S1E05 - Return of the Kung Fu Dragon
WARNING: PROBLEMATIC LANGUAGE We say "the midget" a lot in the riff. While I'd like to think that we were more speaking to the conceptual movie trope of a "midget" being a wizard's homunculus (a trope this movie 1000% leans into), it still feels really uncomfortable listening back to how often we said it, and wish we had done differently.
About The Movie
On Phoenix Island, a wizard made of beard gets his hand on a magic stick (the dragon, I guess, technically) and helps his buddy take over the island, conquering the emperor and his three generals. A generation later, the children of said generals join forces with their own crazy old man and a disgusting weird little guy... creature... thing that can turn invisible to try to rescue a princess of some sort and defeat the government that's been in power for most of their lives and doesn't appear to actually be evil or doing that bad of a job.
Aside from the stick, there are zero dragons in this movie. There is a LOT of racism though, I think, it's very hard to tell what's actually happening in this movie.
About the Riffs
This movie is our first real entry into one of the two realms that Mystery Science Theater 3000 did not really explore that we wanted to try out - martial arts movies. Sure, they had some Tokusatsu films (Gamera, Godzilla, Time of the Apes, Fugitive Alien) and some movies where people where people knew martial arts (if you count Timothy Van Patten as people) but they never really got down into the nitty gritty grindhouse kick-punch fest with an out-of-tune Guzheng wailing on the soundtrack and subtitles that don't even sort of match what's going on.
This is very much one of those movies. Gloriously, irreverently so. This isn't a noble and profound telling of tales from the Three Kingdoms era. This is the sort of movie where a short person with the face of a middle-aged woman with braided hair is repeatedly called "boy" and punches people in the nuts while cackling.
