10 Awesome Films That Never Got The Cult Following They Deserved
1. The Man With The Iron Fists (2012)
The Film:
This hip-hop inspired kung-fu flick is a genre film like no other, set in 19th-century China with a soundtrack by director/star RZA. The Wu-Tang Clan founder plays a nomad that settles in a jungle village, where he puts his skills as a blacksmith to use. His is soon sucked into local troubles when radical tribal factions force him to fashion elaborate tools of destruction for their upcoming campaign of war.
Knowing he must take action before conflict tears his new home apart, the blacksmith channels an ancient energy to transform himself into a human weapon - the titular man with the iron fists - and uses his new power to defend his adopted people from an army of soulless villains. This homage to bloody martial arts epics manages to capture the feel of classic Asian cinema while still being undeniably unique.
Why It Never Got The Following It Deserves:
The only people who really knew what to expect from The Man with the Iron Fists were fans of RZA and the Wu-Tang Clan. The New York-based rap group have always flavoured their music with oriental samples and their albums are filled with skits from various old kung fu movies, which is where the name of the group originated.
RZA became interested in blending his love of hip-hop and kung-fu when he was approached to do the soundtrack for Takashi Okazaki's award winning animé series Afro Samurai, the story of a black samurai who wanders a desolate world looking for the man who killed his father. The similarities between Okazaki's animation and RZA's film are blatant, but if Quentin Tarantino can get away with ripping off samurai movies by calling it pastiche then why couldn't RZA?
The fact is, he just wasn't well-known (or well-respected) enough in the film world for this kind of unusual project to be given a serious chance. Even with an A-lister in Russell Crowe on the cast and 'Quentin Tarantino presents' added to the trailer (he and RZA are apparently good buddies) the movie failed to impress, with viewers seeing it as a bad movie instead of a good movie paying tribute to bad ones.