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Todd Brown of Twitch Film also praised the film, calling it “a thirty-minute long, nonstop assault of some of the most astounding visual gags ever assembled in one place. Kung Fury knows its audience, knows it damn well, and while it has little to offer to anyone outside of its particular niche, for people within that niche this is absolute gold.” Scott Weinberg of Nerdist Industries called it “a 31-minute masterpiece that feels like it fell right out of 1985 and hit just about every awesome b-movie genre on the way down.” Tyler Richardson of Latino-Review gave the film an A, commenting that “What Black Dynamite got so perfect about Blaxploitation films, this does wonderfully for 80’s cop movies.”

Kung Fury has an 8.3 on IMDB (the same score held by revered classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Raging Bull (1980), Chinatown (1974), Metropolis (1927), Die Hard (1988), and the Seventh Seal (1957)) and no critical reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, however, 99% of Rotten Tomatoes users say that they WANT to see Kung Fury! By June 1, the film had received over 10 million views on YouTube and as of July 7, 2015, that number increased to 17 million.

Critics and audiences alike responded well to Kung Fury’s hilarious and awesome homage to 80s martial arts and police action films. Kung Fury made it’s debut at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and premiered on YouTube, Steam, SVT2 in Sweden and the El Rey Network in the US, on May 28, 2015. Many of the backers for the film are assisted the production as extras and one even lent his white Lamborghini Countach replica to Sandberg for interior shots and for the music video for “True Survivor”, one of the songs featured in the film. Originally Joanna Häggblom played Katana as seen in the trailer, but because Helene Ahlson replaced Häggblom for the actual film, visual scratches and distortion effects were added to the scene to mask the cast change. One instance of this effect is in the scene where the Viking Babe Katana summons Thor. In keeping with the film’s 80s theme, the visual effects artists softened the film clarity and added videotape wear effects to give the illusion of it being a worn VHS copy being played on an old VCR. Many of the characters’ voices were intentionally dubbed over as well to give the film a cheaper feel, with some of the non-English speaking actors reciting their lines phonetically. Because Sandberg could only afford one police uniform and limited costumes, many of the crowd, stunt, and creature scenes, such as the police precinct shooting or Barbarianna riding her giant wolf, involve heavy compositing and green screen effects.

Due to his limited budget, the majority of the film was shot at Sandberg’s office in Umeå, Sweden. He initially spent $5,000 producing and shooting footage with his friends that later became the trailer used in the Kickstarter campaign.

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Sandberg himself is a Swedish filmmaker who quit his commercial job directing TV commercials and music videos in 2012 to focus on writing a script for an action comedy set in the 80s. The Kickstarter exceeded its target goal of $200,000 but fell short of the feature film goal of $1 million, with a total of $630,019 in pledges from 17,713 backer. Kung Fury is a 2015 Swedish martial arts comedy short film written, directed, and starring David Sandberg that was crowdfunded through Kickstarter from December 2013 to January 2014. “I decided I would use my new super kung-fu powers to fight crime.

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