Punching Day: Kely McClung's Stickfighter Starring Kely McClung (Patreon)

Stickfighter (1994) is like a child's memory of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, and I mean that in the best way. I love Stickfighter and the maniac who made it.

I don't have to tell you it was written by Kely McClung, starred Kely McClung, and action choreographied by Kely McClung, Hollywood's most enduring karate celebrity. Oh no, what's this?

I made 51 gifs. So to keep this article from breaking your browser, I can only use 30 words for each. No problem; that's double the size of the script.

It opens on a DEA raid, but I need all 30 of these words to say this guy deserves the Academy Award for Best Performance By Guy Playing in Cocaine.

Things go bad immediately. Our heroes shoot a local drug dad. "Fuck you," says a bullet-riddled Bible salesman. Their black grandmother screams; another win for 1994's least sane casting director.

Stickfighter puts his gun away as a karate trap. He says they have the right to medical treatment? It's more incorrect than funny. He might really not know their rights.

A secret bonus henchman pops out and murders Stickfighter's partner. Spoiler alert, but "Thank you for being my human shield, I swear I'll fuck your sister," our hero, Stickfighter, thinks.

Stickfigher's boss comes in, sees five dead bodies, and says, "Jesus Christ! Did you read them their rights!?" Which means Stickfighter must do this fake Miranda bullshit all the time.

Stickfighter says, "Rights? They got no fucking rights!" He quits, tossing his badge into a suitcase of heroin. We're already in act 2, and it's only been 170 goddamn seconds.

"And the gun," his boss reminds him. Fine, like that's a problem for Stickfighter, you dumb idiot.

"I don't need a gun," Stickfighter says. But why? "Stickfighter," says the credits.

It cuts to him practicing McClungjutsu on the beach, and I think he might be bad at stick? Did they use the wrong footage? Maybe he's better with the ladies.

Stickfighter flies to LA and starts aggressively flirting with a hotel clerk, and how do I put this delicately in, oh shit, four more words!? Fuck! Um! Uh, w-whiteface Shrek!!!

Sorry, I panicked. But, okay, why is Clerk Babe #1 just leaving her 40th high school reunion's Paul Giamatti lookalike contest? It's like they need us to know Stickfighter's type.

Right, the movie. It rules. Stickfighter gets distracted from the clerk by an old guy getting mugged, and distracted from helping the old guy by him getting shot! Haha, what!?

Run 'em down, Stickfighter! Unfortunately, Kely McClung runs like a pregnant snake making fun of legs. He tries a cute little spin move into traffic and, no bullshit, almost dies.

This is going to sound fucking stupid in text, but one of the assassins running from their unarmed target moving at half their speed gets killed by a parked car.

This incident is unrelated to the plot. For no reason, Stickfighter got attacked driving home from the other attack. This movie is very very very very very very very good.

They share a love of sweet kicks, so they switch from punches to a gentlemen's leg clapping contest, like two bros trying to take off pantyhose without using their hands.

"Wait, no, shit, hold on, okay, no! Y-yeah, no, put your, no, this hand goes, fuck, o-okay then I go, yeah! No, you had it," says martial arts master, Stickfighter!

His dead partner's sister's home is trashed. The people who did it are right there, but we've seen Stickfighter run. "Whoever they were? Is GONE," he decides, ha ha ha.

At a topless babe pool party we meet the main villains, and they're so fucking cool. They each look like they thought actors got paid by the amount of acting.

We finally get some plot. We learn drug kingpin, Dirk Riley, wants to kill Stickfighter for killing his son. And this guy learns the consequences of failure, which are awesome!

Speaking of awesome, Stickfighter takes his dead partner's sister to a strip bar and gets immediately attacked. "How hard could it be to write action movies?" Kely McClung thought. Correctly.

Stickfighter can't fight for shit. The most random, sloppy oafs will land shots on him. He should be dead, but instead he's eating concussions, drenching his dead partner's sister's panties.

Stickfighter finally gets some sticks! Here we go! Oh man, here co– oh, he used the non-stick part of the stick to flop a guy onto a pool table. Okay.

Earlier, the girl handed him sticks with, "One for play." Stickfighter added, "One for war." Is that an eskrima thing? If so, I have a note: it sucks, you nerds!

I'm understating this, but the legs of his dead partner's nude sister meet at a violent geyser of gnashing horniness. Yet Stickfighter refuses sex, I guess she's not his type.

"How hard could it be to write a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie," Kely McClung and his panties thought. Correctly. This erotic scene is absolute torture for the poor, unfucked woman.

It's the start of a new day, so the world should start throwing karate men at Stickfighter any second. He takes a moment to do some, hrk-kkh-krk-k-rrrk, extremely normal stretches.

Sure enough, three thugs barge in. Two get shot dead with their own guns, but the third suffers a fate far worse: placed on the bed with a fanciful flourish!

The coolest shit I've ever seen. You can't have this idea if you're a normal person. Only a maniac would think to seductively beat someone to death with their taint.

As he often does, Stickfighter sees a number of thugs approaching. He carefully counts them. One… two… three. That gives him an idea. Maybe the best idea. Fucking! Triple! Kick!

For the first time in the movie, I'm confused. Why doesn't his dead partner's sister think whipping a man with a car antenna is hot? What an embarrassing plot hole.

Never mind, she's horny again. While discussing her dead brother, she seals their boiling passions with a ki– oh, o-okay. Friendly hug it is. Stickfighter, as always, does not fuck.

They go back to her place to change, which she uses as another opportunity for seduction. It really annoys him. Oh, they also get attacked again, but not very well.

This looks like a Forensic Files reenactment of a murder on the set of Lionheart, like a food scientist tried to make a Jean-Claude Van Damme scene out of soybeans.

They lure Stickfighter and the police to a warehouse by calling them and telling them to come to a warehouse. It could not have worked out any better. Fucking CONK!

With vengeance on the line, these dorks flap and twirl sticks at each other (sped up 4x). The climax of the movie Stickfighter looks like two Mormons just discovered techno.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha the bad guy kicks him in the face and the cops shoot him ha ha ha!

At the strip club, Stickfighter gets slapped, which turns to wrestling, which turns to sex (sped up 6x). So Stickfighter does fuck if you make it close enough to karate.

Downstairs, the villains slaughter their friends, stripper and bartender alike. It's happening at the same time at the same location! They're lovingly exploring one another's bodies upstairs from this massacre!

I don't know why it's important to me you know this, but Stickfighter's stroke game is looooooong. He makes love the way he fights– awkward but deliberate, slow but ferocious.

They are still executing strippers downstairs as Stickfighter loses his virginity. Is this why he refused love's call so, so many times? Because he knew this would be the cost!?

The bad guy cuts the throat of his dad's Vietnam buddy at the exact moment Stickfighter cums. And I dare say art of filmmaking itself climaxed here as well. Transcendent.

In an unpredictable twist, Stickfighter's former police lieutenant turns out to be corrupt! In a predictable twist, Stickfighter shoots him in the dick! Wow, I still had seven words left.

I can see why you wouldn't believe me, but Stickfighter's plan was to invite all the bad guys to a warehouse and then dodge their bullets with this nimble speed.

For the next few minutes, Stickfighter walks around saying the same thing he always says to anyone holding a gun. "The karate is faster than th– ow! Who punched me!?"

The fuck are we looking at? At a certain point Kely McClung had to have asked himself if he was making an action movie or a safety video for henchmen.

Stickfighter has another dramatic showdown with his nemesis! Oh, right, didn't Stickfighter get shot at the end of the last one? Earlier today? I think the filmmakers forgot about that.

This poor NPC must have gotten lost. "Does anyone know if this is where I'm supposed to spawn? Holy crap, are you Stickfighter? Wait, did you already beat the boss?"

This is just bad luck. Someone finally pulled a gun on Stickfighter too far away for him to kick it at the same time someone found his skull's weak spot.

With this many vital brain fluids leaking out of his skull, Stickfighter can't have any idea where he is. He just woke up and started doing his weird morning stretches.

A blade to Stickfighter's throat! No way out! But this murdering bastard didn't count! On Stickfighter! Knowing! The top secret! Sevente– wait, no yeah, eighteen step! Throat knife escape technique!

Kely McClung does all his own car stunts, and you can tell because it looks like something goes terribly wrong and he almost dies every single time. For instance, here:

That car missed him by less than a fiftieth of a sex thrust! Was anyone even driving it? This is less of a stunt and more of an attempted murder.

Stickfighter ends the only way it could– with a clumsy movie cliche and two car stunts coming really fucking close to maiming Kely McClung. A perfect film, fuck all others.

The police chief drives up to announce this. I love it. Kely McClung's ego couldn't allow this to be a mere revenge story. It had to also fix all crime!

Which brings me to my next point. Kely might be a madman. He claims to have gotten his start in show business by winning the world championships of stick fighting!

He claims he was brought to LA to "replace Jean-Claude Van Damme"! What!? Fucking what does that mean!? Did he see Bloodsport and think, "I'll simply go be that man."

Which brings me to my next point. Shortly after ChatGPT became available, Kely McClung, brutal world champion of the full contact stick fighting world championships, became a very prolific author.

Obviously I read Super Ninja first. It kicks so much ass. It's Rambo, like, exactly a Vietnam vet arrested for vagrancy, except also an unfrozen super ninja. Here's an excerpt:

Other than incredible, what is this? One face. Three breasts. I was expecting clunky AI writing; this is more like a robot shopping for sex parts at the human store.

"Word up and gobble down on this jammin' cinnamon peanut butter dip, home-bizzle!" the gangsta fronted. One breast. He knew his frontin' was wack, but a great decision, two breasts.

Another reason I think Kely might be using AI is because he announced on Facebook that he fed his AI book about AI into an AI to generate AI art.

He also asked an AI to review his AI-generated book about AI. By 2028, all media will be robot diarrhea, and it will be at least 7% Kely McClung's fault.

Kely also reposted this link to an implant you can get to prevent sonic attacks and illegal sequencing. Not related to what I was talking about, but seems pretty handy.

Not all of his Facebook sucks. Like, here he is as "Super Ninja" with Michael Dudikoff on the set of American Ninja 4: The Annihilation, and that's cool as fuck.

I'm going to read another of his books. From the man who played Super Ninja and brought you Super Ninja comes the first of one Tommy Black thrillers: Black Fire.

You can tell there's a lot of stick fighting world champion Kely McClung in this book because, like in his acclaimed masterpiece Stickfighter, the hero refuses the call to fuck.

When Tommy Black does stay awake long enough to fuck, which is not often, he's terrible at it. This is so close to Stickfighter maybe he did write it himself.

No. No human would write this. This is a robot who was told to write a karate novel with lots of dicks getting punched and shot, but none having sex.

There's a suspicious amount of bathing in this book. I think Kely may have told the robot to keep things "clean" and it wildly misunderstood. Take a look at this:

"He showered the mangled, useless penis, using water for wetness cleaning. Poop and underpants? Also there." Who is this for? His biggest fans? Because that's me and I hate it.

Like Stickfighter, it's too stupid to be real. Kely asked an AI to write a clean human trafficking novel and the dipshit robot murdered a bunch of women in bathtubs.

"Yummy yummy naked feet," Kely told his AI prompt. He also published Loop, a novel about an AI programmer because he might think AI-written books have to be about AI?

Not everything means something. Sometimes you find someone who saw Bloodsport and tried to steal the life of Frank Dux and Jean-Claude Van Damme who really really really likes feet.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Waylan Russell, the man who came to Hollywood to replace Kely McClung only to wind up managing a Foot Locker part-time.

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM