Yellow Belt Fury
2021 · 5m
Directed by Katherine Hughes
Genres: action, comedy, sci-fi
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
When her boyfriend is gruesomely killed during an alien attack, a young woman learns karate as fast as possible to kick extraterrestrial butt in a zany kung-fu sci-fi comedy.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A five-minute movie that kills the boyfriend in act one and pivots to grief-as-motivation-for-montage-training is so aggressively absurdist it loops back around to actually working—Hughes commits to the bit hard enough that the zany sci-fi kung-fu premise stops being a gimmick and becomes the only honest response to the premise's own ridiculousness.
The tonal whiplash between grotesque alien violence and spirited martial-arts comedy gestures toward something formally interesting, though the execution feels more sketch-comedy than formally coherent—it's aware of genre convention without quite achieving the rigor to justify its tonal ambitions.
That opening kill is ruthlessly efficient—Hughes spends no time mourning, just pivots immediately to the *training*, and it's that refusal to sentimentalize the setup, that cut away from grief into pure action, that makes the whole thing sing instead of collapse under its own premise.
Reviews
What would you do if your loving boyfriend was gruesomely killed during an alien attack? The answer is pretty obvious, right?
The film is a fun and fast-paced experience, meaning it should do well online and also at festivals, where it would feel like the perfect counterbalance to the programming of heavier dramas or sociopolitical documentaries.