Does your dad ever embarrass you by telling wild, obviously fake stories of an over glorified past? If so, this movie may bring back haunting memories only this time – the stories are real! Well, sort of…
Terry Yue Siu-bo (played by Anthony Wong) is a single father to two troublesome teenagers who seem extremely well trained in martial arts. Terry loves to tell stories of how he took on a gang of bad guys as a secret agent with his underground base of operations. These stories have absolutely no consistency as he pulls weapons out of nowhere and flies about in a ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style’, almost unbeatable in combat.
But everyone just has a chuckle at his ‘tall tales’.
But the shit goes down! When an older agent is being chased by some bad guys out for revenge, our single dad must pull out his lethal skills to protect himself and his fellow agent from danger before being outnumbered and captured.
Luckily, his two kids Natalie and Nicky are freakin’ deadly, beating up any who attack them and they decide they must forumulate a plan to rescue their old man from the eveil Quadriplegic bad guy named Rocco.
It’s all about Family values
Teenagers bicker and fight, Dads are embarrassing and unfortunately Mum isn’t around to balance things out because she passed away some years ago.
The forewarning speech is given by the Terry to his kids telling him to learn to get along as he “may not always be there” – so naturally he manages to not be there shortly after due to his kidnapping – it’s almost an exact mirror of 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when Splinter disappears.
So Natalie and Nicky start to look out for each other and form a tight knit team but it’s all pretty superficial. I don’t sense a hell of a lot of substance in this film as it seems be driven more by action and also light-hearted comedy.
While it’s not all out sitcom style comedy, the family events and general back forth between all of the characters is very light hearted in nature and offers a few laughs, but it not enough for me to want to call it a ‘kung fu comedy’. It’s more of a standard run of the mill kung fu film which doesn’t offer much of a unique story or style, but it’s still relatively entertaining.
Not bad, not great.
The Action?
Anthony Wong (the Dad) isn’t too bad in this, but the kids are better!
These kids offer a high level of energy in their fights and I was a little impressed. While it’s not climbing the list of top action flicks, it has value.
The kids do perform most of the fights and even the final fight relies heavily on their performance. In particular one young boy, son of the main villiain, shows off some the most impressive work in the film with some incredible bow staff work. It’s fast and impressive to watch as he throws it around with ease and ferocity.
The action is nice, well done and worth a watch as a bit of time killer.
Overall?
It’s ok. A bit of fun to watch and one of the better ‘on the fence’ films. Check out if you have some time to kill.
On Blu Ray –
Region A (US & Canada)
House of Fury [Blu-ray]
Region B (UK, Australia, New Zealand, Europe etc)
House Of Fury [Blu-ray] [2005]
On DVD –
Region 1 (US & Canada)
House of Fury
Region 2 (UK, Europe, etc)
House Of Fury [DVD] [2005]
Region 4 (Australia, New Zealand, etc)
