By Patrick Macias

HOLLYWOOD CAN OVERDOSE on wire fu, Hanes can use Jackie Chan to sell tagless T-shirts, and Keanu can even learn kung fu, but it seems that the West has yet to replicate the intoxicating effects of a truly mad martial arts movie. Offering more than just "you killed my master" plotlines and guys with their shirts off smacking each other around, a great martial arts film should also show you things you've never seen before in a mind-expanding fashion. And when was the last time that happened to you at the multiplex?

Meanwhile, rearranging your brain cells is par for the course at the Four Star Theater, which has once again been struck by "Kung Fu Movie Madness" – a 14-title-strong hodgepodge of flicks from Hong Kong, mainland China, and Japan. On display are not only top stars, top directors, and rare titles, but also many opportunities to reacquaint yourself with what it is, exactly, that Asian movies do so well: showing the human body in motion and depicting the impossible via special effects and camera tricks.

Perhaps no single film in this seven-week series better exemplifies the spirit of kung fu movie madness than 1982's Miracle Fighters. Directed by Yuen Woo-ping (who is sadly now better known for his work as the choreographer for The Matrix), the film is an inferno of magic spells and martial arts that defies any single adjective you can throw at it, with the possible exception of wacky. Overriding a nominal plot about an orphan adopted by a pair of squabbling sorcerers (one looks alarmingly like Quentin Tarantino; the other is Yuen Cheung-yan, the director's brother, in drag) are shoes that turn into fish, urns that transform into ghostly mimes armed with paper swords, and subtitles that say things like "My buttock will bleed till I die." The last couple of reels in particular, during which various demons, magicians, con artists, and acrobats compete in a sorcerers' championship, will have you crawling out of the theater on your hands and knees in ecstasy. Brief warning: this film contains heroic amounts of comedy and gags that some – those who prefer sitcoms, perhaps – might find straight-up stupid. But anyone who believes The Three Stooges was great but could have been improved by an injection of Buñuelian surrealism will find The Miracle Fighters to be the answer to a prayer.

The insane kitchen-sink school of H.K. martial arts, typified by the Yuen clan's earlier, funnier works (among them 1979's Magnificent Butcher, playing June 26), had no problem attracting a worldwide cult audience but was simply too wild and untamed to hook the masses abroad. Wire fu, a gimmick that producer-director Tsui Hark and a pre-Joel Silver Jet Li perfected in films like Once upon a Time in China and Fong Sai Yuk, wound up being the preferred flavor. Maybe now, after the onslaught of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and far lesser films, you've had enough of it. Happily, the Four Star is offering a Tsui-Li film that's short on people dangling from wires and long on maximum brain boggle. Tsui's 1989 movie The Master sees Li journeying to a strange, savage city named "Los Angeles," where he runs afoul of a white dude with a ferocious mullet and is befriended by a trio of staggeringly preposterous gangbangers. Much hilarity, intentional and otherwise, results.

While the kung fu action is only so-so (check out Fist of Legend July 17 to see what Li is actually capable of), the real attraction is Tsui's bizarro-world reading of America (this might be the weirdest L.A. since Repo Man) and his warp-speed directorial prowess. With nearly cubist editing and excessive use of the fish-eye lens, every cut seems like a gamble against audience comprehension. While Tsui would soon be losing fans left and right by "going too far" (not to mention pairing up with Jean-Claude Van Damme), here he's on point. Every take, whether it features someone repeatedly, accidentally shooting himself with a shotgun or a guy who looks like Hulk Hogan wearing Jazzercise gear, feels unrehearsed and totally off the cuff. Probably because it was.

The word incredible has been reserved for Sonny Chiba, Japan's foremost screen martial artist. A man whose name tingles the spines of grind-house fans, Chiba is best known for playing the title role in 1974's Street Fighter (also playing July 17), the first movie ever to be rated X by the Motion Picture Association of America for explicit violence (and if that's not an endorsement, nothing is). Where to begin with this one? Chiba plays Terry Tsurugi, a ruthlessly cool hired killer who lives with a mangy guy named Ratnose who constantly burns his roast chicken dinners. Terry has been tapped to prevent the execution of Junjo (Masashi Ishibashi), "a mean bastard from Okinawa." Disguising himself as a Buddhist priest, Terry sneaks onto death row, where he uses an ancient karate technique on Junjo that simulates both the effects of a heart attack and the beginning of Oshima's Death by Hanging.

From here things start to get complicated, but The Street Fighter is less an A-to-B narrative than a superbly digressive manga comic come to life. Like all great Japanese exploitation films, it switches between comedy, sleaze, horror, and socially unacceptable power fantasy – sometimes within the same frame. Tying everything together is Chiba's swaggering, pantherlike performance as a vicious killing machine who spends his downtime watching TV and snacking on apples. Make no mistake, Chiba can act. He does a fabulous turn in Andrew Lau's C.G.-enhanced 1998 Storm Riders (July 10) and is sure to wow 'em yet again this fall when he appears in Tarantino's long-awaited Kill Bill.