Filmmaker Sean Fahey details the life of action star Eugene Thomas in For Kicks, a feature-length documentary that premiered at the Chicago Underground Film Festival on September 17, 2023. Besides telling the story of an actor who scaled the heights of fame, Fahey also sheds light on a crucial era of cinematic history. 

“It’s a moment in time,” he says. “The window was there.”

The “moment in time” is Eugene Thomas’s journey to success during the peak of a kung fu movie craze that began in the 1970s, as described by the actor himself. 

Thomas began studying taekwondo in high school and took to it “like a duck in water.” He moved from Chicago to Taiwan when he was 23 years-old. He made a friend in a hostel who introduced him to some movie people who helped him launch a career that spanned the 1980s. He describes the experience as a “dream come true.”

“My mind was just focused on just one thing: headed to Asia to do films,” he recalls. “Opportunity presented itself.”

A handful of films in which Thomas co-starred during the 80s have been posted on YouTube and today they boast nearly 15 million views. With titles like The Super Ninja, Ninja USA and Shaolin Dolomite, they are mostly good guys fighting bad guys in extremely choreographed hand-to-hand combat. Occasionally, they lean towards ethnic stereotypes inspired by the Blaxploitation era.