Outside Asia, martial arts is a genre made with earnestness and perceived by irony. Ostensibly a window into the "exotic" Far East for middle America, kung fu movies were once a staple attraction in the grimy theaters that dotted pre-tourist gentrified Times Square. During its first wave of popularity in the early 1970s, the genre regularly occupied the same space — both physically and in the industry's creative regard — as horror, Blaxploitation, and pornography.
The death of Bruce Lee in 1973 sparked a search for "the next" kung fu star. While there were painfully obvious efforts to exploit Lee clones, there soon emerged talents who found success on their terms. Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh, Sammo Hung, Donnie Yen, and many more carried the genre well into the 21st century.
Due to Byzantine copyright ownerships, many classics are hard to access — that is, if you don't hit up your local flea markets for DVDs. Luckily, some foundational kung fu pictures are still miraculously accessible with just a few streaming subscriptions. Below, I will run down five all-important classics that you, the assumed grasshopper, have likely never seen before but can stream right now. Yes, now. Get stretching and fire up that Fire TV Stick.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)
When you think of kung fu movies, the image in your head is owed to Shaw Brothers Studio. Founded in 1958, the studio enjoyed its peak in Hong Kong in the mid-1960s due to popular historical dramas, musicals, and most of all, wuxia — an epic genre that explores China's medieval history with dazzling depictions of kung fu as a source of superhuman power.
There are too many classics to name in the Shaw Brothers canon, but one that stands the test of time is 1978's The 36th Chamber of Shaolin starring the magnificent Gordon Liu. Take it from the Masters of Staten Island, the Wu-Tang Clan: The movie is a certified banger. Gordon Liu plays a young student who submits to training at a Shaolin monastery to seek vengeance against a tyrannical new government. He undergoes many challenges – 36 of them – before attaining the physical, mental, and spiritual enlightenment necessary.
Past all the aesthetics newcomers might call "kitsch," The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is classic Hero's Journey storytelling that champions martial arts' virtues of perseverance and fortitude. Where superheroes get bit by radioactive spiders by luck, martial artists commit to a lifestyle where they become better, stronger, and faster. It's no surprise how a few transgressive rappers from New York City made this movie their personality. Victory is sweeter when it's earned.
Wheels on Meals (1984)
Jackie Chan didn't become a superstar overnight. After intense study at the now-defunct but influential China Drama Academy, Chan featured in numerous movies in Hong Kong before finding his footing as a leading man via the 1978 classic Drunken Master. In the early 1980s, Chan co-starred with his peers – including prolific actor/director Sammo Hung and actor/stuntman Yuen Biao – in a multitude of action-comedies like Project A and Winners and Sinners (both 1983).
In 1984, their collab peaked with Wheels on Meals, a delightful gem directed by and co-starring Hung that effortlessly fuses butt-kicking mayhem with knee-slapping hilarity. Chan and Biao lead as Chinese cousins with a popular food truck in Barcelona who are hired to rescue a beautiful thief (Lola Forner). The movie's finale features Chan's single greatest one-on-one fight scene of his career, against fierce real-life kickboxing champ Benny "The Jet" Urquidez. Wheels on Meals is loaded with on-brand Chan antics, with legitimately stunning martial arts mastery to fuel all the fun.
Yes, Madam! (1985)
American audiences may have heard the name Corey Yuen. In the early 2000s, the late Hong Kong filmmaker worked as Hollywood's leading action director for big budget productions (often starring Jet Li) like Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), X-Men (2000), The Transporter (2002), and The Expendables (2010). Yuen never found the same profile in the States as he had in Hong Kong.
Yuen's sophomore film was 1985's kinetic Yes, Madam! The movie stars Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh alongside American export Cynthia Rothrock, both playing international cops who team up to track down a piece of microfilm containing a list of criminal names. (Hey, it was the '80s.) If you've never heard of or seen a "girls with guns" movie, prepare to be Roth-rocked.
Before Black Widow and Wonder Woman, Hong Kong's once-popular girls with guns subgenre of action locked and loaded the screen with gorgeous women who knew how to roundhouse kick you off your feet. Yes, Madam! endures as the best of the genre, a dazzling showcase for both Yeoh (who shows why she deserved her Oscar) and Rothrock, whose name maddeningly remains unheard of even among dedicated enthusiasts of women in cinema.
Once Upon a Time in China (1991)
There's a reason why Jet Li found success as a more serious and even sexier alternative to Jackie Chan in late '90s Hollywood. Li, a legit Wushu champion, made his screen debut in the 1982 film Shaolin Temple, its success earning him instant movie star status in East Asian cinema. He achieved further stardom from the hit Once Upon a Time in China film series, essentially epic (and brazenly inaccurate) biopics of real-life kung fu master and physician Wong Fei-hung.
The six films in the series, most of them helmed by director Tsui Hark, ruled Hong Kong's box office for most of the 1990s – a troubling period for the region as Britain's handover to China underscored national anxieties. The first in the series, released in 1991, is not simply the best in the franchise but one of the greatest wuxia films ever made. Better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Debatable. Between Li's awe-inspiring physicality and Tsui Hark's filmmaking elegance, Once Upon a Time in China soars.
Kill Zone (2005)
Rising in the early 1990s with red-hot intensity, Donnie Yen represented a new generation of domestic action stars as Jackie Chan and Jet Li began flirting with Hollywood. Despite hits like the 1993 film Iron Monkey and the TV series Fist of Fury (based on the Bruce Lee films), Yen's financial woes also led him to Hollywood, in bottom-rung parts like in Blade II (2002) and Shanghai Knights (2003). By 2005, Yen was showing his first signs of middle age and unfulfilled potential when he teamed up with Sammo Hung and director Wilson Yip for the 2005 action crime thriller SPL: Sha Po Lang, renamed Kill Zone in the United States.
The plot sees Yen play an outsider cop who joins a local police force trying to arrest a ruthless Triad boss (Sammo Hung). The simple premise serves as an arena for Hung and Yen, two men of similar age but representatives of different eras, who throw down in ways even native audiences had never seen. Yen's interest in the emerging sport of mixed martial arts bleeds into Kill Zone's hard-hitting choreography, where kung fu is disrupted with wrestling slams, Judo takedowns, and armbar submissions. Kill Zone occupies the dead center of kung fu cinema's past and future, a perfection of what's come before with glimpses at what's ahead.
