Martial arts movies can certainly get quite strange, especially older kung fu films, resulting in laughably bizarre and low-budget masterpieces of so-bad-they’re-good legend. The martial arts genre isn’t inherently bad or cheesy, with plenty of martial arts films featuring genuinely great stories alongside their well-choreographed hand-to-hand fight sequences.

However, there’s no denying that for every masterpiece of the genre, there are hordes of ill-conceived old kung fu movies with shoestring budgets that produce some uproariously funny results, intentionally or not. For those that love movies so bad they’re funny or even amazing, the kung fu genre is ᴀssuredly full of great ironic watches.

10

Dance Of The Drunk Mantis

A Bizarre Semi-Official Sequel

Both Drunken Master and Drunken Master II can be hailed as not only some of the best martial arts movies of all time, but the crowning jewel of the legendary Jackie Chan’s expansive filmography. That makes it feel all the more bizarre that there exists a seldom-seen unofficial sequel not starring Chan at all, тιтled Dance of the Drunk Mantis.

Dance of the Drunk Mantis leans far harder into slapstick comedy than actual kung fu battles, going all-in on proudly low-brow humor that moves the needle so far in terms of cringeworthiness that it circles back around and becomes hilarious again. The fighting styles on display here are too strange to describe, including techniques like the тιтular drunken mantis, chicken style, duck style, and the dreaded “sickness boxing”.

9

The Battle Wizard

A Beautifully Ridiculous Mishmash Of Martial Arts And Magic

The definition of “kung fu” tends to get stretched beyond belief in older films, encompᴀssing all sorts of mystical Taoist superpowers, and nowhere is this more evident than in The Battle Wizard. The story centers on a scholarly wizard searching for magical power and his swordswoman sister as they battle a series of increasingly bizarre bad guys.

From masked women to vile mutants with chain-hook pincer arms to aged wizards with metallic rooster feet, The Battle Wizard‘s villainous roster is beautifully dumb. Calling it a kung fu movie at all is a strenuous take considering the characters’ main form of attack is a finger laser that chops up limbs, but it’s simple to amazingly awful to risk exclusion.

8

Shaolin Youth Posse

Throws Kids Into The Grinder Of A ᴅᴇᴀᴅly Kung Fu Conflict

Kung fu movies featuring kids shouldn’t seem like they should offer enough enjoyment to even be ironically entertaining, but Shaolin Youth Posse demonstrates prepubescent kung fu in a hilariously grisly manner. The plot centers on a group of child shaolin monks left to defend a temple by themselves from dastardly villains when the adults are sent away.

Shaolin Youth Posse has some of the most violent on-screen kid character deaths of any movie ever, as the vicious bandits, fireball-slinging mercenaries, and lecherous vampires ᴀssail their home. At one point, the kids fight back by unleashing the spirit of an ancient mummified shaolin master. It’s a nightmarish carousel of carnage that needs to be seen to be believed.

7

Lady Iron Monkey

A Wacky Fish-Out-Of-Water Romp

Lady Iron Monkey is an amazingly absurd martial arts film centering on a young girl who is raised in the wilderness by monkeys, somehow evolving simian traits like fur and a tail, before being adopted by a kindly stranger. Using her natural skills to become an expert at monkey-style kung fu, she eventually sets off on her own when she falls in love with a wicked prince.

Lady Iron Monkey relies on some oafish slapstick humor spat out in an uproariously funny, if not grating, English dub. The тιтular heroine’s monkey business is accentuated by a positively wild late ’70s synth soundtrack, with the crowning jewel of her action choreography being when she uses her tail as a propeller to fly through the air.

6

Matching Escort

A Garish Haunted House Of Neon Colors

Chang Ling, also known as Pearl Chang, is one of the most wonderfully unhinged visionaries of kung fu cinema thanks to her awesomely trippy martial arts visuals. Among her more amazingly awkward films is Matching Escort, which tells the story of a young peasant girl whose parents are murdered, seeking revenge on the warlord responsible.

Despite the solid set up, Matching Escort‘s meandering plot has a hilariously meandering pace, taking up a mᴀssive chunk of the movie to show the heroine training in a fungal cave with a wacky old hermit named Uncle Strange. The best part is how Chang Ling’s protagonist gains her powerful kicking ability from wearing a pair of heavy iron shoes all her life.

5

The Crippled Masters

Put Disabled Martial Artists Center Stage

As early Hong Kong cinema went on, studios had to go to greater and greater lengths to make their stories stand out among the crowd. A unique solution to this problem was found in The Crippled Masters, which stars a pair of kung fu experts left dismembered by their former master who go on to seek revenge.

Amazingly, the protagonist duo is really played by two real-life martial arts masters with physical impairments, one missing his arms and the other missing his legs. The visuals of them tearing through crowds of combatants make for some delightfully offbeat choreography yet unreplicated anywhere else, even if the plot makes no sense.

4

Gymkata

Awkwardly Marries Kung Fu And Gymnastics

It’s rare that movies starring athletes as main characters go over well, with most sports stars’ acting abilities failing to carry a feature film. In the case of Gym Kata, which stars real-world Olympic athlete Kurt Thomas, the result is an incredibly inexplicable attempt to prove gymnastic routines as the ultimate form of martial arts.

The plot of Gymkata is somehow amazingly more farfetched than this concept. Thomas plays, what else, a world-class gymnast who is somehow decided to be the United States’ best hope at coming out on top of Russia at a high-stakes martial arts tournament that will decide the fate of a nuclear engagement.

3

Riki-Oh: The Story Of Ricky

Amazingly Violent And Larger Than Life

Perhaps being based on the manga series of the same name can help explain some of the absurdity of Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky. The film seems to be reasonable enough in its premise, centering on a man named Ricky who is imprisoned in a ᴅᴇᴀᴅly for-profit penitentiary for taking revenge on the man who killed his girlfriend.

What this logline doesn’t reveal is the absurdity of Ricky’s power level, able to shrug off razor blades, glᴀss, and even bullets with his superhuman physique. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky features some of the most grotesque violence ever rendered with some of the cheapest effects around, culminating in an unbelievable final battle.

2

The Legend Of The 7 Golden Vampires

A Hilariously Weird Mash-Up Of Two Iconic Studios

Considering how iconic they both were in the ’70s, a joint production between the illustrious Shaw Brothers studios in Hong Kong, known for their martial arts films, and the work of Britain’s Hammer Films, known for horror hits like Dracula, should have been a winning combo. But in The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, the two mix like oil and water.

Teaming Peter Cushing’s vampire hunter Van Helsing up with a family of kung fu masters to take down Dracula himself, The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires is like a beautiful disaster. Watching Cushing stand around totally lost in the midst of high-flying kung fu action is simply too entertaining to pᴀss up on.

1

Master Of The Flying Guillotine

A Sequel That Outdoes The Original In Strangeness

The sequel to Wang Yu’s One-Armed Boxer, Master of the Flying Guillotine is a foundational film when it comes to so-bad-they’re-good kung fu classics. Here, Wang Yu’s one-armed kung fu expert is sought for revenge by the master of the ᴅᴇᴀᴅly flying guillotine, a wicked contraption that acts as a bladed ranged weapon capable of taking off heads with ease.

The vengeance seeker in question is blind, causing him to indiscriminately kill one-armed men with his insidious weapon. The martial arts techniques of this film need to be seen to be believed, from inflating oneself like a balloon to extending elastic arms to ᴅᴇᴀᴅly hair-braids used to choke and constrict; it simply doesn’t get ironically better than this.