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Watch Kung Fury, 2015's greatest '80s action movie, right now

Watch Kung Fury, 2015's greatest '80s action movie, right now

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Kung Fury might be the greatest '80s action movie the '80s never produced. The Kickstarted movie, which premiered at Cannes this month, features smoky alleyways, a city ravaged by murderous arcade cabinets, a cop with the head of a Triceratops, and a huge number of neatly trimmed mustaches. Only one man can save the world — the eponymous Kung Fury — and you can now see his escapades in their entirety on YouTube after its TV debut.

After being bitten by a cobra and struck by lightning at the same time as his police partner was chopped in half by a sword-wielding kung fu master, Kung Fury is working as a cop in 1985-era Miami. The city has kept its palm trees and beaches, but has changed in other, fairly notable ways. Everything's bathed in a pink or orange neon light, for one, and there's a huge shaolin temple rising high above the ground that residents might not recognize. That temple is Kung Fury's home, but he doesn't stay there long. His mission takes him on a quest through cyberspace, before ending in a climatic showdown in a secret underground bunker that pits dinosaurs, Norse gods, and cyborg hackers against Hitler and an army of his gas-masked goons.

The result is particularly impressive considering director and star David Sandberg doesn't actually know any kung fu. Certainly, any shortcomings in his technique are covered up with liberal use of modern visual effects, or wiped away with tracking errors and frequent interruptions of fuzz, making it look like the movie's been copied straight from a VHS. Just in case it couldn't get any more '80s, Sandberg also secured the services of David Hasselhoff for the movie's theme song, the synth-heavy slice of retro pop that is "True Survivor."