THE VICTIM (1980)
Directed by: Sammo Hung
Starring: Sammo Hung, “Beardy” Leung Kar-yan, Karl Maka, Wilson Tong

Kung fu? Kung fun! Big, tubby Sammo Hung plays a country bumpkin in a flopsy mopsy haircut with blistering kung fu gifts. Vowing that the man who can beat him will be his master (“sifu” in Cantonese - you'll hear it about a million times in this picture) he sets out to get in a bunch of fights because, let’s face it, every man wants to meet his master. Ten minutes, and a dozen high-impact falls, later he's run through the short list and they're all begging for mercy. Then he bumps into Beardy (Leung Kar-yan) and is soundly trounced by him.

"Sifu!" screams Sammo, falling to his knees.

"Leave me alone, fatty." says Beardy Sifu, and strides away.

Sammo follows. And the movie swings into motion, Sammo scheming to make Leung Kar-yan his sifu, and Leung Kar-yan doing everything short of killing him (okay, he tries that, too) to get away from this ambling pile of pudge.

The student/master relationship is about as sacred as anything is in martial arts movies. The student gives his life to his sifu, and in return his sifu takes care of him and passes on his knowledge. It's a beautiful thing involving timeless rituals, respect, reverence and humility. In The Victim, Sammo gives his master chickens and booze. His master gives him a poke in the nose. "Stop calling me sifu!" he shouts before sending Sammo crashing through a table for the umpteenth time.

The world's finest living action director, Sammo Hung did everything on this movie but serve tea. With its improbable zooms, traumatically racked focus, weird point-of-view shots, and super slo-mo knockout kicks it’s a chocolate box of hyperkinetic energy as it struggles to keep up with Sammo who scurries, scampers, and breakdances across the screen. The fastest living fat man — one-third of what Sammo does here would give men half his size instant coronaries — Sammo is motion personified. The Victim is also one of three movies (all considered classics) that Big Brother Big (as he's known in Hong Kong) starred in and directed in 1980. Like we said: if he wasn't Sammo, he'd be dead.

The comedy is acidic, eating away everything. Everyone is a fool — even Sammo — in a Sammo Hung movie. Every meaningful relationship — a master and his student, two brothers, a wife waiting for her husband on their wedding night — is spun hard and turned into a plateful of weirdy noodles that inevitably winds up in someone's face. In The Victim Sammo dishes up the dumbest, funnest, funkiest kung fu comedy ever seen, topped with cherries and whipped cream, and the whole thing comes flying at your face, right off the screen. To Sammo Hung comedy isn't just a section in the video store, it's a higher calling, and The Victim is his New Testament.