Many visitors to City on Fire will also no doubt be aware of kungfucinema.com, and are most likely asking the question of why the site has been offline since Sunday 11th July. Unfortunately it was confirmed by site owner Mark Pollard a couple of days ago that kungfucinema.com has been laid to rest, after 12 years online, due to personal reasons.

For myself, as I’m sure for many others, the closure of the site marks the end of an era. Having started in 2003, for the next 6 years the site was run by Mark, providing in-depth and entertaining reviews on kung fu movies both new and old. Personally, many of my DVD purchases of years gone by were based on Mark’s reviews. Having gotten into the genre in 1999, after purging myself on Hong Kong Legends and Eastern Heroes releases, kungfucinema came along at a time when sites like HKflix were just warming up, and Celestial had just began releasing remastered Shaw Brothers movies on DVD for the first time. The reviews and articles on kungfucinema were like an invaluable guide on what was worth picking up and what wasn’t.

In 2007, kungfucinema also gave me my very first writing gig. After having several e-mail exchanges with Mark, he took me on-board as a reviewer, and I took to sharpening my writing skills on a selection of Shaw Brothers movies. As fate would have it though, a few months later Mark became less and less active on the site, which was the end of an era in itself. In 2008 the reigns were handed over to Albert Valentin, whose arrival marked a noticeable shift of focus away from kung fu movies, and onto lesser known American martial arts B-movies from the 1990’s.

2008 also marked another significant event in the history of kungfucinema, as the most well established forum for talking kung fu movies on the internet, Kung Fu Fandom, made the switch from its previous incarnation and began being hosted through kungfucinema. Now going under the title of the Kung Fu Cinema Forum, in its new guise the community went from strength to strength, quickly becoming the home for both people that were new to the genre, and those that had several encyclopaedias worth of knowledge stored under their belts.

For many, the sudden disappearance of the forum is understandably the greatest cause for concern. Not only does it contain 10+ years’ worth of discussion and information, but it also has the posts of forum members who have since passed on, their thoughts and opinions still able to live on in the written word. I became a forum moderator myself at the beginning of 2014, and like many other members of the community out there, the biggest question that’s being addressed right now is to how we can transfer the content to a new home.

Update: It’s back! The official launch of the Kung Fu Fandom Forum begins today at 5:00PM, North America, Eastern Time Zone. Expect the forum to be bigger, better, and more user friendly than ever!