on the last minute, I think they could have done better than this seemingly randomly chosen ending-scene. But oh well, perhaps this whole “let’s end it in a random way, so people will hate the ending”-thing is part of the whole joke!
If you plan to watch this movie (or have watched this movie previously) I’d suggest you’d also try to obtain the movie it was based on. It makes this movie even funnier once you know the original scenes and context. I bet there are a few scenes which you’d have sworn that Steve Oedekerk came up with them, but actually were in the original movie!
It was originally announced this would have been the first in a total episode of three movies (the DVD even contains scenes for the supposed first sequel). For years IMDB says the second one is in production, but I would be totally surprised if it will ever see the light of day. I think it would be a wise choice if volume 2 and 3 are also part of the joke surrounding the movie so to speak… and keep that way.