Review by E.C.McMullen Jr.
SHOULD YOU? TIP JAR KWOON - 2004 USA release: Feb. 10, 2004 Image Entertainment Rate: USA: NR

Put a thousand monkey's in a room with typewriters and, in an infinite period of time, they would write the complete works of Shakespeare: Or so the concept goes.

Put those same monkeys in a room with a bunch of laptop computers and give them only five years, and they might come up with KWOON.

As you can see from the movie poster, these guys are all about bad Acting, Good Kung Fu.

Well...

Actually, the acting isn't half bad. The problem is the Cinematography - either poor lighting or far too hot lighting. Another problem is sound, it overdrives to an audible blur. Still another is the direction. Better direction would have got maximum laughs from the antics of the misfit screwballs that are the 5 students of a Northern California Kung Fu school called KWOON.

To tell you the truth, with a bigger budget and the aforementioned necessities of a good DP, Soundman, and Director, this could probably be on the cult scale of an early Monty Python movie - or at least as good as any Broken Lizard film. Yes, there are miles between the two, but that gives you an idea of just how good, how bad, and how so bad they're good the troupe of KWOON are.

These guys are completely unafraid to make utter asses of themselves, the kind of foolishness that I haven't seen since the Marx Brothers - although their act was more disciplined. The Marx Brothers had a kind of trained spontaneity. In the words of Carl Reiner, they knew how to take a scene and "Funny it up."

Through the course of these 3 episodes on the DVD (starting with episode 2???), the 5 students of KWOON will do battle with the incompetent minions of death, an overly sensitive-about-his-hygiene mummy, and some mobsters (you can't have a good Kung-Fu movies without a battle with mobsters thrown in there somewhere!). One of them will also bleed profusely from the nipples. No good reason, but there it is.

The DVD is stuffed with extras and Easter eggs and the enthusiasm of Onassis Parungao, Todd Roy (bloody nipples), Jimmy Lam, Chuck Becker, and Nathan Decker. It's that crazed enthusiasm that really carries the day, because while their Kung Fu is technically good, it also looks like classroom demonstration moves and not the fast and furious stuff of Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow - and anyone who is making Kung Fu comedy has to attain the bar of Chan & Chow - you cannot get around it.

KWOON is nutso garage-style film making at its most energetic, most frenetic, and I recommend it as one of the best of the worst. If you crave the left field horizon of Horror/Chop Socky comedy, KWOON is for you.

4 Negative Shriek Girls.

This review copyright 2004 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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