If someone walks in on you while watching a kung fu moving picture, they're likely to make a remark something along the lines of "What the hell are you watching?" There's zilch to justify such a disdainful attitude—kicking others in the face while grunting and whooping loudly is a perfectly normal activity for nearly people, and the depiction of it in cinematic form is as venerable an art as ballet or professional knife throwing. And actually, what sort of person is perplexed by Drunken Master anyway? That's, like, Kung Fu Movie 101 correct there.

The true addict dives much deeper, into the arcane and indecipherable depths of a martial arts celluloid sea, and comes gasping back up with artifacts and then weird, so unnerving and incomprehensible that even a doctor of abnormal psychology might recoil and gaze into the middle distance in tranquillity horror. Or merely shame y'all further by making cracks about your questionable taste in movies, assuming information technology's the same person who walked in on you watching Drunken Master in the get-go identify. Whatsoever of the following eight movies on this list is liable to arm-twist either response.

8. Master of the Flying Guillotine

master-of-the-flying-guillo

When former Hong Kong activeness star (and declared gangster) Jimmy Wang Yu began working in Taiwan to pick upwardly the pieces of his film career, he spearheaded the production of some…interesting motion pictures. Alongside the fairly loopy Fantasy Mission Strength, Principal of the Flight Guillotine might be the most unusual of those.

A sequel to Wang Yu's 1-Armed Boxer, the film opens with the titular character angrily launching out the roof of a thatched hut (fifty-fifty though there's probably a perfectly good door) in gild to have revenge on Wang Yu's ane-armed kung fu primary, currently busying himself education martial arts students to walk on ceilings and walls through the magic of proper breathing technique.

Things just get odder from at that place. Flashbacks to the previous film tell the states that Wang Yu had killed two of the guillotine main's best students, one of whom could inflate himself like a human hot air balloon (an prototype borrowed by John Carpenter in Big Problem In Little Red china). The evil chief spends part of the run fourth dimension decapitating random one-armed people with his bladed birdcage-on-a-chain. It's an understandable error—he'due south totally blind.

Later on in the story, the villain employs the help of a samurai, an expert Thai boxer, and a "yogi" who's power of Reed Richards arm-stretching clearly influenced the character of Dhalsim from the Street Fighter video games. After dispatching these, Wang Yu takes on the villain through the utilise of kung fu, trip-wire hatchet launchers, and strategically placed bamboo poles.

This picture has rightly gone on to become a cult classic, a favorite of Quentin Tarantino's, and echoes of it have periodically turned up in popular culture since its release in 1976.

7. Taoism Drunkard

Taoism Drunkard

Amid slapstick routines that make the Three Stooges look stately and restrained, at that place is a story that involves an alcoholic martial arts master looking for virginal boys in society to win his brother's forgiveness, a job he undertakes by systematically inspecting children'due south penises. It's of import to mention he drives a buck-toothed, bamboo Fiat.

The flick's immature protagonist lives with his mom, who trains him in kung fu by running him through an obstacle course that includes Death Star compactor walls, a bed of hot coals, and a black beach ball monster with feet and a chomping oral fissure full of abrupt teeth. What else? How nigh a caped villain whose weapon of pick is a metallic sphere full of flight Phantasm balls. He had the palms of his easily burned off on a heated playground slide/torture device, so who tin arraign him if he's a little temperamental?

The fight scenes are fast-paced, visually inventive and tight, simply the sort of affair one expects from the great Yuen Woo Ping. None of this makes a whole lot of sense, and it's probably not supposed to.

six. Return of the Bastard Swordsman

Return of the Bastard Swordsman

It'southward pretty mutual for people in kung fu movies to take superpowers—they fly, punch copse in half, whatever. There is a man in Return of the Bastard Swordsman who has mastered the ability of the silkworm, and he uses that ability to produce silk from his hands at will. Don't laugh—he can spear enemies through the torso with solid shafts of silk, or hurl a massive cocoon at them.

Set against this formidable super-pugilist is an evil cult master with the ability to make an opponent'southward heart explode, causing him to vomit claret. For some reason he accomplishes this by repeatedly puffing up his chest like a toad. But by playing large taiko drums can ane hope to counter his attack.

This flick, released by Shaw Brothers in the mid-eighties, is a prime example of what filmmakers tin do using but practical furnishings, with just a smattering of ILM-style visuals, particularly during a major fight scene midway through the story. Breakneck one-time school personal combat combines with wirework, flying boulders, whirling silken cocoons every bit big every bit an Oldsmobile, and general magic martial arts craziness to brand a viewing feel that is delightful, compelling, and visually one of a kind.

Although this is a sequel to the Shaw Brothers film Bastard Swordsman, it isn't necessary to take seem the first film to thoroughly enjoy this one.

v. Chinese Super Ninjas, aka V Chemical element Ninjas

Five Element Ninjas

Workaholic managing director Chang Cheh was probably best known for his seminal epic 5 Deadly Venoms, where characters take frog, cadger and centipede-based martial arts abilities, simply that's far from the weirdest thing he ever did.

Chinese Super Ninjas (equally it was known in the States) is a head-spinning celebration of the garishly bizarre, a story involving a kung fu clan that defeats a group of Japanese martial arts experts in what was intended to be a friendly demonstration of skills, but naturally ends up being a modest blood bathroom.

In retaliation, an club of ninjas representing the v elements (h2o, earth, fire, wood, and gold) seek revenge on the kung fu experts, nearly wiping out their whole school. The but hope is for the remaining students to seek out a Chinese master of ninjutsu who tin teach them the techniques they need to know to destroy their antagonists.

What sets Super Ninjas apart is its full devotion to fabulous imagery and visual splendor (within the limits of a typical Shaw Brothers budget). The ninjas are wholly fanciful creations, attacking in gold lamé outfits armed with umbrellas that shoot knives, camouflaging themselves with red smoke bombs and spearing opponents from underground similar angry gophers.

The stagey appearance of the sets gives one the feeling of watching an specially violent, kaleidoscopic play, performed by actors dressed like members of a 70'southward funk group.

4. The Seventh Curse

The Seventh Curse

Not a kung fu movie per se, but with enough martial arts lumped in with myriad other elements to requite it a pass. This is a little bit of everything: kung fu, comedy, sexploitation, shoot 'em up and horror gorefest, with just a fiddling fleck of Raiders of the Lost Ark and James Bail thrown in for adept mensurate.

A young archaeologist travels to southeast Asia and accidentally witnesses a supernatural ritual forbidden to outsiders. As punishment, he is struck with a blood curse that causes bloody boils to explode on the surface of his skin. If this happens seven times, he'll die, then he embarks on a journey to get the spell reversed, part of which requires him to swing effectually similar Spiderman on a behemothic Buddha statue while fighting hostile monks, to grapple with a skeleton that knows karate (a funny nod to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), and avoid being eviscerated past a flying baby-monster.

It's hard not to be a little charmed past the nutty, kitchen-sink arroyo the filmmakers take to this project, even going so far as to accept the villain vanquish a bunch of children in a large stone juicer to collect their claret, so later on plough into a bat/alien hybrid that Chow Yun Fat, in a cameo as a professor of the supernatural, blows upward with a bazooka. Great R-rated fun for the whole family.

3. Ix Demons

Nine Demons

Largely considered to be managing director Chang Cheh's worst picture show, this is still an immensely fun, completely off-the-wall motion-picture show that is difficult to describe to anyone who's never taken psychoactive drugs.

Joey (yep, in the English language dub in that location's a Chinese man living during the Ming Dynasty named Joey) falls through a cleft in the earth after a band of thugs murders his master's family unit, and meets the Devil, who like everyone else in the cast is dressed like a 70'southward-era Vegas wizard. He makes a deal with Lucifer/Doug Henning that grants him special powers including, merely non limited to, a necklace of tiny skulls that transforms into acrobatic vampire children.

These are the motion-picture show's most interesting—if very depression-budget—visual, accompanied by psychedelic rave lighting and the sort of audio effects one commonly associates with a kids' show about extraterrestrial robots. A swordsman named Roland (again, this is the Ming Dynasty) tries to cease him, ultimately confronting him with the help of some friends and a magical priest, on the surface of a "pond" that is really only a large soapy puddle on a sound stage the actors are obliged to scoot around on similar 4-year-olds skating across a linoleum floor in their socks.

In spite of the WTF premise, information technology's difficult to fault a movie that tries to do something so unique, fifty-fifty if it doesn't quite succeed on all points.

2. Encounters of the Spooky Kind, aka Spooky Encounters

Spooky Encounters

Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan's elder classmate in the Peking Opera School and the co-founder of the comedic kung fu movie genre, also helped create the genre of martial arts/horror, oftentimes featuring traditional Chinese vampires called jiangshi who hop effectually instead of walk and hold their arms extended in front of them like the old Universal Studios Mummy.

Sammo plays a man whose wife is adulterous on him, and her lover decides to have him bumped off by hiring a sorcerer to con him into spending a dark in a haunted cemetery. At that place he does battle with a jiangshi under the sorcerer'southward control, fighting information technology with a combination of kung fu, eggs, and dog's claret.

The sorcerer's estranged apprentice tries to help him, culminating in a showdown wherein Sammo and an opponent are compelled to fight while possessed by a serial of war gods, and the two wizards preside over the gainsay from towers of scaffolding.

Hung, who was director equally well as fight choreographer, puts together some weird, unforgettable set pieces, particularly in the final fight and during a scene where he and a reanimated corpse engage in a skewed recreation of the Marx Brothers mirror gag. Genuinely worth repeat viewing.

ane. Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky

The Story of Ricky

It was probably inevitable that we would come up to this, one of the near outrageous and over-the-tiptop martial arts movies always made.

As ridiculous as this film is, information technology's too strangely prescient: Ricky is sent to a privatized prison house in a 1991 version of 2001, which isn't too far off base from where the actual The states prison system is going. Nevertheless, cipher else bears even the slightest resemblance to reality.

Ricky, through the apparent power of qigong, is near immortal, enduring gunshot wounds, powdered glass to the eyes, and a mouthful of razorblades, among other indignities. Fights include a disemboweled man attempting to strangle Ricky with a length of his own intestine, a humongous thug getting his jaw punched off, and the evil, opium-cultivating prison house warden turning into a demonic Hulk monster in the middle of the final fight, just to be dumped into a behemothic meat grinder. The gore is every bit as disgusting equally annihilation in the filmographies of George Romero or Lucio Fulci, but many times funnier.

Riki-Oh is based on a manga, a fact that is most apparent in the bizarre scenarios and character designs, which have a kind of Fist of the North Star flavor. Highly recommended to anyone who likes to express joy while watching someone take a board with nails in it to the face.

Writer Bio: Scot Mason lives in Tucson, AZ. He is the author of the blogs Hawaii Timewarp, Eastern Trails, Scotty'south Movies N' Tunes, and Tucson Only Kind Of Sucks. He once lived in a shack in the middle of an abandoned sugercane field full of giant spiders and rats, considering YOLO.