Martial Art

A great collection of kung-fu on film

ung Fu Video and DVD isn’t the easiest place to spot from the street. To reach it, you have to climb a staircase from a jewelry shop at street level. But hang a left at the landing and say hello to what may be the best selection of kung-fu movies in town, ranging from the familiar (Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee) to cult classics (The Happiness of the Katakuris), all for sale, alongside display cases full of knives and other kung-fu gadgets. It’s a simple room filled floor to ceiling with DVDs, the office walled off by a beaded curtain. If the definition of a cult classic is a sleeper that becomes extremely popular with a select audience, then this place is a cult classic in itself. Horton

Shhhh! The store is owned by a corporation,
BC Kung Fu, which bought it from the previous owner, who believed that Downtown Crossing had a void that needed to be filled. Mission accomplished.

Shhhh! Visitors to a country guesthouse
keep mysteriously turning up dead, and
the frantic family that owns the place
tries to avoid attention by burying the
bodies out back. It’s actually a comedy.

Shhh who knew

Until the early 1980s, audiences packed no fewer than three all-Chinese cinemas in Chinatown that were a center of the neighborhood's social life, often to watch kung-fu films. The moviehouses abruptly closed with the advent of the VCR, but the Asian Community Development Corporation shows martial-arts movies outdoors for free for a week every August.