- Year: 2003
- Starring: Bruce Li, Yuen Siu Tin
- Running time: 26 minutes
iLL MASTER (the movie formerly known as Blind Fist of Bruce) is the first episode of the Kung Faux hip hop/kung fu comedy TV series from Tommy Boy and Dubtitled. It takes old school kung fu films and edits them down to a half hour show and adds all new dubbing, music, and special effects. With it's fast pacing, split screens, flashy effects, crazy edits and wipes it comes off more like a live action comic book or video game than a TV show. If you have no attention span what-so-ever, than this show is for you. At times that can work against it as all the gimmicks onscreen just distract from the show.
Being part hip hop the Kung Faux shows are dubbed by rap artists such as Biz Markie, Guru, Prince Paul, Sadat X, and others. The website even boasts a cameo by the Black Dragon himself, Ron Van Clief. In keeping with the rap and urban vibe if you will, the voice actors throw in tons of slang and street holla. This pretty funny when you actually understand what the hell they are talking about. Watching this just made me feel so white. I never thought I'd see Yuen Siu Tin saying "I'm gonna sit on the rocks and smoke a bowl.", or Bruce Li telling some guy, "I hit you in the ribs, make your lip bleed nigga!". Then again, maybe that's what they were saying all along in the original Chinese versions. Along with the dubbing Tommy Boy provides all the music which is mostly hip hop with some breaks and guitar riffs thrown in and I found the music to be pretty cool as it just fit the whole package.
As I said iLL MASTER was originally Blind Fist of Bruce. Bruce Li now plays Kick-O and Yuen Siu Tin is ill Master, leader of the new school. If you've seen Blind Fist of Bruce already then you've already seen this, iLL MASTER is just a new interpretation. I had read lots of good things about the Kung Faux series, so I decided to check it out. I found it mildly entertaining, so if you are the fence about this one I would recommend renting it (or catching it on TV!) before buying it. Die hard Bruce Li fans might want to check it out though. Although just watching it greatly expanded my vocabulary.
Bonus DVD info!
Now the DVD is pretty skimpy in terms of content as they only include two episodes on the disc, that's only 60 minutes. Another thing is that there are commercials included in the shows! Yes, you pay to watch commercials. There are only three short commercials per break, but it's still annoying. You think the commercials on there would've paid for the disc giving it a cheaper retail price, but they don't. The main bonus feature is three different karaoke versions that let you ad lib a characters dialogue with existing dialogue or create your own dialogue from scratch. That's off the hook son! Other extras are a coming soon trailer and a music video. The other episode on the disc is Boxcutta which was originally King Boxer starring Meng Fei and Yasuaki Kurata.
"Reviewed" by Keith
"You call that dancin'?! That shit was wack!" - Kong Do
Bruceploitation
