And Here Is The Craziest Kung Fu Silliness You’ll See All Day

Being a fan of martial arts films can be difficult, seeing as a lot of the greatest fight scenes are hidden within the dozens upon dozens of flicks you’ll probably never hear of until someone with a bigger love and appreciation for martial arts films brings them to your attention.

Fellow former Cracked writer and current io9 blogger Cyriaque Lamar is really, really good at finding wonderful little gems of weirdness on the internet. Today, Cyriaque used his talents to uncover a Youtube channel by the name of Fist of a Thousand Torments, run by Youtube user Sardonicus1313. Sardonicus is an archiver of obscure and extremely badass martial arts fight scenes from movies long since forgotten or never remembered to begin with.

The clip below, brought to my attention by Cyriaque and archived by Sardonicus1313, is one of the most awesome and ridiculous and badass fight scenes I’ve ever seen. It’s silly as hell, which is what we’ve all come to expect from the Taiwanese martial arts flicks of yesteryear.

I’m posting the entire 4 minuet clip, from the 1986 flick The Young Taoism Fighter (aka Miracle Fighters 4) and not setting it to play at the part when the insanity kicks in. I want you to experience the silly for yourself, the way I did. I want you to not expect the absurdity to come, even though you’re already expecting something.

The fight starts off as any normal three-way Kung Fu fight would…and then things get spectacular.

Now that you’ve seen that, let’s break down what makes this clip so good.

1)      Our Hero pulls out a tactic parents use to play with their children: he plays peekaboo. He swipes a table cloth, holds it to his face, and vanishes in to thin air, like a Vegas magician.

2)      The villain, after seeing the hero disappear behind dinnerware, performs some quick Sherlockian deduction and, through the power of deductive reasoning, hypotheses that the hero is now behind him. Never has something so obvious been given so much time and attention on screen.

3)      The villain force pulls the hero toward him. Alright, so there are some mystical Kung Fu powers at work here. You have my attention.

4)      And then the villain pushes the Crash Test Dummy action figure buttons on our hero’s chest and the hero’s limbs all explode outward, violently.

5)      The villain, thinking that his “wicked style” was more than enough to defeat his foe, is surprised to discover that the hero can command his exploded limbs to continue attacking. Why is it that I can’t think of these kinds of things when I’m high? Clearly other people can. Why not me?!

6)      The battle rages on as the villain kicks and punches flying limbs. It’s as if he were training while standing in front of the wood chipper from Fargo.

7)      And then, suddenly, nipples.

8)      And then, just as suddenly as nipples, titty twisters.

9)      The villain is hanged upside down by a disembodied arm and has his head simultaneously kicked by two disembodied feet.

10)   Again, taking a cue from the yet-to-be-invented Crash Test Dummies action figures, the hero pops off his own head and springs it toward the villain.

11)   The head is punched out of a window…

12)   And then this happens…

13)   It is then that we learn that the hero has mastered Separated Body Style, which is the most specific style of martial arts out there. This means that our hero thought about every single possible outcome of a fight with the villain and somewhere on that list, maybe at around Outcome #15448b was “Will explode my limbs off my body – how to defend?”. Without being sure as to whether or not the villain even has the ability to explode limbs off of a human body, our hero trained for that very specific outcome anyway.  I wonder if somewhere further down the outcome list was “He may try to flick my butt – NOTE: learn anal fist fury technique???”

I want this movie inside of me; to be mother to my children.