Why US distributors used sex to sell martial arts movies, and some of the other twists on kung fu film posters

When adult-film theatres in American cities had to stop showing X-rated porn they switched to martial arts movies, but sexed up their plots on posters

That wasn’t the only twist distributors practised – movies were creatively called sequels or titles changed to appeal to African-Americans or fans of Bruce Lee

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A promotional poster for Angela Mao Ying’s Lady Whirlwind, which was marketed in the US as Deep Thrust. US distributors oversold or distorted martial arts movie plots on posters.

Published: 4:15am, 10 Apr 2022

New York-based librarian Chris Poggiali’s expansive collection of martial arts posters tells an alternative history of kung fu films.

Poggiali’s posters show how American distributors, sometime unscrupulously, tried to attract US viewers to Hong Kong films by adding liberal dashes of sex and violence to the posters, changing the names of the films, and even lying about the content.

Poggiali’s collection has been 40 years in the making – he started collecting back in the 1980s, using the money he earned from his newspaper delivery round – and also features many kung fu newspaper advertisements culled from microfilm in various libraries and archives.

Some of his collection can be seen in the film history book These Fists Break Bricks. Poggiali talked the Post through his alternative, poster-driven history of Hong Kong kung fu films.

There’s an amazing poster tagline for The Dragon’s Fatal Fist that says, “New York’s got Harlem, but no ghetto in America can compare to the rat-hole slums of Shanghai.” Did distributors often try to localise the film’s marketing like that?