The Smoke Master

[Drunk Monk]

The Smoke Master



Ikr?

This looks like a different film. 

This Brazilian indie had DM written all over it. It’s low budget and rough on the edges, about what you’d expect from a stoner Kung Fu flick. But the cast knows Kung Fu & stoner culture. The beginning is a typical B Kung Fu film - a KF group that practices in the park is hassled by some gang thugs. It’s connected to a 3 generation curse, which really makes little sense but you just gotta roll with it. 

The fight choreo is crude, yet mostly because the actors are new and the cinematography is middling at best. There’s a few good exchanges, but it’s amateur, especially compared to today’s standards. The actors clearly practice their respective styles but lack the crispness of seasoned stunt people.

It picks up when the smoke master appears, maybe half an hour into the film, and it flips to a stoner film.  The training sequences include rolling joints and grinding herb. There’s a lot of gratuitous inhaling. There’s also a humongous joint, the size of a duraflame log, but having seen these in real life, it wasn’t as funny to me. In fact, none of the humor hit home with me. I was only amused by the crossover. It mightve worked if I took a puff every time some one took a puff in the film, but that game would be better served in One Love.

There's lots of Easter eggs for fans of either genre. For example, there’s these two dealers that supply the smoke master - Zhan and Zhuang. The cfs will get that joke. One wears a bandana headband and the other, a toque, t-shirt and suspenders - it’s a Cheech & Chong homage. 

The dialog is mostly Portuguese and mandarin - I always think I can understand Portuguese because I understand some Spanish, but it always loses me in the process. 

Not D00M recommended.

Seen on hoopla.