A cheap slum apartment complex hides two of the deadliest martial artists alive, disguised as a nagging landlady in curlers and her landlord husband.

KUNG FU HUSTLE (2004) is Stephen Chow's follow-up to Shaolin Soccer, a Looney Tunes fever dream of a gangster picture set in 1940s China. Chow plays Sing, a small-time hood who dreams of joining the fearsome Axe Gang and instead stumbles into a crumbling tenement called Pig Sty Alley, where the humble residents turn out to be retired kung fu masters.

The cast is stocked with real martial arts talent pulled out of retirement or obscurity. Yuen Wah, once Bruce Lee's stunt double, plays the landlord. Yuen Qiu, his classmate at Yu Jim-yuen's opera school, plays the landlady; she had been out of movies for close to twenty years and was only escorting a younger classmate to the audition when Chow spotted her and talked her into the part. Bruce Leung Siu-Lung plays the Beast, a top master held in a mental institution. Chiu Chi-ling, the Tailor, is an actual Hung Ga master.

Sammo Hung choreographed the early going and walked, by one account because he had no interest in the exaggerated style Chow wanted. Yuen Woo-ping took over, and the fights mix wire work, cartoon physics, and CGI into something gleefully unhinged. Underneath the slapstick is real affection for the old-school kung fu cinema Chow grew up on. Its HK$61 million made it the highest grossing Hong Kong production in Hong Kong history, a record it held until 2011.