David Sandberg
Kung Fury

‘Kung Fury’ is a 2015 short film written, directed, and starred in by Swedish filmmaker David Sandberg, who brought his project to life through a crowdfunding campaign that achieved incredible success. The total runtime of the work is only 31 minutes, but these can be considered exhaustive for telling the entire story and for its contents, which are so many and all condensed into this one half-hour, that the making of the film took Sandberg almost two years of work.

But what is ‘Kung Fury’ really? It's clear from the very first scene that we are dealing with something special and unconventional, and that narrating the plot would make no sense. The film, which features 'Kung Fury,' a martial arts expert police officer with almost divinatory powers and a nature as naive as it is belligerent, follows our hero's deeds as he is forced to travel back in time from the present to fight his nemesis, the greatest criminal in history: Adolf Hitler. To achieve this, he will ask for help from the computer expert 'Hackerman,' and later on, other companions will join him in the final battle, the clash against the Fuhrer and the Nazis in Third Reich Germany, such as Thor, the two Viking warrior women Barbarianna and Katianna, a tyrannosaurus rex, the police officer Triceracop, and Hackerman himself transformed into a sort of robot from the 'Transformers' series.

The contents of the short film are clearly imaginative and border on the absurd; in fact, they surpass this limit extensively, and are undoubtedly parodic, picking up clichés and typical stylings of the classic action films of the '80s and early '90s, making massive use of them, and making this the true rationale behind the entire work. It alternates referrals to the subculture of science fiction and horror cinema of those years; to Hong Kong action cinema like that of John Woo or John Carpenter, then to Japanese disaster movies starring giant puppets like Godzilla and the like; the love, or rather the cult for racing cars, particularly the symbol car of those years, the Lamborghini Diablo, just as obvious quotes from the TV series 'Knight Rider'; especially martial arts films from Bruce Lee to the '80s boom of 'Karate Kid' and then fantasy ones starting from 'Conan The Barbarian,' inspired by Nordic legends; the video game culture and the forgotten world of arcades.

Consequently rich in repeated citations obsessively and practically in every single scene of the short film, ‘Kung Fury’ is undoubtedly a truly well-crafted work perfectly achieving its dual purpose of being both a nostalgia operation and a way to mock an entire generation, literally lost behind a series of 'images' completely lacking in sense and exaggerated to the point of ridiculousness. Irreverent, the viewer will surely enjoy it, even if perhaps younger, somehow empathizing with those who spent most of their time watching those films and possibly compulsively inserting coins into large boxes to play outdated arcade games.

All this, combined with what was evidently a certain effectiveness of those contents, contributed to the great success of Sandberg's short film, which itself became a cult object and was later developed in the form of a video game. A success that is itself a deserved parody, of the great feedback and influence that the culture had, which had the peculiarity to emerge powerfully, becoming dominant and then instead of developing, remained stagnant, crystallized in past time.