Directed by John Carpenter • 1986 • United States
Starring Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun

John Carpenter goes kung fu with this breathlessly imaginative martial-arts spectacular in which truck-driving tough guy Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) must infiltrate the mystical, spirit-filled underworld of San Francisco’s Chinatown in order to rescue his friend’s fiancée from the clutches of a two-thousand-year-old sorcerer. Russell does an irresistibly goofball send-up of John Wayne–style machismo, while Carpenter revels in taking every martial-arts cliché in the book to giddy extremes.