“Lucky Seven” Theatrical Poster

Director: Chao Chen-Kuo
Cast: Chiao Pei, Yang Wei-De, Lin Tung-An, Wang Chi-Cheng, Cheng Wei-Pai, Chang Chai-Ming, Hsu Yu-Ta, Hsiao Hung-Me, Eugene Thomas, Chang Yi-Teng
Running Time: 90 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Spend long enough in the niche genre that is kung-fu cinema, and you’ll eventually find yourself exploring some of the more obscure corners of what’s on offer. One such corner is that of the Taiwanese kids kung-fu movie, a sub-genre that rose to prominence in the 80’s and lasted into the early 90’s. While the traditional kung-fu flick was on the way out by the beginning of the 80’s, in Hong Kong the likes of Jackie Chan kept audiences engaged through bigger stunts, and an evolution into a more modern kickboxing style of screen combat. Taiwan and Korea on the other hand, while attempting to emulate the same, largely shifted their focus to making productions aimed at kids, and it was a move that turned out to be a successful one.

Many of these productions made the decision to actually have kids headline the cast, and some of the first out of the gates were 1980’s The Flying Tigers and the Kung Fu Kids and Kung Fu Kids Break Away. In 1986 the first entry of the popular Kung Fu Kids series hit the screens, spawning 5 sequels over the next 3 years, plus a reboot in 1992! Suffice to say, if watching kids headline kung-fu movies was your thing, then the 80’s was a great time to be alive. Shuffling itself in amongst the pack is Lucky Seven, which was released the same year, and more than likely was inspired by Kung Fu Kids.

Imbued with what feels like a go-for-broke approach to the genre, whereas Kung Fu Kids had 3 main protagonists, Lucky Seven more than doubles it with (you guessed it) 7 heroic kids as our leads, and similarly looks to ramp up the comedy and action stakes as well. The world that Lucky Seven unfolds in is a surreal one, and is probably best described as a live-action cartoon. Who exactly the 7 kids are is never given any explanation, but none of them seem slightly concerned that their parents don’t seem to be around, and they have no issues booking hotel rooms or reserving a table at a fine dining restaurant. However if you’re giving a thought to such things, then it’s safe to say that Lucky Seven probably isn’t the movie for you.

The kids come together when 6 of them go to the airport to meet their 7^th member who’s flying in from the States. In a conversation fairly typical of what you can expect from Lucky Seven, he explains that in the U.S. he’s called ‘Rambo’, but in Taiwan they should refer to him as ‘Rocky’. Being educated in western culture, he takes the gang out for dinner at a steak restaurant, during which they witness the exchange of a large diamond go all kinds of wrong at a nearby table. In short, the diamond ends up in the kid’s possession, who are entrusted to find its rightful owner, of whom the only identifying features they have to go on is it’ll be a lady that’s wearing a flower and she has a mole on her upper thigh. Hijinks ensue as the kids attempt to find the rightful owner, while being pursued by the gangsters who want the diamond for themselves at every turn.

Lucky Seven is one of those movies that plays with your head, at once as grating as you’d expect it to be, but at the same time displaying a humorous streak that’s so intentionally dumb it’s hard not to laugh (for some reason I found it genuinely funny when, in the restaurant Rocky orders everyone a medium steak, and the others question as to why he doesn’t want them to have a full size one). There’s an infectious energy on display that means even the more offensive (or just plain absurd) jokes manage to get a free pass – from women being harassed, to Eugene Thomas being compared to a chimpanzee, and at its most brazen one of the kids tells an Argentinian fighter to “stop shooting at our boats” (a reference to the sinking of the Chian-der 3 incident, a Taiwanese shipping boat that was sunk by the Argentinian Navy in May 1986, resulting in 2 deaths).

The kids themselves are clearly all martial artists, and it’s probably safe to say that the trauma some of them endured in the action scenes is the reason why, for most of them, Lucky Seven is the only credit to their names. Out of Chiao Pei, Yang Wei-De, Lin Tung-An, Wang Chi-Cheng, Cheng Wei-Pai, Chang Chai-Ming, and Hsu Yu-Ta, it would be only Yu-Ta who’d go onto work in the film industry for a few more years, turning up alongside Lin Hsiao-Lu in a trio of fantasy flicks made between 1987 – 1990. Other than that, to see these kids in action front and centre, Lucky Seven is the only place to do so, and for that it may be worth it alone.

Marking the choreography debut of Chiu Ying-Hong, who’d go onto work on such Taiwanese productions as the 3D hopping vampire movie The 3-D Army, and the insane unofficial live action Dragon Ball flick, The Magic Begins, here he was already showing himself as a capable orchestrator of action. Like many Taiwanese action movies of the era, there’s a strong emphasis on impact and falls, with the undercranking turned up to just the right level of intensity. The restaurant brawl involving the diamond is ferocious, with a vicious kickboxing style on display (involving plenty of bodies crashing through tables), predating the kind of contemporary triad action that’d become the go-to in many HK productions during the late 80’s and early 90’s. The same scene also introduces Hsiao Hung-Mei (Sworn Brothers, Mr. Vampire Part 3) as the lady with the flower, who displays some impressive moves and willingness to take some brutal hits.

Director Chao Chen-Kuo, who had helmed action flicks before like 1983’s The Village Brother and 1984’s A Girl Rogue, thankfully knows to save the best for last. While many of the fights throughout the runtime are played for laughs, to the point that you’ll need to endure listening to the theme song which the kids sing play over some of them, the finale means business. Clearly inspired by the finale of Sammo Hung’s 1983 comedy Winners and Sinners (and indeed there’s nods to the My Lucky Stars series throughout), the kids and gangsters descend upon a warehouse filled with a healthy amount of stacked sandbags, barrels, and of course multiple levels to fall off. Each of the kids has their own specialty – one is a ninja (complete with full black garb), one riffs on Bruce Lee with a pair of nunchucks, one is a fencer, and…well, you get the idea.

As hard as it is to believe, the final throwdown contains barely any stunt doubling, with the kids getting thrown around like ragdolls, smashed through glass (poor Chiao Pei is thrown through a window and lands face first, the impact of which causes her legs to go over her back the wrong way, all in glorious slow motion), and kicked in the face. In any other movie it would be classed as child abuse, but apparently, not in Taiwan! The most hilarious element of the finale is not only how ludicrous the physical violence gets, but also the bizarre tone it takes, with the ninja kid killing a guy with his katana, and Chiao Pei snapping one of the bad guy’s necks! The beatdowns continue with the arrival of 2 foreign fighters, one of whom doesn’t appear to be listed anywhere, and the other is an always welcome appearance by Eugene Thomas (The Super Ninja, Ninja Condors), here taking a break from his Lo Rei partnered ninja shenanigans.

Throw in musical cues that include Madonna’s Material Girl, Survivor’s Burning Heart, and even a body popping disco dance off to Wham’s I’m Your Man, and you have yourself one of the most distinctly mid-80’s Taiwanese action flicks out there. Lucky Seven feels like it spends its entire runtime balancing on a delicate tightrope between inspired Looney Tunes style insanity, and gratingly juvenile comedy, and had it been in the hands of a director like Chu Yen-Ping it probably would have fallen off the wrong side in the opening minutes. As it is, while many of the jokes fall flat, there’s an equal number of bodies falling into just about anything that’ll break, and that balance is enough to result in an enjoyably manic dose of Taiwanese mayhem.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6/10

The post Lucky Seven | aka 7 Ninja Kids (1986) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” Theatrical Poster

Director: Rob Cohen
Cast: Jason Scott Lee, Lauren Holly, Nancy Kwan, Michael Learned, Lim Kay-tong, Ric Young, Luoyong Wang, John Cheung, Van Williams, Shannon Lee
Running Time: 120 min. 

By Ian Whittle

This is a film I enjoy a lot more unreservedly now than I did as a teen. Back then, I knew all the ins and outs of Bruce’s life (or at least, I thought I did, Matthew Polly’s recent biography certainly tears up a few myths!) and this just seemed like fancy Hollywood Babyloney.

Now, having seen that two of my favourite “true story” films, The Elephant Man and Ed Wood, were just as fictitious as this,  and having laughed through several Hong Kong/Taiwanese Bruce bios, I can now appreciate it for its merits. Which are considerable.

Jason Scott Lee is superb. A three-dimensional portrayal that captures the essence of Bruce without restoring to clichés like thumb-nosing. Although the fights rely a tad too much on flipping out of trouble, they have energy and drama in them – and boy, John Cheung is really terrifying as Bruce’s back-breaking nemesis! Hard to believe he was goofing off in Eagle’s Killer once upon a time…And although she looks nothing like her real life counterpart, Lauren Holly is a lovely Linda (who doubtless enjoyed seeing herself on screen as a leggy cheerleader blonde with 20/20 vision).

Where the film does fall down is with The Demon (Sven Ole-Thorsen, the Swedish giant Grace Jones dated after she threw out Dolph Lundgren, essentially a video game character (speaking of which, anyone remember the video game of this?) resembling Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Everytime it appears, it makes you long for the dignity (relatively speaking!) of Ernest “Curt” Curtis from The Dragon Lives. To make matters worse, the sadly ironic ending where Bruce “saves” Brandon from the Demon does leave a bad taste in the mouth, but to be fair they weren’t to know his fate when they made this.

One thing that hasn’t changed in my view is the sublime Randy Edleman score, which is lovely.

Still, they could at least have mentioned Betty Ting Pei. She did the same for Linda in Bruce Lee & I…

By Ian Whittle: 7/10

The post Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story (1993) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Bridge of Death” Theatrical Poster

Director: Lee Doo-yong
Cast: Han Yong-cheol, Bae Su-chun, Kim Yeongran, Chang Il-sik, Woo Yeon-jeong, Mun-ju Kim
Running Time: 90 min. 

By Paul Bramhall

In my review for Returned a Single-Legged Man 2 I concluded with “What’s left to ask but for more taekwon-action productions be made available to be enjoyed.” The line was in reference to the Korean Film Archive’s decision in 2023 to release some of director Lee Doo-yong’s taekwon-action movies starring Han Yong-cheol on their Korean Classic Films YouTube channel, which kicked off with The Manchurian Tiger and Returned Single-Legged Man. Sadly Doo-yong would pass away in January 2024, so was no longer around when the Archive released the sequel a month later in HD, uncut, and in its original language probably for the first time since it was released. Within the same year the ask was answered, when in August Doo-yong and Yong-cheol’s 2^nd collaboration was released, Bridge of Death.

With information being so scarce on the taekwon-action genre for so long, confounded by the fact many were distributed overseas with different titles and edited into completely different plots (and thanks to Godfrey Ho, some even had gweilo ninja footage spliced in!), it’s not surprising that Bridge of Death has rarely been mentioned. On the likes of the Hong Kong Movie Database the title is listed as an alias for Returned Single-Legged Man, more thank likely down to the iconic scene where Han Yong-cheol takes on a bunch of lackeys single handedly (or should that be footedly?) on a bridge. There is an entry for Bridge of Death, except it’s under the title Gate of Destiny, which perplexingly also has the original title down as an alias, giving some idea as to why there’s so much confusion around Korea’s martial arts output from the 1970’s and 1980’s.

Bridge of Death would only be Han Yong-cheol’s 3^rd time as a leading man, having appeared in Choi Young-chul’s Black White Big Fist straight after debuting in Lee Doo-yong’s The Manchurian Tiger. Watching the collaborations between Doo-yong and Yong-cheol fifty years on, of which they cranked out 6 in 1974 and would go their separate ways, there’s a sense of familiarity to what was a fairly stock standard plot template. Underground Korean independence fighters are roughing it out in Manchuria, hoping for the day when the Japanese will be kicked out so they can return to their homeland, and there’s usually a missing stash of gold involved that’s intended to be used to fund the independence movement. Expect Bae Su-chun (Miss, Please Be Patient, Return of Red Tiger) to turn up as the Japanese villain, the usual roster of lackeys, and Yong-cheol eventually revealing himself to also be on the side of Korean independence.

For their sophomore collaboration together Bridge of Death does zero to deviate from the formula, although it’s worth mentioning that the plot may well have still felt fresh for audiences at the time, more so than watching Doo-yong and Yong-cheol’s collaborations out of order today. Yong-cheol plays the homeless son of a traitor who worked for the Japanese, and as such is frowned upon wherever he goes, with even his introduction being an amusingly undignified affair. Thrown out of a restaurant from the first-floor balcony, the obvious switch to a mannequin is sure to raise a smile in its quaintness. Referred to as a “Korean punk” by the Japanese, he’s taken pity on by a young apple seller, played by Kim Yeongran (7-Star Grand Mantis, Kill the Shogun), who turns out to be a part of the underground freedom fighter movement along with her brother.

While Yeongran is keen to bring Yong-cheol into their fold despite his father’s background, he wants nothing to do with it, however when the Japanese catch wind that she’s a part of the independence movement and knows the location of a stash of gold (of course), Yong-cheol feels obliged to protect her. Naturally that involves unleashing a barrage of kicks against the usual roster of bad guys, with Chang Il-sik (Tiger of Northland, Dragon from Shaolin) playing the lead of a gang who are also after the gold, and offering up a suitably intimidating opponent for Yong-cheol to flex his feet against in the extended finale.

The most interesting element of Bridge of Death (apart from the fact that there really isn’t any bridge to speak of) is a pronounced Bruce Lee influence. At one point Yong-cheol dons a disguise not dissimilar in comedic tone to what the Little Dragon portrayed in 1972’s Fist of Fury, and at the end he dons an all-black getup to sneak around the Japanese headquarters. It’s a look which feels clearly influenced by Bruce Lee’s sneaking around Han’s underground lair in 1973’s Enter the Dragon, and notably at the time of Bridge of Death’s release he’d only passed away 9 months earlier. It’s possible that for their 2^nd collaboration perhaps Doo-yong was playing around with the idea of making Yong-cheol a localised version of the star who’d become popular throughout Asia.

The most obvious reference is when Yong-cheol starts bouncing on the balls of his feet during his fight against Il-sik, which even includes a flick of the nose, removing any doubt that the intention was to mimic Lee’s mannerisms. However it would appear the early attempt at Bruceploitation was a one-off, as by the time Doo-yong and Yong-cheol would collaborate again a few months later for Returned Single-Legged Man, the Bruce Lee influence was nowhere to be found, allowing Yong-cheol to further develop his own screen identity. Like The Manchurian Tiger it’s Kwan Yung-moon (Kung Fu Zombie, Blood Child) who’s in the role of fight choreographer, and here he once more stays behind the camera, a habit he’d thankfully break in Returned Single-Legged Man where he’d share top billing with Yong-cheol.

Despite the condensed timeframe that Doo-yong and Yong-cheol cranked out their 6 collaborations, with The Manchurian Tiger released in March, and the last of their collaborations A Betrayer released in October, there’s a clear uptick in the quality of the fight choreography with each production. The action in Bridge of Death noticeably utilises the undercranking technique to speed up the flow of the fights, and there’s the welcome inclusion of breakable props, with plenty of collateral damage in the form of vases and door windows on the receiving end of kicks. There’s still a certain clunkiness to some of the fights here, with the flow that screen fighting requires not quite there, resulting in the occasional pause during a fight while waiting for another performer to execute their choreography, but for 1974 it’s completely forgivable.

Even with the traditional formula that Bridge of Death rigidly sticks to for the most part, it does have one surprise up its sleeve with a nihilistic ending that feels pulled straight out of the Chang Cheh playbook (and foreshadows the likes of Hong Kong’s The Gold Connection by several years). Considering the kind of censorship that Korean cinema suffered from in the 1970’s it’s an eyebrow raising moment that it was able to be left intact, however on reflection, when considering earlier plot points it’s clearer as to how they got away with it. Ironically it’s offset by being one of the few Manchuria westerns that closes with the announcement of Japan’s surrender, which would also place its setting as 1945, considerably later than the go-to time period of the 1930’s.  

While Bridge of Death is one of the lesser productions that Doo-yong and Yong-cheol released during their 1974 hot streak, it still ticks all the boxes of what you want to see in a Manchuria western, offering up a heady mix of duplicitous bar girls, determined freedom fighters, villainous Japanese, and kicks to the face. There’s also the undeniable fact that, considering these productions have been unavailable for the best part of fifty years, to be able to watch them in HD, presented in their original language, and uncut is a rare pleasure that many had resigned themselves to never happening. For that, it’s almost impossible to complain.   

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6/10

The post Bridge of Death (1974) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“The Big Boss Part II” Chinese Theatrical Poster

Director: Chan Chue
Cast: Lo Lieh, Wong Ping, Lee Kwan, Michael Chan Wai Man, Bruce Le (Huang Kin Long), Krung Srivilai, Preeya Rongernaug, Hung Wang, Shan Shan, Chiu Lik
Running Time: 107 min.

By Ian Whittle

It’s weird that The Big Boss Part II is as obscure as it is. You’d think being a semi-official sequel to a Bruce Lee movie, it’d have been all over numerous VHS and DVD re-issues in the manner of the same year’s Fist of Fury Part II. And yes, there was a Big Boss 2 doing the rounds on home video, but that was a retitled Dragon Lee film that was a Fist of Fury knock-off if anything else!

Around the mid-00s, an English language trailer showed up on a DVD collection – which didn’t look very inspiring, with especially lame dubbing and narration. A South African collector claimed to have a print and did indeed upload some of it online, as did a relative of the film’s producer – the latter’s upload is indeed still on Youtube. But seeing the full film seemed an elusive prospect, until a print (possibly owned by Quentin Tarantino) started appearing at special screenings around 2020. And now, about a year after the longer version of the 1971 original made its Blu-ray debut, we can now watch The Big Boss Part II on Blu-ray in its OAR and Mandarin with subtitles! Wonders never cease!

Following a bizarre title sequence – in which clips from the first film are mixed with new footage that doesn’t match in any way – we meet up with the hero of the original, Cheng Chao-an, now played by Bruce Le (Huang Kin Lung) in his Bruceploitation debut. Despite a ton of mascara, Le doesn’t really resemble the Bruce Lee of The Big Boss in the way he sought of resembled the Lee of Enter the Dragon – the hair cut is too different for a start – and somewhat unfortunately for the movie, Cheng is stuck in prison, meaning all he can do is overact. But this is the movies, land of coincidences, and Cheng gets a visit from his brother he never knew he had, Cheng Chao-chun (Lo Lieh) who has the same “never get into fights” medallion, but is more than happy to take vengeance on Cheng’s behalf. And, as luck would have it, their conversation is overheard by a fellow prison visitor who arranges for Lo to get a job in Thailand.

Once in Thailand, Lo falls in with a bunch of gangsters who are in a gang war with the new boss of the ice factory, played by Chan Chue, the director of this movie. Chan has played the manager in the previous film and has been assistant director. His character’s disappearance near the end (apparently due to breaking glasses during the filming of the party scene) meant he survived the bloodshed and could return for this movie – how convenient. And wouldn’t you know it, but the girl Lo falls in love with (Wong Ping) also happens to the daughter of the new Boss… well sort of, but that’s hardly a spoiler as the trailer we’ve all seen for years told us!

One of the highlights of The Big Boss Part II is the fight choreography (courtesy of Yuen Cheung-Yan of Dragon Missile), which is, dare I say it, better choreographed than the original, where Bruce Lee moved like lighting against slow and unwieldy extras. Lo Lieh was never the most dynamic of fighters, but here looks especially fast and brutal. The film does lose some points for an endless and slow boat/underwater chase, clearly copying those in the recent James Bond films… not least because of the use of the Bond theme. It’s a wonder they didn’t put a fat Southern sheriff in it (although it might explain why Lee Quin, a returning actor from the original, is doing as a weird Thai witch doctor… clearly he is this film’s Baron Samedi).

The final battle in the ice factory gets to use the location in a similar manner to that later seen in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story – hey, maybe Tarantino got his print from Rob Cohen? – with the machinery put to good use. It does get a bit silly though, when Chen Wei-man suddenly appears out of practically nowhere to take on Lo in a fight that is clearly suddenly in Hong Kong instead of Thailand (with a cow prominently in the field next to them!), and most of Chan Chue fighting Lo features an obvious stunt double with a old mop for a wig.

But, after all this time, I’m happy to say that while this is no masterpiece, it is a much more entertaining movie that that naff trailer suggested. Thank you very much, Severin, for releasing this obscurity!

So that’s the uncut Big Boss, Big Boss Part II, and the forthcoming release of the longer version of A Man Called Tiger. What’s next…Tiger Boy? It could happen!

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 6/10

The post Big Boss Part II, The (1976) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“The Lama Avenger” Theatrical Poster

Director: Wong Wa-Kei
Cast: Bruce Li (Ho Chung Tao), Chin Yuet Sang, Michael Winston, Chui Fat, Lee Hoi San, Baan Yun Sang, Ching Chu, Sham Chin Bo, Austin Wai 
Running Time: 85 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Looking back at the careers of the Bruceploitation genres big three – Bruce Li, Bruce Le, and Dragon Lee – eventually all of them would step out of the Little Dragon’s shadow, admirably pushing for their own onscreen identities to come to the fore. However it was Bruce Li who took the initiative first, and understandably so, since he holds the record for how many times he’d portray Bruce Lee onscreen in numerous biopics of varying quality (if you’re wondering, the one worth tracking down is 1976’s Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth). By the late 70’s Li had seemingly had enough of the Bruce Lee association, and started appearing in productions billed using his actual name of Ho Chung Tao, headlining a number of gritty contemporary kung-fu flicks (and even venturing into some Jackiesploitation territory with the Drunken Master inspired Blind Fist of Bruce).

The evolution of Chung Tao as a kung-fu leading man is one of determination and learning on the fly. The difference from the stiff and uninspired performance he’d clock in for his debut lead role in 1974’s Super Dragon (unsurprisingly playing Bruce Lee, in what many consider to be the first Bruceploitation movie), to 5 years later when he’d transformed into a performer who fully understood how to convey power and intensity onscreen, is like night and day. Chung Tao would headline 6 productions in 1979 alone, and all of them range from solid entertainment to stone cold classics on the kung-fu movie scale (and I’ll go ahead and say it – I’d also watch any of them over a Bruce Lee movie!). In the upper echelons you have the likes of The Gold Connection, Bruce and the Iron Finger, and Lama Avenger.

Far from the traditional kung-fu flick that the last title implies, The Lama Avenger is (like its brethren), a contemporary tale set in 70’s Hong Kong. One of the rare instances where the aka of The Three Avengers is actually more accurate than the title it’s popularly known by (those expecting any lama kung-fu will be disappointed), here Chung Tao is paired with Chin Yuet-Sang. A regular supporting player in countless Shaw Brothers productions, Yuet-Sang’s best accomplishments are arguably behind the camera as a fight choreographer and director – he’d helm 1981’s Lion Vs Lion with Hsu Hsia, and choreograph the likes of Ol’ Dirty Kung Fu and The Drunken Monk. Here he’s also on fight choreography duty, while in front of the camera he and Chung Tao play a pair of opera troupe performers who get fired after seeing off a group of hecklers using their fists and feet.

Strapped for cash, they end up moving into Chung Tao’s aunt’s home, where they cross paths with a greedy real estate agent eager to purchase the home for redevelopment, and not afraid to use some heavy-handed tactics to get his way. Of course, said developer wasn’t counting on a pair of kung-fu experts moving in, and a lot of ferocious fighting ensues. To address the elephant in the room, the third of The Three Avengers comes in the form of gweilo Michael Winston, here clocking in his one and only film credit before disappearing without a trace (note: not literally). Winston initially plays the friend of the developer’s ruthless son, played by Chui Fat (who’s also most well known for his work behind the camera, choreographing the action in the likes of Killer Angels and Avenging Trio), however when he realises their villainous ways, he switches sides to team up with Chung Tao and Yuet-Sang.

Essentially that’s all there is to the plot, however director Wong Wa-Kei, who also co-wrote the script with none other than Wong Jing (it’s worth noting that before making his directorial debut in 1981, Jing also co-wrote the scripts for the likes of The Magnificent Butcher and The Fighting Fool!), crams a lot into the punchy 85-minute run time. We get a revenge triggering character death, a new kung-fu school business, Yuet-Sang spending time in jail, 70’s style deep fake shenanigans, Chung Tao being ‘discovered’ and becoming a kung-fu movie star, a life changing injury, and a couple of female cast members who aren’t credited anywhere! The good news is that throughout it all, there never seems to be a fight more than a few minutes away, and they’re all of a high quality.

The Lama Avenger was 1 of only 2 kung-fu movies that director Wong Wa-Kei would make in his 14-year career (that encompassed, unironically, 14 movies), with the other being the more comedy inclined My Kung Fu Master from the previous year. There are still subtle traces of Wa-Kei’s comedic sensibilities on display here, my favorite of which is at the start when Chung Tao and Yuet-Sang have just been fired and head over to Yuet-Sang’s place, which is literally one of those old-school kung-fu movie wooden shacks in the middle of a field. There’s something amusingly surreal about seeing them sat there in 70’s attire, however when the same hecklers turn up for another confrontation, it turns out it’s been constructed for the sole purpose of being destroyed. Those on the receiving end don’t just go through the walls during this fight sequence, they literally bring the entire wall to the ground when they go crashing into it!

Chung Tao had developed a strong screen presence by this point, and his character gets some cool touches, like being able to flick a cigarette into his mouth, precursing Jackie Chan doing the same thing with chewing gum 8 years later in Armour of God. By the late 70’s there also seemed to be a recurring theme of incorporating meta-like elements into the movies he’d star in – here he becomes a kung-fu star, similar to what we see in Dynamo from the previous year (there’s actually a scene where Chung Tao and the film crew go to watch Dynamo on the big screen as the latest movie they worked on – the mental logistics of which are too difficult for me to articulate in words), and he also stumbles onto a filmset in The Gold Connection. It would seem like Chung Tao wanted to use his influence to include scenes of his own experience working in film, which culminated with his directorial debut The Chinese Stuntman in 1984.

Personally I find Chin Yuet-Sang tends to be a little grating in many of the roles he plays (Hocus Pocus springs immediately to mind), but here he’s at least dialled back, and it’s a rare pleasure to also see him executing his own choreography (as it is with Chung Tao – this would be the only time they’d work together). I’m not sure anyone needs to see him breaking out the disco moves on the dancefloor again (but they would, 3 years later in Carry On Pickpocket), however it can’t be argued that he’s the real deal, and even performs a dangerous looking stunt where he’s pulled along a road by a car with a chain tied around his neck. The latter forms part of a standout action sequence in The Lama Avenger, in which Yuet-Sang and Chung Tao are ambushed by Chui Fat and his lackey’s roadside, culminating in a rage filled two on one as the pair attempt to subdue a seemingly unstoppable Fat who’s determined to kill the pair.

The other standout action sequence belongs to the finale, when Chung Tao, Yuet-Sang, and Michael Winston team up to take on muscle for hire Lee Hoi-Sang (Shaolin Mantis, Bruce Li in New Guinea). Playing the kind of late entry villain role usually reserved for Hwang Jang Lee, the gym/kung-fu school setting makes good use of the environment, with a pommel horse being utilised to give a thorough pummelling, and Hoi-Sang going ballistic while brandishing a pair of old school kettlebells. Yuet-Sang even gets his licks in via some weapons work with a sword and straw shield, making for a gruelling final fight that serves as a fitting closer for an entertainingly gritty and economically told slice of old-school kung-fu goodness.

At one point a character tells Chung Tao “Go into the movies, you can fight well!”, and he’s right! While there are still those out there who write off the entire Bruceploitation genre as exploitative drivel to be avoided, it’s productions like The Lama Avenger that could well be the one that changes their mind. For the rest of us already acquainted with Ho Chung Tao, if you’ve yet to see The Lama Avenger, then make sure to get that corrected sooner rather than later!

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8/10

The post Lama Avenger, The | aka The Three Avengers (1979) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

Blood And Steel | DVD (SRS Cinema)

Director: Mark Swetland
Cast: David Male, Joanne Gagliardo, Elaine Arnone, Diane Zdarsky, John Raszeja, David Bobik, Rick Swetland, Ron Detrick, Scott Sehl, Jim Reeb
Running Time: 87 min.

By Paul Bramhall

One side effect from the emergence of boutique Blu-ray labels over the last 10 years, is that we’ve seen a deluge of increasingly obscure and “lost” low budget productions being given the deluxe release treatment, some of them even getting 2K or 4K remasters. The marketing of such releases tends to willingly lean into the whole “so bad it’s good” factor, with common themes like a lack of funding and dubious acting all lending themselves to a certain look and feel. However in the cold light of day the reality is most of these movies are rarely worthy of the hype that comes with them. Movies like Samurai Cop and Miami Connection are true rarities that genuinely entertain in that distinctly “so bad it’s good” style, however for every Samurai Cop, there seems to be at least 10 other similarly marketed releases that simply fall into the category of “so bad”.

With that being said, I still found myself being drawn to the SRS Home Video release of Blood and Steel, which hit DVD (not even a Blu-ray!) in 2023. A 1990 shot on 16mm backyard passion project, on paper it has all the hallmarks of being another part of the “so bad it’s good” release cannon fodder. However, being a kung-fu movie fan, the image that graces the cover of a guy sporting a blonde hair moptop in the iconic Game of Death yellow tracksuit while brandishing nunchucks was enough to pique my interest. Plus, the fact that it was using the original working title of Enter the Dragon was admittedly a nice choice, offering up a glimmer of hope that this could indeed be a “lost gem” (words that are frequently thrown around for such releases, although admittedly, there was no sign of them in any of SRS’s blurbs for this one).

The gentleman on the cover is Mark Swetland, and for Blood and Steel he stars, directs, choreographs, writes, produces, edits, and probably a few other production related roles that I’ve missed out on mentioning. To top it off, he’s playing a character called Mark Swetland. If you were to accuse Blood and Steel of being a vanity project for the young Swetland, it’d be hard to argue. Proceedings open at night with a knife wielding masked killer stalking a woman swimming in her home’s backyard pool, a scene that culminates in her throat being cut. We soon learn that the woman was Swetland’s sister, and when his girlfriend (who looks distinctly uncomfortable to be on camera in every scene she’s in) breaks it to him that she’s been murdered, he swears to find those responsible and kill them with his own hands. You could almost say it’s a little like Bruce Lee looking to avenge the murder of his sister in Enter the Dragon.

Except here nobody has much to offer in the acting department, and Swetland comes across as the opposite of someone fuelled by rage and grief on a quest for revenge, instead giving off a friendly and likeable aura, not helped by inserting scenes in which we get to watch him feed his dog. So it was, as with so many of these productions, in the initial third my attention started to wander, and the thought may have even entered my mind if it was going to be worth making it to the end credits. However that all changed when Swetland’s enquiries lead him to a martial arts school, and out of nowhere it feels like the spirit of the Little Dragon possesses his body. 

Clearly riffing on the dojo scene from Fist of Fury, a blistering fight sequence breaks out which has Swetland lay waste to the multiple students who attempt to take him down, with crisp choreography, impactful blows (complimented by some meaty sound design), and dynamic camera work. The quality of the scene alone immediately elevated Blood and Steel from the “so bad it’s good” playing field, with it becoming immediately apparent that Swetland is not only a legitimate martial artist, but also one who knows how to adapt his skills to a screen fighting aesthetic. Clearly a huge fan of Bruce Lee (the movie is dedicated to him in the end credits), Blood and Steel feels like the product of an American kung-fu movie fan who knows kung-fu, and has just spent the last decade watching the likes of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung do their thing. 

Just how down pat Swetland has Bruce Lee’s mannerisms and combat movements is almost worth the price of admission alone. It may be unlikely that a blonde haired blue eyed white guy from the U.S. would have been cast as the next Bruceploitation star had he been around during the genre’s heyday, however once you see him in action it’d be hard to argue why he shouldn’t. While there’s no denying that Blood and Steel is a low budget 16mm movie that Swetland roped all his friends into appearing in, it’s also true to say the effort that’s gone into creating a legitimate kung-fu flick is fully there to see onscreen. At one point he throws himself down a steep concrete embankment from a decent height, and in another he pulls off the Yuen Wah doubled Bruce Lee somersault kick (without the need for a double!), however the highlight goes to a fight against a hitman played by David W. Bobik (who also assisted on choreography duty). 

In a fight scene that took 24 hours to film, the pair go at it in a lengthy exchange incorporating boxing, kung-fu, jiu-jitsu, and probably a few other disciplines I didn’t catch. The fight is a joy to watch, with one part going to the ground for some frantic grappling, predating the type of MMA infused screen fighting Donnie Yen would popularise with 2005’s SPL by 15 years. While I don’t usually go into the details of specific releases, the fact that the SRS DVD is likely the only one we’ll get has me willing to make an exception, as there’s an excellent Fight Analysis special feature in which Swetland and Bobik reunite to provide a commentary on certain fights. Of course their own is one of them, and amazingly we learn that some parts were unchoreographed (including the grappling), which amusingly sees them occasionally stop and rewind the footage in slow motion to appreciate a move one of them pulled off against the other.

The time and care that’s gone into the fight scenes turn what could have been another run of the mill low budget 16mm obscurity into an entertaining 87 minutes, with the proficiency and passion Swetland shows when he’s in action making an amusing counterpoint to his wonky acting in the non-action scenes. The same can be applied to the narrative, which barrels along with what’s best described as an innocent goofiness. The perfect example being when Swetland turns up to face the drug dealing bad guys for the finale in the Game of Death tracksuit, flanked by a group of local kung-fu practicing do-gooders called the Guardian Angels (who wear matching branded t-shirts). 

A highlight of this sequence sees Swetland lay waste to a small army of lackeys in the parking lot, only for the main villain to get away in a car. Swetland gives chase behind the wheel of his own, but rather than reversing out, he decides to show no mercy and goes full throttle forward, hilariously running over all the sprawled-out lackeys on the ground. The juxtaposition of the unassumingly charming nature of the production, alongside such out of the blue scenes of gratuitous bodily harm and violence, ensures Blood and Steel keeps the audience on their toes, even if it’s completely unintentional.

While I feel inclined to say it’d have been awesome to see more of Swetland’s talents utilised in the action genre (he’d go on to have a small role in the following years American Shaolin and disappear), at the same time it’s clear it’s a production he gave 110% of himself to and probably has no regrets. What starts out looking like a cheap horror flick ends up as a true example of a “lost gem”, combining Bruceploitation, high impact Hong Kong style choreography, and a guy having his crotch attacked by a rabbit trap. The end credits state “Only a few actors really got hit by Mark during the making of this production”, more than 30 years since Blood and Steel was first released, hopefully now they can feel it was worth it!

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8/10

The post Blood and Steel (1990) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Superdragon” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Chinese Chien Chuan Kung Fu
Director: Lin Bing
Cast: Bruce Li (aka Ho Chung Tao, James Ho), Shan Mao, Paul Wei Ping Ao, Got Siu Bo, Tse Ling Ling, Lung Fei, Tai Leung, Woo Chau Ping, Yeh Hsiao-Yee
Running Time: 90 min.

By Ian Whittle

Bruce Li’s second attempt at a Bruce Lee bio-pic is a better kung fu movie than its predecessor, Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story, but is seriously lacking in the scandal and sleaze which made that picture considerably more interesting.

Instead, this is very much a work of fiction, playing almost as though it was a script inspired by Bruce until someone threw up their hands and decided they might as well be hanged for a sheep than a lamb, but ensured the supporting characters were changed enough that no-one got drawn and quartered for the whole damn flock.

Distributed internationally by wheeler-dealer Dick Randall, this film benefits from being dubbed in Rome, which makes a nice change of pace if nothing else, though as far as I’m concerned, it’s just not a kung fu movie without Ted Thomas and the “but still…” crowd!

And judging from the slow and stilted kung fu on offer here, it wouldn’t have been much of one anyway. Bruce Li has definetly come on leaps and bounds from his earlier film, now in better shape, clean shaven and starting to show off his tae kwon do kicks. And yet, the fighting remains uncoordinated and repetitive, the extras frequently missing their cues. It says something that the best fight Li has in the film is a scene where Bruce Lee and an old kung fu master debate fighting techniques verbally, with the moves shown as “what ifs” via split-screen (the English dubbers intentionally left this scene in Chinese, adding to the off-beat flavour).

The best fights in the movie are not technically part of it, and their appearance depends on which print you watch. Essentially we see Lee/Li/whatever directing a movie. Despite the entirely stationary camera next to him, the footage we see him directing is handheld, and borrowed from other movies. My DVD, the Goodtimes release under the title The Young Bruce Lee, shows some incredibly shakey and hard to follow action, possibly derived from a Korean production. It’s similar to the chaotic messes seen in Toei’s Karate Bullfighter, and frankly, gave me a headache. I’m not exactly looking forward to seeing a whole movie like that!

However, the US prints went one better (well, two better, actually) and instead utilised lengthy clips from The Screaming Tiger (aka Wang Yu: King of Boxers, thus giving Jimmy Wang Yu special billing on the posters) and Slash! The Blade of Death (aka The Chase, poor James Tien NOT getting special billing on the posters!).

These few fights play second fiddle to the tedious soap opera of the main story, which is not interested in Bruce and Linda (who appears briefly, played by a rather cute actress), or Bruce and Betty Ting Pei (who doesn’t appear at all, at least not in the print I’ve seen), but rather Bruce’s fictional childhood friend, who learns Wing Chun alongside him and becomes a popular Peking Opera actor. Scenes of this guy moping around getting depressed slow the pace down horribly. I imagine he’s meant to be Unicorn Chan, but since this guy doesn’t trick Bruce into appearing in a low-rent flick, the connection is very slight. Curiously enough, this marks the debut of the recurrent bro-mance that would appear between Bruce Li and actor Chung Au-yeung, which would carry on for another movie or two.

Thankfully lending the film a bit of class is Wei Ping-ao, here playing “Mr. Wang”, who is basically Raymond Chow, and historically marking the first time a Bruce Lee bio-pic cast one of his co-stars in a supporting role. Bruce Li’s regular co-stars Shan Mao and Lung Fei are rather underused and even for the 70s lack fashion sense, the former in a stripy gondolier t-shirt, the latter in yellow tracksuit pants and a vest, which reveals him to be a lot more wiry then I had previously realised.

And as for the death scene…we don’t get one. I think we’re meant to take it from the last fight that Bruce gets done in by the dim mak, but my suspicion is everyone was just hoping that things would be OK so long as they didn’t mention that woman…

Rather like Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, then. Only, not as good.

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 4/10

By Jeff Bona

People (including myself) keep on confusing Superdragon (aka Young Bruce Lee)  with another Bruce Lee bio-film, which also stars Bruce Li, called “Bruce Lee: A Dragon Story” (aka Dragon Dies Hard). You can use all the websites, books and forums you want – but keep in mind – none of them are accurate, including the one you’re reading at right now. Depending on your country, as well as the version of the VHS//BETAMAX/DVD you have, the titles are a mixed mess.

Superdragon is, by far, the worst of the Bruce Lee bio-films (I have yet to see Story of the Dragon). I understand that bio-films will always have their inaccuracies, but with “Superdragon,” the filmmakers didn’t even try to come close to the facts. It’s almost as if they barely knew the surface of Bruce life, and just went ahead and made shit up as they filmed.

Superdragon is disjointed, sloppy and dull. It’s basically another one of Bruce Li’s “early stinkers” (as Carl Jones, author of Here Come The Bruce Lee Clones, puts it), so expect extremely generic martial arts choreography and incompetent filmmaking — even for 70’s kung fu standards.

Here’s what you can expect from Superdragon:

• Bruce’s first teacher was a fat ass phony who didn’t even know kung fu. His second teacher was a spiritual hermit-type who hangs around buddha statues.
• Bruce grew up and kept in touch with two childhood friends: Chow Wu (I assume he’s based on Unicorn Chan) and a female named Chow Mei (maybe the English dubbers snagged the name from Maria’s Yi’s character in The Big Boss).
• Bruce’s self-developed, unorthodox style is called Chieh Chuan Kung Fu (hence, the film’s original title), as opposed to Jeet Kune Do.
• A Raymond Chow-ish film producer, played by Paul Wei Ping Ao (the scrawny interpreter from Fists of Fury), is goofy figure who follows Bruce around, hoping to get him to sign a multi-picture deal.
• Bruce had a hardcore death premonition, which he openly talked about to his friend, Chow Wu. He says things like: “How long do you think I’m going to live?” and “I keep on thinking of a song called I’m going to live ’til I die” (in real life, Blood Sweat & Tears’ “And When I Die” was played at Bruce’s funeral ceremony in Seattle).
• The way Superdragon ends is just silly. Everything happens so abruptly, with no explanation about Bruce’s death whatsoever. All we get is Chow Wu yelling: “Bruce….. noooo!”

Films like Superdragon make me wonder why Golden Harvest (production company to Bruce Lee’s films) never got off their asses and made their own Bruce Lee bio-film. Instead, they jumped on making Bruce Lee, The Man & The Legend (1974), an interesting, but depressing documentary, which concentrates more on the immediate aftermath of his death.

Maybe Superdragon isn’t as bad as I’m making it out to be. Ultimately, it’s another example of an ‘opium dream’ of Bruce’s life (kind of like The Dragon Lives) seen through the eyes worshippers who believe Bruce was a flawless, God-like being from another world.

Unless you’re a Bruce Li (aka Ho Chung Tao, James Ho) fanatic or completist, skip this with all your might.

Footnote: The film’s original U.S. poster suggests that the film has a “special guest appearance by Jimmy Wang Yu.” From my understanding, early theatrical prints did indeed have Wang Yu, but the footage was actually spliced in from Blood of the Dragon. Since then, Wang Yu’s Blood of the Dragon scenes have been been replaced by an unknown kung fu film, most likely due to copyright laws.

Jeff Bona‘s Rating: 2/10

The post Super Dragon | aka Bruce Lee Superstar (1975) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Challenge of the Tiger” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Gymkata Killer
Director: Bruce Le
Starring: Bruce Le (Huang Kin Long), Richard Harrison, Nadiuska, Hwang Jang-lee, Kong Do, Bolo Yeung Sze, Brad Harris, Dick Randall, Pei Ju-Hua
Running Time: 86 min.

By Ian Whittle

(Note: Every online source I’ve seen says this film is from 1980, which is contradicted by 1982 being mentioned in the dialogue, and a sequence taking place at an event that took place in that year!)

Although it features no martial arts, the opening sequence of Challenge of the Tiger must rank as one of my favourite martial art movies intros ever. Two scientists discover the secret of making men infertile, declare that it must not be used for the wrong purposes, then embrace passionately. Seconds later, masked men burst in and shoot them.

Genius. I defy any film to top that!

Challenge of the Tiger is the third of three films Bruce Le made in Europe for producer Dick Randall; the others being Le starring in Ninja Strikes Back, and Le’s bizarre cameo in the bizarre slasher Pieces, which is, let me assure you, very bizarre. Le also wrote and directed Challenge, so you know exactly who to thank/blame. Le plays agent Huang Lung, assigned to track down the missing formula. Because this is an international movie, he can’t do it without a white guy, so we have agent, Richard Cannon (yes, Dick Cannon) played by Richard Harrison. 

Harrison is a funny case. Originally a 50s pinup model and muscleman, he started making films for AIP (you can see him, topless naturally, piloting Vincent Price’s airship in Master of the World) and married the daughter of AIP’s head honcho James H. Nicholson. He later ended up in Italy starring in sword-and-sandal movies and spaghetti westerns (allegedly turning down Fistful of Dollars) and by the 70s ended up in Taiwan appearing in two films for Chang Cheh: Marco Polo and The Boxer Rebellion. His appearance in Challenge of the Tiger is probably also an one-off, but only a few later he was stuck making endless ninja movies for Godfrey Ho, immortalised forever in that clip of him using a Garfield telephone in Ninja Terminator.

And if you thought John Saxon got an unfair share of the action in Enter the Dragon, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Harrison’s first scene is him arriving at his palatial mansion to be greeted by a LOT of naked babes, some of whom play slow motion tennis, and accompanied by the strains of “Montego Bay” by Jon Stevens. Throughout the movie, Harrison will sleep with every lady going, whilst barely lifting a finger to help fight-wise. Which is good because I really don’t fancy seeing Harrison getting the best of Hwang Jang-lee, never mind Bolo!

So our heroes start off in Spain… where Bruce Le does not one, but two Sonny Chiba tributes: he fights a bull (ala Karate Bullfighter) and smashes its skull, represented with crude x-ray animation (ala The Street Fighter). Harrison gets friendly, if you know what I mean, with Miss Spain 1982 Maria who is in possession of the formula and is a secret agent played, not by the actual Miss Spain 1982 Ana Isabel Herrero García (can you tell I had to look that up?) but by Nadiuska, who played Conan’s mother in Conan the Barbarian the same year. Meanwhile, Bruce tries to distract her dog, which growls like a cat. Yes, you read that right!

Oh, right, the formula! So Le retrieves it from Maria, only to discover it’s Spanish Fly. The real formula is en route via Hong Kong to a international cadre of villains (headed by Dick Randall, appropriately enough) whose assortment of hired goons includes HK regular Chiang Tao and Brad Harris, the latter of whom can best be described as a Western version of Bolo Yeung… who is also in this movie as a member of a group of Vietnamese freedom fighters/terrorists/I’m really not sure which and neither is the movie. The Vietnamese group is headed by Hwang Jang-lee, in a rather subdued performance for him, and they also want the formula. And one of their number is a gorgeous lady (Pei Ju-Hua) who’ll be all over Richard Harrison like remoras on a shark. I could question why all these girls are ignoring Bruce Le, but then here, more than ever, he looks like Mowgli from Disney’s The Jungle Book on sterioids. Richard Harrison may not be Dolph Lundgren, but yeah, I’d be going for him too given the choice!

Just when you thought, OK this movie is pretty wacky, you realise you underestimated it. Le and Harrison end up in Macau, at The Macau Trotters’ Association’s Second Anniversary celebrations no less. And for some reason, US tv vets Jack Klugman, Jane Seymour (hey, Dr Quincey and Dr Quinn in the same movie!) and Morgan Fairchild were in attendance there, so of course footage of them chatting with Le is stuck into the film in the same manner Bruce Lee was into Fist of Unicorn! I can’t say whether such shenanigans are typical of Dick Randall’s non-HK product, but I wouldn’t have put it past him, and god bless ‘im for it.

On the martial arts side of things, Le shows considerable improvement from his earlier movies with more dynamic kicks and less of the silly Bruce-isms. I also give the film credit for not trying to pass off Harrison as a martial arts master (unlike, well, a lot of other movies!) so he relies more on his fists, and takes a heck of a lot of blows to the groin! Who needs a formula to make men infertile when Hwang Jang-lee can do that with his feet? Disappointingly, Le doesn’t get to fight Bolo here, and the final fight between Le and Hwang is curtailed unnecessarily shortly in a car chase, but hey, thankfully we got Enter the Game of Death and Ninja Strikes Back to address those issues respectively. And as a madcap combination of the best HK and Euro exploitation had to offer in the 80s, this madly entertaining flick is well deserving of more attention.

And just what was Bruce Le saying to Jack Klugman?

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 7/10

The post Challenge of the Tiger (1982) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“The Steel Fisted Dragon” Theatrical Poster

AKA: A Fistful of Dragon
Director: Iksan Lahardi
Cast: Steve Lee, Enden Marlinda, Ronald Kansil, Vita Fatimah, Chan Lau, Johnny Hong Kong
Running Time: 78 min.

Paul Bramhall

In 1977 the Bruceploitation genre was already alive and well, with guys like Bruce Li bursting onto the scene with 1975’s New Game of Death and Bruce Le unleashing digit related mayhem in 1976’s Bruce’s Deadly Fingers. While the name Bruce combined with variations of how to spell Lee seemed to be the way forward for any potential Bruceploitation star, at some point producers must have realised they’d maxed out. So it was, the new era of Bruceploitation star was born, with the surname Lee remaining intact, but being called Bruce no longer a requirement. Korea stepped up to give us the legendary Dragon Lee with his Cheshire Cat smile and moves accompanied by various blip and bloop sound effects, and Indonesia unleashed the one and only Steve Lee!

In fact Indonesia already had its own kung fu star at this point in the form of Larry Lee, who in the same year starred in Four Shaolin Challengers and Black Belt Karate (in which he wore a similar red tracksuit to what Bruce Lee wore in Longstreet). However it was Steve Lee who’d be marketed and sold as Indonesia’s own Bruce Lee imitator, which he did a whole 2 times, first in Cobra from the same year, and second in The Steel Fisted Dragon. After that he’d disappear into obscurity, which makes him an anomaly amongst his Bruceploitaiton luminaries, as most of them starred in more movies and had longer careers than the Little Dragon, but not our friend Steve.

For his sophomore outing Lee plays a kung fu master whose mother and girlfriend are murdered by the local bad guys, leading him to go on a revenge fuelled rampage. That’s your plot right there. I actually gave some serious thought to how I could describe it in at least 2 sentences, but really there’s nothing more to it than that. Understandably depressed, Lee’s friend (who sports a Hitler moustache, a fashion choice I felt for sure was foreshadowing a villainous betrayal later on, but no, turns out Hitler moustaches were just trendy in 1977 Indonesia) insists he should cheer up by finding a job. I get the logic, but on the other hand if Lee was an unemployed bum before tragedy struck, it seems unlikely that a job would makes his existence any more cheerful after losing his nearest and dearest.

Thankfully we don’t spend too much time with Lee wallowing in self-pity (although if he did, he’d be perfectly entitled to), as this is 70’s South East Asia meaning denim clad villains are never in short supply. I confess I’ve never seen Cobra, so The Steel Fisted Dragon was my first taste of Lee and I like his approach to Bruceploitation. Rather than imitating the Little Dragon’s fighting style, Lee uses his own brand of kung fu beatdown, but infuses his fights with a liberal (and I mean liberal) dose of Bruce Lee styled high pitched howling and the occasional mannerism (like a flick of the nose). Amusingly at one point he gets so badly beaten that he has to recuperate, with his wounds represented by Enter the Dragon style scratches on his chest. Somehow seeing the overly familiar scratches put someone completely out of action made Lee seem like a bit of a wimp.

The villain is particularly villainous here, keeping a number of girl’s captive for his own nefarious purposes, and keeping an eye on them all with a camera set up in the room they’re kept in. In one scene his secretary calls him to advise he has a visitor who he asks to show in, and in-between the secretary leaving and the visitor walking in he switches on the TV just to briefly check out what’s going down in the room. I guess it was the closest thing to steaming on demand in the 70’s. At one point the ladies even get into a full-on brawl with each other, sending pieces of clothing everywhere. You’d think this blatantly criminal activity would factor into the plot at some point, but it never really does. Go figure.

Indonesian kung fu flicks of the time had a habit of bringing over Hong Kong talent either to co-star or even work behind the scenes. The previously mentioned Black Belt Karate cast fellow countryman Lo Lieh as the villain of the piece, and a year later Chen Kuan Tai would pair up with local star Billy Chong to star in and direct Invincible Monkey Fist. In The Steel Fisted Dragon we get Chan Lau, old groper himself from The Dragon, the Hero. In fact Lau worked on both Cobra and The Steel Fisted Dragon, featuring in front of the camera as well as being on fight choreography duty. I’m not sure if we ever needed to see a guy like Lau in a sex scene, but The Steel Fisted Dragon comes close to giving us one, mercifully cutting away just at the right moment (especially since we later learn that he’s the master of the iron finger technique!).

While not a prolific fight choreographer by any means (prior to this the only 2 movies he’d choreographed solo were the Taiwan-Korea co-production Magic Curse and Hong Kong flick Moon and Stars, both from 1975 and non-martial arts related), here he definitely puts his best foot forward. I’m sure there was also input from the local Indonesian talent, as the action is often quite raw and brutal. In one tussle Lee rips one poor lackeys’ eyes out (both of them!) and tosses them away, and in another he hangs one guy upside down with his hands, while proceeding to repeatedly kick him in the head! A stunning display of brutality and balance at the same time.

The real action highlight in The Steel Fisted Dragon is an extended fight against multiple attackers in a warehouse that acts as a precursor to the finale. It’s a scrappy ordeal that some will likely argue goes on for longer than it needs to, but I enjoyed the gratuitous length of the scene. Set in a location with a seemingly unlimited amount of breakable wooden crates to fall into or on top of, various spades randomly scattered around just waiting to be utilised as weapons, and plastic drums which appear to be full of acid, all are put to effective use. Interestingly the action incorporates an element of grappling, with arm and leg locks being used to dispose of some lackeys, and no Bruceploitation flick would be complete without some nunchucks action. Here we get a pair of lackeys brandishing the iconic weapon, who of course can’t keep their hands on it for long.

Cast as a kind of kung fu assassin, we also get a Chan Lau versus Steve Lee face off which delivers the goods, with Lau channelling his inner-Hwang Jang Lee, and at one point brandishing a pair of tonfas (which Lee amusingly counters with a large tree branch). As scrawny as Lau may be, he actually manages to look believably dangerous here, a flurry of kicks, iron finger pokes (the grass they fight on suffers considerably), and tonfa thrusts, it’s a welcome one on one fight compared to the many 1 versus many battles that make up the majority of the action. Events eventually culminate with Lee attempting to make an escape with the main villain’s sister (don’t ask) on a boat, only for him to end up using the wooden paddle as the main weapon in the final fight rather than sailing off into the sunset. Still, watching people get smacked across the head with it is arguably more entertaining.

It’s a shame Steve Lee didn’t go onto make more movies. Well, let me just take a step back there, firstly it’s a shame that he was named Steve Lee in the first place! But he was an actor who clearly had screen presence and, while not the most graceful of performers, clearly had the moves to look like an effective fighter onscreen. Perhaps he decided a life of hitting people over the head with tree branches, spades, and paddles wasn’t for him, and that’s fair enough. As a slice of 70’s Bruceploitation though with an Indonesian twist, The Steel Fisted Dragon delivers the goods thanks an almost constant stream of action and ridiculous dubbing. Let’s be honest, sometimes that’s all you need from a kung fu flick.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6.5/10

The post Steel Fisted Dragon, The (1977) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Fist of Fury Part II” Theatrical Poster

Director: Lee Tso Nam
Cast: Bruce Li (aka Ho Chung Tao, James Ho), Lo Lieh, Tien Feng, James Nam Gung Fan, Suen Lam, Philip Ko Fei, Cho Kin, Chan Wai Lau, Lee Kwan, Sit Hon, Jimmy Lee Fong, Shikamura Yasuyoshi, Robert Tai Chi Hsien, To Wai Wo
Running Time: 104 min.

By Ian Whittle

1976 saw director/producer Lo Wei locate to Taiwan to produce a sequel to his box-office smash Fist of Fury, which was also his second and final collaboration with Bruce Lee. A talky, 2 hour slog, which underused Lo’s new discovery, Jackie Chan, New Fist of Fury was an underwhelming attempt to rekindle past glories – this was made even more obvious by another Taiwanese sequel to Fist of Fury, produced the same year, which ended up feeling a lot more like the original than the sequel from the actual director of the original did!

Fist of Fury Part II follows on from the original at the funeral of Chen Zhen (Bruce Lee), represented by a photo of Lee from…Way of the Dragon. Since Lo Wei represented Bruce in New Fist of Fury with stills from Enter the Dragon, I suppose there must have been a lack of FOF photos, except this film has an opening montage of stills from the original. Since Nora Miao was off making New Fist of Fury, here her character is played by a double in mourning garb…who [ Spoiler Alert ] promptly flings herself on the grave and stabs herself! [ End Spoiler Alert ]

Since FOF2 couldn’t get Nora, the film settles for Jing Wu survivors Tien Feng and Lee Quin – and also Sham Chin-Bo, who played a Japanese fighter in the first film, but is now a Jing Wu student! The Japanese, now led by Mr Miyamoto (Lo Lieh) have taken defeat graciously…by forcing Tien to sign over the Jing Wu school to them by turning him into an alcoholic and torturing the surviving students with branding irons! Just in case we were in any doubt that Miyamoto is not a nice man, he feeds a pet bird to a lion!

One recurrent trend in FOFII is to slavishly copy elements from the original, and in these early scenes it becomes obvious, as the Japanese have a new bespectacled, moustachioed interpreter – Mr Wah (Chen Hui-Lou) – an obvious clone of the original’s Mr Wu (Wei Ping-ao). Later on, we get a new police inspector (Tsao Chien) who endlessly says a lot and does nothing. Yes, never mind Bruce Lee clones, this film has a Lo Wei clone (albeit a considerably skinnier one)! It’s funny how all the different FOF remakes, sequels and rip-offs include a weasly quisling and a dithering inspector, but none of them to my knowledge have included a re-creation of the original’s corking geisha stripper scene. More’s the pity.

Ah yes, Bruce Lee clones. It takes nearly a full half hour for this film’s one to show up: Bruce Li plays Chen San, the never-before mentioned twin brother of Chen Zhen (a plot-point that Jackie Chan’s dubious “autobiography” falsely attributed to New Fist of Fury!). And he’s here to kick butt!

I’d probably go so far as to say this is Li’s best performance (if not his best film), and considering he is meant to be reminding us of Lee, he does managed to craft a unique character of his own. Whilst Lee was screaming and grimacing in that way only he could get away with, Li goes for a colder, darkly humorous character. Although it is fun to see him insulting the Japanese villains early on (“I’m trouble…I’m trouble for the Japs!”), his reactions to his fellow Chinese are rather alarming: his words of consolation for a character whose brother has just been killed? “You’re the one who caused it, because you’re too weak, because you’re a coward!” Ouch!

The final confrontation between Li and Lo Lieh is an effective one, the two discussing the merits of Chinese art before duelling. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that Quentin Tarantino is a fan of this fight (and overall prefers this film to the original), and it’s certainly effective and dramatic, with a satisfying closure. For once, Lo looks martially competent – for all his years in kung fu films, he often seemed lost without a sword.

So when you want to watch Fist of Fury again, but feel familiarity is starting to breed contempt, send in the clone! And if you’re lucky like I was, you might even find a copy with the elusive nunchaku scene! (the UK video censored this, and the US DVD just used the UK master!)

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 8/10

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“Ninja Over the Great Wall” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Fire on the Great Wall
Director: Bruce Le
Cast: Bruce Le (Huang Kin Long), Li Ning, Yu Hai, Leung Yim, Shikamura Yasuyoshi, Cheng Yuen Man, Xue Bai, Gao Jian-Hua, Ma Zheng, Yang Li-Xin
Running Time: 90 min. 

By Paul Bramhall

After spending 10 years playing various incarnations of Bruce Lee within the infamous Bruceploitation genre, Huang Kin-Lung (or Bruce Le as he’s more commonly known) directed what could be considered his first production which didn’t rely on the connection to the Little Dragon. Out of all the clones that sprung up in the wake of Bruce Lee’s death, it’s Le whose filmography most represents someone attempting to take control of his own career. Originally hired by the Shaw Brothers studios and cast as a supporting player in the likes of Rivals of Kung Fu and Big Brother Cheng, Le quit before being given a shot at lead role, and subsequently found himself inadvertently cast as a Bruce Lee clone. What was the job of a Bruce Lee clone? To put it simply, it was to have a passing resemblance to Bruce Lee, some martial arts training, and be cast in Bruce Lee-esque movies to try and fill the massive void the stars passing left behind.

Compared to his contemporaries – the likes of Bruce Li and Dragon Lee – Le featured in some truly bottom of the barrel fare. Usually shot in the Philippines, watching titles like Return of Bruce and Treasure of Bruce Le are often touted to be more effective torture techniques than waterboarding. However in the 1980’s Le seemed to take more control over his career, and began directing as well as starring. Seemingly aware that the Bruce Lee schtick was his money maker, if you’re going to be a clone, you may as well try and be a good one. So it was the likes of Bruce – King of Kung Fu enlisted Sek Kin as its main villain, a role he’d also played in Enter the Dragon, Challenge of the Tiger saw him battling a bull (and Hwang Jang Lee) in Spain, and Bruce Strikes Back saw him rampaging through Italy and Paris. Le’s movies began to feel more like they’re inspired by Bruce Lee rather than blatantly copying him, and they became fun!

After 1982’s Bruce Strikes Back Le went quiet for 5 years. Maybe he went up a mountain to find himself, or simply tired of the global gallivanting, but it wasn’t until 1987 that he’d return with Ninja Over the Great Wall. Le’s return was an unexpected one. In 1987 Bruceploitation was essentially a thing of the past, at least in the form of actors attempting to be passed off as Lee, or playing a character he’d portrayed. Bruce Li had wrapped up his clone career with 1981’s The Chinese Stuntman, and Dragon Lee concluded his Bruce Lee phase with 1983’s Martial Monks of Shaolin Temple. The world was no longer interested in seeing impersonations of Bruce Lee, with stars like Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao representing the new faces of Hong Kong action cinema. For a Bruceploitation star, to attempt a comeback didn’t make a whole lot of sense on paper.

But Le had other ideas. Ninja Over the Great Wall ditches both the European and South East Asian filming locations (and Hong Kong itself for that matter), and moves things to the Mainland. Taking place during the Japanese occupation in the 1930’s, after his village is raided by the Japanese army Le flees to Beijing, where he meets other patriots eager to get rid of them. The opening credits are preposterously bombastic, with onscreen titles like ‘LEE NING – THE WORLD CHAMPION OF GYMNASTICS’ and ‘LEUNG YIM – THE FAMOUS VOLLEYBALL PLAYER’. Lee Ning was actually a famous gymnast, and had a brief film career that also saw him star in Ching Siu-Tung’s Wonder Seven 7 years later. Here he appears as a kung fu instructor in little more than a cameo that gives him a (literal) stage to bust out some gymnastics moves, but at least he looks good doing it. Shamefully, I have no idea who Leung Yim is or who he (or she?) was playing.

Arguably the best thing about the Mainland setting though, is the casting of Yu Hai, the Praying Mantis champion who at the time was hot on the heels of featuring in Jet Li’s Shaolin Temple trilogy (Martial Arts of Shaolin was made the year prior). Hai’s one of those martial artists who, even if you only saw his silhouette, once he starts busting out the mantis boxing you’ll immediately know its him from the fluidity of his movements. A joy to watch in everything he’s appeared in (yes, even Man of Tai Chi), here he plays the archetypal Chinese master who’s goaded into a duel with a Japanese master played by Yasuyoshi Shikamura (God of Gamblers, Casino Raiders). It’s a great fight, and the kind that makes you do a double-take to make you remember you’re watching a Bruce Le movie.

Foul play ensues, throwing in some clear nods to Fist of Fury (US distributor Ground Zero went so far as to amusingly retitle it Shaolin Fist of Fury), sending Le into beast mode and gate-crashing the wedding of Shikamura for some serious beatdowns. After letting Shikamura know that if he ever sets foot in China again he’ll kill him, the tail whipped groom makes his way back to Japan, where he immerses himself in the ways of bushido. The more he trains though, the more he increasingly becomes obsessed with returning to China for a rematch. Le himself spends his time practicing kung fu in the Yalu River to learn its “greatest secrets”, until eventually the stage is set for the inevitable showdown, pitting the principles of bushido versus those of kung fu. Or in other words, another tale of the Chinese taking on the Japanese.

Ninja Over the Great Wall is a great little kung fu flick. There, I said it. Not something I’d imagine ever writing about a Bruce Le flick. It’s lean and mean, and I admit I like the look of the older more mature Le. He’s ripped as anything, but his face has a few years of experience etched on it, making him look like a legitimate bad ass rather than a D-movie version of Bruce Lee. The choreography, also handled by Le, is notably several steps up from any of his previous work. I don’t want to say that as too much of a compliment, because at the end of the day it’s 1987, so its contemporaries are productions like Armour of God and Eastern Condors. The bar had been lifted on action choreography for a number of years, so if he’d come in and performed like he was still in a 100 peso production from the mid-70’s, of course that wasn’t going to fly. So while the fights may not be as complex as the top tier stuff of the era, they’re still damn good.

Le gives himself plenty of opportunities to let loose, and in terms of fights Ninja Over the Great Wall can definitely be considered his swansong more so than 1990’s Black Spot (which is entertaining for other reasons). One particularly gratuitous scene has the Japanese send a whole army of ninja after him, which translates to Le walking around various environments, then constantly have a small army of ninjas jump out of nowhere to take him down. Knock them all out, cut to the next scene of him strolling somewhere else, and repeat the process. The sequence goes on for so long that even the seasons seem to change, with the last one being set in snow-covered countryside. A highlight of this sequence involves a ninja that gets set on fire, and when I say set on fire I mean he really goes up in flames, but then continues to fight Le despite his imminent incineration. I guess you could call it the bushido way.

Considering the plot Le also doesn’t squander the opportunity to put his spin on the dojo fight from Fist of Fury. I mean is there anyone who doesn’t enjoy 1 vs many dojo fights? (Not withstanding the awful one from Legend of the Fist: The Return of Chen Zhen). Events eventually culminate with Le and Shikamura agreeing to a one on one fight on the Great Wall of China. Ninja Over the Great Wall is also known as Fire on the Great Wall, and in the lead up to the fight you can really tell why, as there seems to be a cast of thousands lining several miles of the great wall with lit torches. The helicopter tracking shots go on just long enough to drop the hint that yes, this must have been expensive, so we’re going to spend a few mins just looking at it. In fact the production values overall are surprisingly decent, and one particular shot at the start showing war torn fields full of skulls had me almost expecting an endoskeleton to turn up.

The final fight delivers a satisfyingly brutal ending, starting off with Le armed with two metal batons vs Shikamura’s katana, it eventually segues into an empty handed beatdown, with Le throwing in the animated x-ray shots to show the impact of certain blows that he first utilised in Challenge of the Tiger. It’s noticeably undercranked, but not to the point that it spoils the enjoyment of the fight, and if anything it only adds to the ferociousness of it. Sure Bruce Le has made plenty of trash in his time, but don’t let that put you off some of his later work. If you’re in the mood for a straight-faced kung fu flick that delivers where it counts, Ninja Over the Great Wall more than fits the bill.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7.5/10

https://youtu.be/3OKTZ1Bk_AA?fbclid=IwAR0ZwQ32C3B90mKqCEPJ4NX4twCxHC8FtzXy6jpuwvYHNesOFlG6fbWnkRY

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“The Magnificent” Poster

Director: Kim Hyeong-Jun
Co-director: Chan Siu-Pang
Assistant-director: Godfrey Ho
Cast: Carter Wong, Casanova Wong, Chan Sing, Doris Lung, Elton Chong, Chang Il-do, Dragon Lee (Mun Kyong-sok), Martin Chui Man-Fooi, Chan Chan-Wa
Running Time: 90 min.

By Paul Bramhall

In the late 70’s the kung fu genre was evolving dramatically. After the Bruce Lee mania of the early 70’s there came a wave of ‘basher’ flicks, movies that put an emphasis more on scrappy brawling than the graceful movements of Peking Opera, but it wasn’t until the likes of The Secret Rivals that the genre started to significantly shift. Director and producer Ng See Yuen saw the potential in the Korean art of Taekwondo, and soon the likes of Hwang Jang Lee and Casanova Wong began to become regular fixtures in Hong Kong movies (many of which were also filmed in Korea). Taekwondo was a perfect fit for screen fighting, able to both be incorporated into complex exchanges, but also look devastatingly powerful. Similar to how Bruce Lee kicked off the decade, audiences once again became attracted to the power of martial arts, and less interested in the Opera style that had dominated since as far back as the 1940’s.

1978’s The Magnificent stands as a prime example of where the genre was at the time, bringing together a trio of formidable talent in the form of Carter Wong, Casanova Wong, and Chan Sing. It was a hell of a year for everyone, with Casanova also starring in Warriors Two, arguably his most famous role, and Carter Wong playing the legendary villain in Born Invincible (and a movie called The Monkey Love, but let’s not go there). Chan Sing takes the cake though, featuring in a whopping 28 productions released that year, amongst them the likes of Bruce Lee in New Guinea and Amsterdam Connection (and, ummm, also The Monkey Love). Surely that’s some kind of record!?

The plot of The Magnificent is simple, as any old-schooler should be – in 1911 a villainous general (Chan Sing) plans to obtain a coat of arms from an elderly lord, which he can use to overthrow the newly established Republic, and restore the old Qing order. Out to stop him is the local commissioner (Carter Wong), his trusty right-hand man (Casanova Wong), and the lord’s daughter (Doris Lung). I initially wanted to write that the story is so simple that it doesn’t allow for more than 5 minutes to go by without a fight breaking out, but on reflection, I think it’s probably closer to 3.

A co-production between Hong Kong’s infamous Asso Asia Films and Korea’s Hwa Chun Trading Co.,The Magnificent sees Godfrey Ho in a rare genuine assistant director credit, supporting co-directors Chan Siu-Pang (who probably took care of the Hong Kong side of the production) and Kim Hyeong-Jun (who probably took care of the Korean side). For fans of the master of cut ‘n’ paste style filmmaking, Ho even appears in-front of camera here, in one of only 8 times he took on an acting role in his 20 plus year career. While The Magnificent itself is free of any Ho style tampering, that didn’t stop it from being chopped into other titles further down the line. The 1981 Dragon Lee vehicle Enter the Invincible Hero has footage from a fight pitting Casanova Wong versus Chang Il-do awkwardly inserted into it, and significant chunks were used to create the 1990 cut ‘n’ paste flick Kickboxer the Champion. 

Speaking of Dragon Lee, The Magnificent is an interesting time capsule as to the popularity of Korean martial arts stars at the time. Despite Casanova Wong only debuting in Hong Kong a year earlier, his impressive turns in both The Shaolin Plot and The Iron Fisted Monk clearly gave the producers confidence that Wong’s talents were enough to sell tickets. At this point Dragon Lee had only featured in The Last Fist of Fury, and hadn’t gained the popularity he’d achieve in subsequent years (he and Casanova Wong would face off against each other in the previously mentioned Enter the Invincible Hero), so it was interesting to see him turn up here as a generic assassin. However even as a generic assassin he puts in a memorably brief performance, still managing to throw in a classic thumbing the nose Bruce Lee-ism despite his limited screen time! 

Elton Chong on the other hand had already featured in supporting roles in several local (and Korean shot – look out for him as a monk in The Shaolin Plot) productions, however like Dragon Lee he wasn’t yet considered leading man material (and for many reading, likely never was!), with 1980’s Fist of the Golden Monkey being his first headline role. He’d go onto inflict the world with many torturous kung fu comedies through to the mid-80’s, but thankfully in The Magnificent he can only be seen lurking around in a scene which has Chang Sing challenge his subordinates to take on his Golden Bell technique (not as dirty as it sounds).

I confess that even when I was in the peak of my kung fu flick watching era, there were some movies which induced fight fatigue. 1979’s Monkey Kung Fu and Seven Steps of Kung Fu are both prime examples of movies so crammed with fight action, that by their respective finales the thrill was long gone. The Magnificent is comparable in terms of the ridiculous amount of fights it crams into its run time, however that fatigue is largely avoided mainly due to the aforementioned focus on impact, rather than the acrobatic Opera based choreography. Neither Chan Sing or Carter Wong are even going to be mistaken for a Ricky Cheng or Li Yi-Min, however they do both bring a sense of raw power to their performances, and in The Magnificent this is nicely offset by Casanova Wong and Doris Lung.

In fairness, both Wong and Lung steal the show whenever they’re called into action. Wong had faced off against Chen Sing only the year prior when he played a supporting role as a monk in The Shaolin Plot, in which some say is one of the finest displays of kicking ever committed to screen. Here the pair get a rematch which plays as part of the opening credits, which have Sing travelling through a snow-covered landscape, before being ambushed by several attackers disguising themselves rather conspicuously in mounds of snow. It’s a great start, and the fights remain consistent throughout, even if some are more of a highlight than others. The credits list fight choreography duties between Chan Siu-Pang (who also directs) and Chan Chan-Wa (notably, the Hong Kong Movie Database lists a third choreographer in the form of Chan Sau-Chung).

The fact that The Magnificent has 3 directors at the helm and (potentially) 3 different fight choreographers makes it easy to believe that, rather than being a collaborative effort, certain scenes and fights were being filmed individually. This would explain why some fights appear more tightly choreographed than others, and similarly also explain why the editing sometimes feels a little sporadic (we don’t actually get to see the conclusion of the Dragon Lee fight). However when they’re good, they’re really good. Wong in particular gets to shine in a fight against Chang Il-do which is flurry of feet, and later goes up against a small army which again proves a highlight, as his kicks take out multiple assailants with deadly precision.

By the time we get to the finale Carter Wong and Doris Lung have spent a considerable time hammering away at wooden cut-outs to figure out how to attack Sing’s pressure points (I assume they couldn’t afford a dummy like the one featured in the previous years Executions from Shaolin), and the stage is set for an exhausting 3 on 1 showdown pitting the pair, with a little help from Casanova Wong, against Chen Sing. It’s a worthy finish to a lean old-school kung fu flick which knows exactly what it’s there to deliver. When you throw in characters constantly delivering inner monologues, a scene that proves radishes are perfect for concealing daggers, and a final line which consists of Carter Wong yelling “The genitals!”, what’s not to enjoy?

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZkujU4X5GM

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“Bruce and the Iron Finger” Promotional Poster

AKA: Bruce vs. Iron Hand
Director: To Man-Bo
Cast: Bruce Li (aka Ho Chung Tao, James Ho), Bruce Leung Siu Lung, Ku Feng, Fong Yau, Dai Sai Aan, Wong Kwong Yue, Lin Ke Ming, Lee Hoi San, Tai San
Running Time: 86 min.

By Paul Bramhall

In 1979 the Bruceploitation genre ramped up with a vengeance, spurred on by the posthumous release of Game of Death the year prior, the genre burnt bright for a few more years before fizzling out in the early 80’s. Featuring what must surely be a record for the number of movies released with ‘Bruce’ in the title – Bruce the Superhero, Treasure of Bruce Lee, Bruce Lee Strikes Back, Bruce vs. Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, Fists of Bruce Lee, Blind Fists of Bruce, and last but by no means least, Bruce and the Iron Finger.

Starring Bruce Li, as the Bruceploitation star who holds the record for the number of times he’d actually portray Bruce Lee onscreen, by the late 70’s he’d made a concerted effort to establish his own identity, and here is billed under his actual name of Ho Chung Tao. 1979 was a good year for Chung Tao, as even though many of the productions he appeared in still slapped the auspiciosus ’Bruce’ in the title (he was also the star of the aforementioned Fists of Bruce Lee and Blind Fist of Bruce), the movies themselves had little to no connection with the Little Dragon. It was the year he’d feature in what I personally consider to be his best movie, The Gold Connection, and also the year when he’d feature in what I’d consider to be his second best outing – Bruce and the Iron Finger.

Not to be confused with the Bruce Le vehicle Bruce’s Deadly Fingers (the Bruceploitation genre was fond of its digit related titles), Bruce and the Iron Finger was helmed by director To Man-Bo, who was having a particularly productive year in ’79. Amongst the six titles he directed are well regarded classics such as Fists, Kicks, and the Evils and My Kung Fu Twelve Kicks, and he’d work with Chung Tao twice, the other being on Jeet Kune The Claws and The Supreme Kung Fu (or as it was retitled for many countries, Fist of Fury 3). Man-Bo’s kung fu flicks of this era tended to stick with the same talent both in front and behind the camera, so a recurring theme was brothers Bruce Leung and Tony Leung Siu-Hung on fight choreography duty (usually with Bruce Leung also in front of camera), and the presence of Ku Feng in various roles.

Everyone convenes in Bruce and the Iron Finger, for a tale that feels like a classic old-school kung fu flick mixed with the detective genre. Chung Tao plays a cop visiting Hong Kong, who finds himself involved in trying to get to the bottom of a case which see’s kung fu masters turning up dead, the only clue to their demise being two bloody puncture wounds in their neck. I should point out that the old-school kung fu flick aspect is far weightier than the detective story element, so it’s no spoiler whatsoever to say that the killer is Ku Feng. He plays a master of the iron finger technique which gives him skin of steel (think Hwang Jang Lee in Invinicble Armour), however there’s a major downside – the mastery of such a technique means he can’t have sex. I guess you can’t have an iron finger and an iron todger.

With this in mind, you probably wouldn’t want to shack up with a member of the opposite sex who’s a nymphomaniac, and has an aversion to wearing anything beyond skimpy underwear. But this is what Ku Feng does in the form of Lee Hoi Gei (whose only credits are this and The Tattoo Connection). Hoi Gei gets off on seducing other kung fu masters who can get it up, and Ku Feng has an annoying habbit of constantly walking in on them during the act, leading to him become a killer driven by his inability to satisfy his woman. Almost as if Man-Bo was embarrassed to direct such an out-there take on the genre, there’s an attempt to incorporate a subplot about girls from Vietnam being human trafficked, which Hoi Gei is masterminding behind the scenes. It’s a nice touch and actually works to a degree, but there’s no escaping the fact that this is really all about Ku Feng being driven to murder because he’s flacid.

As ridiculous as it sounds on paper, onscreen Bruce and the Iron Finger is a nice slice of gritty contemporary 70’s action, and the whole thing is played straight faced. Even a scene which has Hoi Gei declare to Someno Yukio, wearing nothing but a pair of briefs, that she’s going to ride him like a horse is played straight. I’m sure the implication behind this line in the script notes was supposed to be racier than what ends up onscreen, which has Hoi Gei literally straddle Yukio on all fours, and makes him crawl around the apartment with her on his back. I could have done without the closeups of his posterior being slapped, but the scene entertaingly ends with Hoi Gei dropping a lit cigarette into his mouth, and to top it off Yukio, still wearing only his briefs, then gets into a fight with Ku Feng in the garden.

While the night time set opening had me fearing I was in for another forgettable dose of Bruceploitation action (not helped by the battered and beat up print which is currently the only way to watch it), things quickly pick up, with the choreography of the Leung brothers being particularly crisp and sharp. Chung Tao’s screenfighting skills were rather clunky in the first half of the 70’s, however starting from 1976’s Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth he showed a noticable improvement, and by ’79 he looked like the real deal. Similar to Leung Kar-Yan, he seemed to develop a knack for quickly picking up choreography despite a lack of formal training, and here he looks legitimately lethal with both his fists and his feet.

Bruce Leung also gets in on the action, playing an instructor who teaches the iron finger technique, and a fight in which he faces off against Chung Tao is a highlight. Starting off in the kung fu school and ending up on the rooftop, similar to Kuei Chih-Hung’s lensing in The Gold Connection, Man-Bo really takes advantage of the environment, shooting parts of the fight through the clusters of TV ariels that clutter the rooftop. For all of the ferocity Leung shows in his fights, he undeniably looks a little goofy with his semi-mullet, combined with a pressure point based kung fu that has him pacing around with his arms in the air, like someone who took the preying manits poses a little too literally. However he gains his street cred back ten fold when he arrives to lend a hand in the final fight, decked out in a tracksuit with a cigarette dangling from his mouth, which stays there even after the first kick is thrown!

The fight action in Bruce and the Iron Finger comes thick and fast, and even though this was only Leung Siu-Hung’s fourth gig at choreographing after debuting in ’76 with Tiger of Northland, the talent that’d eventually see him go on to direct the likes of Superfights and Bloodmoon is clear to see. Chung Tao soon finds himself being ambushed everywhere he goes, which leads to fights taking place in all of our favorite 70’s HK locales – the junk yard, apartment stairwells, kung fu schools, and of course container yards. In the junk yard Lee Hoi-San turns up as a steel bar wielding assassin (the second most famous bald headed kung fu star after Gordon Liu?), a face who’s welcome in any kung fu flick and worked with Chung Tao frequently (see also Bruce Lee – The Man, The Myth, Soul Brothers of Kung Fu, Bruce Lee in New Guinea, and The Lama Avenger), for another of their worthy showdowns.

Eventually culminating in a two versus one showdown, as Chung Tao and Bruce Leung teamup to take on the might of Ku Feng and his lackeys in a container yard, Bruce and the Iron Finger finishes strong by delivering a healthy dose of kung fu goodness. For the avid listener, you may notice some subdued Bruce Lee battle yelps scattered in here and there, but really this should be seen as a Ho Chung Tao actioner first and foremost, and he delivers the goods. For the male viewer, it should act as a precautionary tale to always read the label for any side effects the kung fu your practicing may have, and for everybody else, enjoy watching the fists and feet fly against a backdrop of late 70’s Hong Kong.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7.5/10

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“Return of Red Tiger” Theatrical Poster

AKA: The Return of Bul-bom
Director: Nam Gi-Nam
Cast: Bruce Le (Huang Kin Long), Eagle Han Ying, An Tae-seop, Lee Kang-jo, Kim Jin-hui
Running Time: 94 min. 

By Paul Bramhall

As a kung fu movie fan, have you ever asked yourself if there’s a kung fu flick out there that’s so bad, it could put you off the genre for good? I have, and I’ve kept my fingers crossed that it’s a movie I’ll never find. However all that changed when I watched Return of Red Tiger. The tragic part is that I brought this dire situation upon myself. I have one rule when it comes to Bruce Le movies, and that’s not to watch anything pre-1980. In the world of Bruceploitaiton, Le’s 70’s output is like staring into an abyss from which you can’t return, like Ken Watanabe at the end of Inception. I had my own Watanabe moment when I sat through 1977’s Return of Bruce many years ago, a Philippines shot travesty that put my love of kung fu flicks on life support for longer than I care to recall. I made it back though, and it wasn’t until 2020 that I had a relapse.

While unassumingly browsing the contents of one of those many 50-DVD kung fu packs that have been gathering dust on a shelf, I came across Return of Red Tiger. I should have known better, but my defences were down, perhaps thanks to the good will I’d garnered towards Bruce Le’s latter day output in the years passed since that fateful day. So it was, I began the mind-altering journey that would rattle my love of the kung fu genre to its very core.

Just a year earlier in 1976, Huang Kin-Lung debuted in Bruce’s Deadly Fingers under the new name of Bruce Le, after supporting roles in a handful of Shaw Brothers productions. While this particular outing was shot in Hong Kong, he’d spend the majority of the 70’s starring in either Filipino or Korean productions (or co-productions in some cases). 1977 appears to be a year that Le spent mostly in Korea, as apart from Return of Red Tiger, he’d also star in Bruce and Dragon Fist and Bruce and Shaolin Kung Fu (and its sequel). While none of them are particularly memorable, Return of Red Tiger takes the cake when it comes to the sheer amount of will power required to get to the end.

The biggest problem with Return of Red Tiger, and one which may have made it entirely more enjoyable if removed all together, is Le himself. His role here has nothing to do with Bruce Lee, and instead he plays a mute beggar, clocking in a performance that’ll make you want to gauge your eyes out and ram chopsticks into your ears within 10 seconds of him being onscreen. Due to a childhood trauma he’s devolved to take on the persona of a feral cat, and spends the whole movie communicating via high pitched meowing and wild yowls. It’s infuriating.

His behaviour makes no sense. In one scene we see him hyperactively running down the street, the happiest mute in the world with his bottle of milk, then in the next scene he sinks into a corner and starts traumatically yowling at the sky. When he runs out of milk, he visits a café where the owner gives him a bowl full, which he proceeds to down while half of it spills all over himself. I know its kind of a kung fu movie trope for characters to have some kind of mental impairment (who can forget Casanova Wong’s mute character in Magnificent Wonderman from Shaolin!?), but this way too extreme even for me. Preceding Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow by a year, even his fighting style is based on a cat, but we’ll get to that later. Needless to say his performance here makes even his most bombastic of Bruce Lee impersonations seem like a subtle masterclass in method acting.

The actual plot involves a singer whose boyfriend is in possession of a microfilm (the most sought after item in 70’s cinema?) and is on the run from the mafia. Played by Kim Jin-hui (Osaka Godfather – which was released by IFD films as Ninja Operation 5 – Godfather the Master) and An Tae-seop (Secret Agents II), while it’s never precisely clear what’s on the microfilm, the main crux of the plot is that Le has the hots for Jin-hui, and has since they were childhood friends. In one cringe inducing sequence, we see Le imagining himself and Jin-hui running towards each other in a field in slow motion. Well, Jin-hui is running, Le skips. I kid you not. Anyway, so blind is his love that he ends up giving up Tae-seop to the mafia out of jealousy, which doesn’t sit well with Jin-hui. After more cat like yowling and crying, Le realises the error of his ways, and the trio team up to take on the dastardly gangsters in a horrendous final fight.

What can be said is that the plot in the English dub has been drastically altered from the original version, not only with the dubbing, but it’s also clear whole scenes have been removed (and added – a random scene from the James Nam 1974 actioner The Fierce One is inserted at one point, adding nothing). Not that I expect it’d make it any better, but the actual story is a classic tale of Korea vs Japanese, with Tae-seop playing an independence fighter who comes to Seoul to receive funding he’ll take back to Manchuria. Le plays an orphan whose parents were killed by the Japanese, and cut his tongue out. The unrequited love angle remains the same, with the main differences being the mafia are the occupying Japanese, and in the Korean version Jin-hui dies after successfully rescuing Tae-seop, allowing him to complete his mission.

At least that version sounds better on paper. Even with the bastardized story and dubbing (which makes everyone sound like they’ve just stepped out of the wild west) though, its clear that Return of Red Tiger is an unsuccessful attempt to mix the popular Korean ’dajjimawa’ genre, which basically translates to tough guy action flick, with the equally popular kung fu genre. Tae-seop delivers powerful punches and can throw a mean kick with the best of the dajjimawa guys, but the genre was far apart from the more choreographed exchanges of the kung fu world. Quite how importing a Bruce Lee clone, and having him play a mute beggar who acts like a deranged cat, was supposed to be a recipe for success is beyond my comprehension.

Which brings us to the fight action. If nothing else, it’s like nothing which has ever been seen before, and thankfully ever been seen since. In what I’d loosely call choreography at best, it mostly comprises of Le (with the obligatory high pitched meowing) scampering around on the ground on all fours, pausing to scratch at it with his hands, before ’attacking’. Said attacks mainly comprise of scratching peoples faces, which seems to immediately kill them. It’s horrible, and one of the greatest example of car crash fighting I’ve ever seen, as no matter how horrendous it gets, the sheer bizarreness of it makes it impossible to look away from. Return of Red Tiger was the debut of Eagle Han Ying, in a small role as an one of the mafia lackeys, and his charisma comes off the screen even buried under the horrendous dubbing. It’s an undignified first screen appearance, as he dies from Le giving him a cat hug. Yes, a cat hug.

Directed by Nam Gi-Nam, a journey man director who helmed many genres over his almost 40 year career (other kung fu flicks include Leopard Fist Ninja and Evil Hits Evil), Return of Red Tiger was his sophomore feature after the 1972 drama Don’t Cry My Daughter, and frankly it’s surprising he ever worked again. However somehow everyone involved with this travesty did go on to work again, and in many cases it was on to bigger and better things, although that’s mainly because the bar couldn’t be set any lower.

We do get a final fight which pits Le against the mafia boss played by Lee Kang-jo (Fury in Shaolin Temple), and after he does the honours proceedings end in ear drum splitting fashion, as Le proceeds to yowl at the sky for a disproportionate amount of time. The yowling is juxtaposed with Tae-sop and Jin-hui having a romantic exchange at the river bank, in which they muse on how they’re now free to go anywhere together, and even during these scenes they can still hear Le’s endless yowling in the distance. To be honest, several hours after watching the movie I can still hear it too, and I was hoping that writing this review would make it stop. It hasn’t.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 0/10

Note: COF likes you so much that we present you with the full film below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVrPRJ0kkq0

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“Dragon Lee vs. the 5 Brothers” Theatrical Poster

Director: Kim Si-hyun
Cast: Dragon Lee (Mun Kyong-sok), Yuen Qiu, Kwon Il-soo, Gam Kei Chu, Lee Ye Min, Chui Man Fooi, Kim Ki-ju, Han Myeong-hwan, Choi Hyeong-keun, Jeong Ju-Hyeon, Jang In-Han, Choe Il, Kim Dong-Ho
Running Time: 87 min. 

By Paul Bramhall

The Bruceploitation genre would melt the brain of even the most academic film critic, which is why I prefer to remain on the other end of the scale. A genre dedicated to cashing in on the legacy of Bruce Lee, often by disguising themselves as Bruce Lee movies to an audience long before the internet, I always found it oxymoronic that many of these productions used the imitators name in their actual title. Essentially giving the game away that, not only where these not Bruce Lee movies, but actively promoting the fact that they were imitation flicks. Classic examples include Bruce Li in Snake Island and Bruce Le’s Greatest Revenge to name but two. Another familiar face of the Bruceploitation genre was Dragon Lee from Korea, who didn’t escape the same treatment. While movies like Dragon Bruce Lee, Part II indicate that his middle name was in fact Bruce, other titles were less confusing in their approach.

Dragon Lee vs. the 5 Brothers was one such production, although like so many Korean kung fu movies, it’s not the original title, but rather one which it was slapped with for international distribution. The original title was The Five Disciples, and was Lee’s first real starring role after featuring in The Last Fist of Fury from the previous year (which is most widely available as the version incorporated into The Real Bruce Lee). Dragon Lee was always something of an anomaly when compared to his Bruceploitation peers. While Bruce Li found himself constantly recast in Bruce Lee biopics, and Bruce Le found himself in flicks which usually involved such ridiculousness as tracking down Bruce Lee’s secret kung fu manuals, Dragon Lee was a little different.

With the exception of a couple (the previously mentioned Last Fist of Fury, and The Clones of Bruce Lee), the appeal of Korea’s Bruceploitation export was in seeing him act like Bruce Lee in movies which, minus the hyperactive posturing, had no connection to Bruce Lee himself. Once the 80’s hit Dragon Lee seemed to really find his rhythm, as regardless of whatever era the movie he starred in was set, he’d basically appear as a wondering nomad wearing a pair of black pants and white t-shirt. If you thought Steve Jobs had a consistent wardrobe, you need to watch a string of 80’s Dragon Lee flicks. Your mind will be changed (probably in more ways than one). Before the black pants and white t-shirt era though, Lee actually starred in some interesting period productions, not least because they seemed to have a wardrobe budget.

Starting with Dragon Lee vs. the 5 Brothers, and followed by 1979’s Dragon Lee’s Ways of Kung Fu and 1980’s Champ Against Champ, these three movies can kind of be looked at as Dragon Lee’s period kung fu trilogy. After these, the mantis fist and accompanying electronic bleeps (and the burning question of if said bleeps were added by Asso Asia or were already there?) became standard, so it’s always somewhat of a rarity to see Lee featuring in what can best be called a ‘straight’ kung fu flick. Of course Korean kung fu flicks are known for being slightly zany and left of field, so even without Dragon Lee fighting to a soundtrack of computerised blips and bloops, you can expect some eye brow raising moments. This is never truer than in the opening of Dragon Lee vs. the 5 Brothers, which has Lee scale a 20-foot wall like he’s Spider-Man to escape a fight with Korean kung fu luminary Kwon Il-soo, and introduces a deadly flying hat.

Said hat belongs to Yuen Qiu, the Peking Opera trained femme fatale that’s perhaps most well known these days for her role as the landlady in Kung Fu Hustle. This would be the first time for Lee and Qiu to share the screen together, and Qiu would return to Korea 3 years later to co-star with him in Dragon, the Young Master and Dragon’s Snake Fist. I guess those Dragon Lee charms were too difficult to stay away from for long. Interestingly, at one point Qiu dons an all-white ninja costume (although it’s one of those Korean style ninja costumes – if you’ve seen at least one Korean kung fu flick, you know the type), and I swear it’s the same costume that Lee would wear a few years later in Dragon, The Young Master.

For this particular outing though, Lee’s appearance seems to be modelled off Bruce Lee’s famous Shaw Brothers photoshoot, with slicked back hair and a long-braided ponytail, it’s definitely the most distinctive look in his filmography. This would be the 2nd time to work with director Kim Si-hyun, who’s practically the Godfather of the Korea Kung Fu Movie (can I trademark this term?), having first worked on Lee’s debut Last Fist of Fury the year prior. The pair would go on to collaborate a further 10 times together over the next 7 years, which I guess kind of makes them the Wilson Yip and Donnie Yen of their time (yeah, I said it).

Like many a Korean kung fu movie, it’s obviously been filmed in the depths of winter, with characters breaths visible even during indoor scenes. I mean I understand the Korean summer would be too hot to film a kung fu flick, but I could never figure out why spring or autumn seem to be off-limits. Thankfully there’s plentiful fight action to keep everyone warm, and the cast are practically a who’s who of Korean kung fu luminaries. Lee Ye-min is one of those dastardly Qings out to get hold of a list that contains the names of the rebels, and in his downtime enjoys wearing a pink nightgown and earrings (played completely straight faced). He’s aided by his right-hand man, Choi Min-kyu, who comes equipped with a metal hand and a variety of disguises. Min-kyu also choreographs the action, which features the likes of Kim Ki-ju, Han Myeong-hwan, Choi Hyeong-keun, and the previously mentioned Kwon Il-soo.

Min-kyu is one of those familiar faces who always puts in a solid performance, and as expected he clocks in an energetic one under his own fight choreography, as does everyone else. The fight action is definitely of the Korean variety – a lot of taekwondo kicks, and an equal amount of head scratching wirework. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many instances of people leaping into the top of trees, dropping back down on top of someone’s head, and then bouncing off into the next tree. It’s like some kind of bizarre precursor to Super Mario Bros. There’s even a scene where a character runs across the tree tops, beating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to it by a whole 22 years. Seems like Yuen Woo-Ping is a closet Dragon Lee fan. The ability to walk on air at head level proves a major source of hilarity, as the villains constantly find themselves being kicked in the face when said walk involves passing their heads. It’s completely crazy.

Amidst the craziness though, there’s some legitimately good stuff. The exaggerated posturing of Lee is nicely offset by Qiu’s acrobatic flourishes (and her deadly half hat, half flying guillotine), and its refreshing to hear those electronic beeps replaced by a constant stream of Bruce-esque battle cries. The final fight involves the pair teaming up for back-to-back 2 vs 1 showdowns against Min-kyu followed by Ye-min, and there’s plenty of grounded high impact kicks thrown amongst the craziness. Similar to Min-kyu’s action direction in Dragon, the Young Master 3 years later, the culmination of the fight features Lee and Qiu literally ripping the shirt off the villains back. It must be a Korean thing, but apparently beating people to a pulp just isn’t enough, you have to leave them in a state of humiliated undress as well.

Like any Dragon Lee flick, the ferociousness of the fights is complimented by the ferociousness of the dubbing. 2 minutes don’t pass by without someone being called a bastard, and the threat of dying is constant. Some highlights include – “You bitch, you must be crazy! You must want to die!”, “You bastard, you must be in a hurry to die!”, “We’re going to put an end to your life”, and “Very clever, you’d better stay smart if you want to live.” I see what they did with that last one. Despite the fun on offer in Dragon Lee vs. the 5 Brothers though, there are definitely lulls in the pace, and Lee surprisingly isn’t onscreen as much as expected. It almost feels like its supposed to be more of an ensemble piece, but perhaps after the success (don’t quote me on this) of Last Fist of Fury, they decided to make it a starring vehicle for Lee. Whatever the case, he’s not as front and centre as he’d be just a couple of years later.

This is a small flaw though in what’s still a healthy dose of crazy Korean kung fu. Featuring bare chested heroics, a booby-trapped sedan chair, and more metal fisted action than you can shake a stick at, if you’re looking to get your kung fu fill, Dragon Lee vs. the 5 Brothers is more than likely to deliver it.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 6/10

Warning: The following clip contains a potential spoiler. 

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“Bruce – The King of Kung Fu” VHS Cover

AKA: Legend of Bruce Lee
Director: Bruce Le 
Cast: Bruce Le (Huang Kin Long), Chan Kwok Kuen, Jeng Kei Ying, Fung Hak On, Fung King Man, Hon Gwok Choi, Kong Do, Benny Lai, Sek Kin, Wong Chi Wai, Lee Hang, Wei Pei , Yeung Chak Lam, Law Keung, Bolo Yeung
Running Time: 90 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Spend enough time down the rabbit hole that is the Bruceploitation genre, and you’ll come to understand that there’s two types of Bruceploitation. Those flicks that claim to be biopics of Bruce Lee’s life, and those that attempt a continuation of a character the Little Dragon played in his 5 most famous movies. Of the former, during the peak of Bruceploitation it was Taiwan’s Ho Chung-Tao that had the monopoly. Going under the guise of Bruce Li, between 1974 to 1978 his physical similarities to Lee saw his cast a whopping 5 times in various biopics spanning the Little Dragon’s life. Even Danny Lee, who’d become Hong Kong’s go-to guy to play a cop in the 80’s and 90’s, had a crack at playing Lee in 1976’s Bruce Lee and I (or as I prefer to call it by its alias – Sex Life of Bruce Lee).

During the 70’s, another of the Bruce Lee clones – Bruce Le (real name Huang Kin-Lung) – didn’t get a look in when it came to actually playing the Little Dragon. At best, you could expect to witness him traipsing around Manila trying to find Bruce Lee’s secret deadly finger kung fu manual. At worst, well, you were spoilt for choice. However in 1979 Le decided to take the reins, and helmed his directorial debut, Bruce the Superhero. Sure, he was still stuck in Manila, but it proved Le to be more ambitious than some of the brain numbing tripe he’d been starring in. It was with his sophomore production as a director that Le would finally cast himself as Bruce Lee for the first (and last) time, in what would become Bruce – The King of Kung Fu.

Although it was made only a year after Bruce the Superhero, 1980 was the year that Le finally got out of the Philippines and South Korea where he’d filmed many of the titles he headlined in the 70’s, and found himself back in Hong Kong, where he’d started as a bit player for the Shaw Brothers. Bruce – The King of Kung Fu focuses on Bruce Lee’s late teens attending college and learning kung fu in Hong Kong, and ends with the decision to send him back to the U.S. to complete his studies. Well, actually it ends with a freeze frame of Le performing a slightly gangly legged flying kick in the middle of a field, à la the famous freeze frame that closes out Fist of Fury. But let’s just assume that he goes to the U.S. shortly afterwards, and Le knew his audience were smart enough to not need to see him actually board a plane.

I mention the final freeze frame of the flying kick, because kicks and fists are really what Bruce – The King of Kung Fu are all about. Sure, on paper it may read like a genuine biopic, focusing in on a specific period of Lee’s life, but onscreen it quickly becomes clear the plot (or indeed, any semblance to the events in Lee’s actual life) are not the key priority here. When I say quickly, the opening credits are set over Le performing a drunken snake fist routine, complete with a bottle of Chinese wine in hand. It’s fair to say that while the framework of the plot may use Bruce Lee, the content is very much based on the trends of the time. Only 2 years earlier Jackie Chan starred in Drunken Master which became a megahit, cementing comedic kung fu as the new box office gold.

Here Le feels like he’s also looking to put his own stamp on the genre, but knows that to have a chance to do so he needs to use the Bruce Lee connection, so simply uses the guise of Lee’s tumultuous late teens to make his own Seasonal Films influenced kung fu flick. This makes Bruce – The King of Kung Fu both an entertaining and frequently hilarious (albeit unintentionally) experience to watch, often awkwardly mixing the more light-hearted elements of a kung fu comedy, with the over-the-top ferocity of the Bruceploitation genre. What’s definitely enjoyable though, is to see Le’s action direction turn away from imitating the Bruce Lee aesthetic of short, brief busts of action, to more intricate and lengthy exchanges that show off all the performer’s skill. Indeed Le allows himself to have his ass handed to him in more than one of the fights, which gives him the motivation to start visiting various kung fu masters and learn their ways.

One such master is clearly modelled after Ip Man, as Fung Ging-Man portrays a Wing Chun teacher who Le visits, and ultimately ends up learning from. Watching the 30-year old Le visit Ging-Man as a teenage Bruce Lee with his neatly coiffed hair and tidy college attire looks every bit as wrong as it sounds, however it only adds to Bruce – The King of Kung Fu’s slightly surreal charm. Jeet Kune Do may not get a single mention, but Le does go on to meet a blind cookie seller who happens to be an “expert at blindfold fighting” (surprisingly), and another kung fu master who practices snake fist, all of whom he endeavors to learn their respective styles from. All of this is hung on a very loose narrative that basically involves Lee constantly getting into trouble with the local youths and other kung fu school students.

This is demonstrated from the get go, when in the opening scene Le leaves his house to go to college, and is immediately set upon by a gang lying in wait to ambush him. Before you can let out a high-pitched battle cry Le has already lost his shirt, and is knocking seven shades out of his attackers. Having floored the lot of them, he’s barely taken a couple of steps before a 2nd different group of riled up attackers run into frame to demand a fight, and we rinse and repeat. This is kung fu genre visual storytelling at his best, I mean why use exposition to explain that several groups are unhappy with Le, when you can use a scene of them trying to attack him one group at a time? Le never really gets to put his shirt on again, and proceeds to spend the duration either walking around Hong Kong bare chested, or wearing it unbuttoned. Who knows, maybe Le was making a sly poke that he doesn’t think Bruce Lee was capable of buttoning up his own shirt?

Le is joined by a pair of comedic acquaintances in the form of Hon Kwok-Choi (The Gold Connection) and Shaw Brothers regular Chan Kwok-Kuen (Opium and the Kung Fu Master). Thankfully any detours into grating comedy, all of which are fleeting, are handled by the pair, who do an amicable job of bouncing off Le’s attempts to look like a fresh-faced teenager. The closest Le gets to anything gratuitous is when he visits the window of his favorite prostitute, who obliges by unbuttoning her top and allowing Le to fondle her breasts through the window grate. However even this slice of nudity is interrupted by the arrival of yet another gang who want to give Le a beating (and apparently knew just where to find him – another subtle poke at the Little Dragon?), and quickly segues into an alley way fight scene. When you’re Bruce Lee, there’s no time for breasts, whether they be through a window or otherwise.

To Le’s credit, he’s enlisted some top tier fighting talent to populate the cast of Bruce – The King of Kung Fu. Fung Hak-On turns up as a thug who Le goes up against twice, once empty handed, then again pitting Le armed with a pair of Wing Chun knives versus a pole wielding Hak-On. Some performers are so high level that they couldn’t look bad on screen even if they tried, and Hak-On is definitely one of them, making it a pleasure to watch him pit his moves against a skillset such as Le’s.

A couple of Enter the Dragon luminaries are also in the mix, with Bolo turning up for a cameo solely for the purpose of having a fight against Le (although let’s be honest, Bolo turned up in almost every Brucepolitation flick!), and Sek Kin clocks in for what most resembles the villain of the piece. Kin’s role in Enter the Dragon was an epic disservice to his skills, so suffice to say his fight here blows the lame hall of mirrors finale out of the water. Kong Do, another familiar face from the Bruceploitation genre turns up as part of Le’s cannon fodder, and his scene seems to indicate that Le forgot at least once that he was supposed to be filming a Bruce Lee biopic, as their fight ends with Le crushing his throat and leaving him dead on the floor! I guess old habits die hard. While such anomalies would be enough to make the casual film fans brain melt, for the discerning kung fu fan Bruce – King of Kung Fu has plenty to offer.

Featuring training scenes surrounded by very real cobras (one of which ends up being force fed Chinese wine, but still, that’s getting off lightly compared to the snake in Eastern Condors), fights aplenty, above average choreography, and a kung fu teacher referring to Bruce Lee as “a very dangerous little man”, you can tell that Le didn’t set out to do anything half-heartedly. As a director he’d really hit his rhythm with the likes of Bruce Strikes Back and Ninja Over the Great Wall, but as his one crack at playing Bruce Lee, Bruce – The King of Kung Fu is an entertaining way to spend 90 minutes.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7/10

The post Bruce – The King of Kung Fu | aka Young Bruce Lee (1980) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Dragon Bruce Lee, Part II” Korean Poster

AKA: Dragon Lee Fights Again
Director: To Man-Bo
Co-director: Lee Eun
Cast: Dragon Lee (Mun Kyong-sok), Lee Suk-jin, Cheung Lik, Ju Eun-seop, Jang Ryeok, Bolo Yeung, Tien Feng, Philip Ko Fei, Sham Chin Bo, To Wai Wo
Running Time: 75 min.

By Ian Whittle

OK, this is rather complicated. A 1930’s set kung fu movie starring Dragon Lee that, depending on what version you own, is a sequel to one of three different movies!

Dragon Lee plays a resistance fighter on the run from the Japanese (who are led by Bolo in a nifty Hitler moustache!), who takes shelter with a patriotic family headed by Philip Ko (in not entirely convincing old age make-up). Meanwhile Nick Cheung (credited as Jackie Cheung) is a pickpocket/rebel, and his crippled sister (Lau Ying-hung) is an expert musician. Which comes in handy, as Ko’s wife has a nervous condition that can only be soothed by music (no, seriously, it’s important!)

The film it most closely resembles is Last Fist of Fury (which was incorporated into The Real Bruce Lee), and the title suggests it is a sequel to Dragon Lee Fights Back, which also stars Dragon Lee and Nick Cheung, but that was a modern day film! The Korean title is Jeong Mu Gate 81, which suggests this is essentially a new variation on Fist of Fury. And just to make matters even more confusing, this is known on video as BIG BOSS II, causing confusion with the real Big Boss II (1976), which was a Lo Lieh film guest starring Bruce Le, and which remains frustratingly unavaliable on home video!

This stands out from most of the Dragon Lee movies in that Godfrey Ho seems to have nothing to with it. Consequently the English dubbing is better (Vaughan Savidge wasn’t involved with this one either) and the sound effects are more in keeping with your typical Hong Kong movie so there are less bizzare bird chirps and electronic bleeps going off during the fight scenes. Production values are higher (slightly), the fights are more intricatly choreographed, and the stakes in the story seem more important – a World War II themed resistance plot is always going to be more interested that the squabble over the farm in Golden Dragon, Silver Snake.

As ever with these co-productions, I can’t decide if it is a HK movie made in Korea, or a Korean movie with more Hong Kong guest stars than usual. You (and maybe the accountants) be the judge! The film itself can’t decide if it takes place in China or Korea, as the costumes are all over the place. Dragon Lee’s impressivley bouffant hair suggests the 80s has well and truly arrived!

Interestingly, on the English dub anyway, two clips from Last Fist of Fury and Clones of Bruce Lee are spliced in, including the music (Gonna Fly Now!!!) and sound FX from those two productions. This practice would carry over into the Asso Asia acquired Dragon Lee movies, but also seems to be have been adopted for a few Bruce Le movies. The soundtrack for the film proper is mostly John Barry’s majestic score for Disney’s The Black Hole, but the title music is from the Costa-Gravas movie Z. Quite why someone thought it would be appropiate for a kung fu movie is beyond me.

If you can stomach the ridiculous melodrama (especially involving the musical medicine!), bizarre acting and rickety quality, you will be rewarded with a fun piece of nonsense. And Dragon Lee vs Bolo is much better then John Saxon vs Bolo!

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 6/10

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Fist of Feat, Touch of Death | Blu-ray (The Film Detective)

AKA: Dragon and the Cobra
Director: Mathew Mallinson
Producer: Terry Levene
Cast: Aaron Banks, Adolph Caesar, Teruyuki Higa, Bill Louie, Fred Williamson, Ron Van Clief, Gail Turner, Hollywood Browde, Louis Neglia, Annette Bronson
Running Time: 86 min.

By Jeff Bona

Whenever the discussion topic of “What’s the worst Bruceploitation movie ever made?” comes up, the answer 99.9% of the time will be Fist of Fear, Touch of Death.

Is it really that bad? Yes. But it’s also one of the best examples of something that’s so stupidly entertaining that it would be a dream to get some insights on who, what, where, when, how and why Fist of Fear, Touch of Death came to be – and thanks to the creative team from The Film Detective, dreams do come true.

Filmed in 1979, this U.S. production from director Matthew Mallinson is a pseudo-documentary that takes place during the “1979 World Karate Championships” at Madison Square Garden. At the event, a news anchor (played by Oscar/Golden Globe nominee Adolph Caesar of A Soldier’s Story) interviews top martial arts experts and personalities – including Aaron Banks, Ron Van Clief and blaxploitation star Fred Williamson – with questions about the late Bruce Lee, particularly about his mysterious death.

Scattered throughout the film are segments of spliced-together footage (Godfrey Ho-style) from Bruce Lee’s 1957 film, The Thunderstorm, as well as Bruce’s appearance in the 1971 TV series, Longstreet. Scenes from Thunderstorm are forced into the narrative as flashbacks from Bruce’s teenage years; and the Longstreet footage is presented as a series of “interviews” (making it look as if Bruce is having a face-to-face conversation with Adolph Caesar or Aaron Banks). Additionally, footage from 1971’s Forced to Fight, an obscure period Taiwanese kung fu film, has Tong Wai’s character being passed as “Bruce Lee’s Great Grandfather”.

The cinematic concoction of Fist of Fear, Touch of Death is topped off with a series of fourth-wall breaking, mirco-subplots involving Fred Williamson (i.e. waking up with a topless hooker); Ron Van Clief doing Karate exercises (at one point, he stops and says with conviction: “I think Bruce Lee was murdered!”); and a kung fu fight scene with Bill Louie (as sort of a “Kato” with a mustache) who saves a girl from being gang raped.

Thanks to the newly released, limited edition Blu-ray (and DVD) from The Film Detective, we are treated to 29-minute documentary titled That’s Bruceploitation: Making Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, which features insightful interviews with the film’s director, Matthew Mallinson (who is perhaps best known for his editing work in films like Trapped Alive and Caged Fury); producer Terry Levene (Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death); screenwriter Ron Harvey; filmmaker Jim Markovic (The Real Bruce Lee); and cult actors Ron Van Clief (The Black Dragon’s Revenge) and Fred Williamson (Black Caesar).

In That’s Bruceploitation: Making Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, we learn that in 1979, Mallinson was presented with the task of making a marketable “Bruce Lee movie” using whatever resources he could get his hands on. This included the aforementioned “1979 World Karate Championships,” which in reality was a martial arts exhibition event put together by prolific martial arts promoter Aaron Banks and his New York Karate Academy. Using guerrilla-style filmmaking tactics, Mallinson used Banks’ exhibition as the film’s backdrop and haphazardly filmed the event’s VIP attendees (Ron Van Clief, Fred Williamson and Bill Louie) as “last minute” stars of the movie. Even the Fist of Fear, Touch of Death film crew, along with mildly drunk Adolph Caesar, had to fake their way into the Madison Square Garden auditorium as legit “media representatives”.

It’s also revealed that producer Levene had purchased the rights to Thunderstorm, Longstreet, as well the Tong Wai actioner Forced to Fight. According Levene, he let Mallinson cut ‘n paste scenes from all three sources, add new dub tracks, and inject them into the newly filmed footage to form a cohesive plot (which he fails to do, but that’s the beauty of it!). Sidenote: Levene previously applied Thunderstorm footage to 1977’s The Real Bruce Lee, which he also produced.

The Film Detective did a mighty fine job with its “40th Anniversary” Blu-ray edition of Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, which is presented in an all-new 4K restoration. It also includes Liner notes by film historian Don Stradley and English and Spanish Theatrical Trailers.

But what really makes the disc shine is the That’s Bruceploitation: Making Fist of Fear, Touch of Death documentary. The fact The Film Detective got all these guys together to talk immensely about the making of Fist of Fear, Touch of Death is a magical experience.

Jeff Bona’s Rating: 8/10 (as a whole!)

The post Fist of Fear, Touch of Death: Anniversary Edition (1980) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Jackie and Bruce to the Rescue” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Fist of Death
Director: Wu Chia Chun
Co-director: Choe Dong-Joon
Cast: Kim Tai-chung, Lee Siu-Ming, Wang Pao-Yu, He Ying, Chang Il-Sik, Eagle Han Ying, Ma Sha, Chen Shan, Baek Hwang-ki, Park Yong-Pal
Running time: 90 min. 

By Ian Whittle

You’d think a film featuring a Bruce Lee clone AND a Jackie Chan clone (not to mention maverick exploitation producer Dick Randall’s name on the credits) would be a lot of fun, but well, no, it’s not.

In a way, this is a Fist of Fury knock-off with the Jing Wu school vs the… well, the dialogue says “YMCA” but the logo on the school is clearly YMGA! Either way, the masters of both schools get bumped off, although the expected school vs. school rivalry peters out fairly early on as it’s blatantly obvious some no good gangsters are behind it, in order to get a document, for reasons that seem to have slipped everyone’s minds until it’s mentioned with less then 10min to go – and I swear this is what they say:

“Master always said that document was important. It has a list of the YMCA members, also a treasure map. If it fell into the wrong hands, it would be too terrible to comtemplate!”

Yes, well, I’m sure the YMCA wouldn’t want people to know they were involved in this mess too!

Anyway, it takes us a good 15 min before we get to see our Bruce Lee clone, although a title card at the beginning assures us of his credentials. And look, it’s none other than Kim Tae-Chung (credited as Tong Lung), late of Game of Death and Tower of Death (and later of No Retreat, No Surrender). It’s just as well the title card was there, as he looks nothing like Bruce Lee at all except when he bugs his eyes in moments of stress. As an actor, he’s not awful and is good looking enough, but yeah, you can see why they used that cardboard cut out in Game of Death!

Lee Siu-Ming (credited as Jackie Chang), playing “Jackie” and seemingly cast because his nose was reasonably big, comes off surprisingly well in his intro, exhanging in a wacky brawl using a rickshaw as a weapon. He doesn’t really get much later chance to shine, but at least his scenes are less po-faced.

The two characters wander in and out of each other’s plotlines at regular intervals, but there’s little to hold the attention aside from some fun fights. Sadly, the film comits further cinematic crimes by ignoring the likes of Eagle Han Ying and Chen Shan, and reserving the main villian role for Hei Ying, who is a boring actor, and spends most of his fight scene teleporting and disapearing in tricks that are probably meant to evoke the then current ninja fad but are more likely to remind you of a school production of The Wizard of Oz. And the end fight ends abruptly with a freeze frame denying us from seeing the final death blow! Honestly!

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 3/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_ut5_YdiKs

The post Jackie and Bruce to the Rescue | aka Fist of Death (1982) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Soul of Chiba” Japanese Theatrical Poster

Director: Chan Tung-Man, Noda Yukio
Cast: Sonny Chiba Shinichi, Luk Chuen, Shiomi Etsuko, Bolo Yeung Sze, Fong Yuen, Kong Chuen, Tadashi Yamashita, Lau Nga-Ying, Peter Chan Hoh-San, Krung Srivilai, Naowarat Yooktanun, Somjit Sapsamruey
Running Time: 94 min.

By Paul Bramhall

At the risk of blacklisting myself from ever writing for an Asian cinema site again, I’ll admit I initially wasn’t very enamoured with Sonny Chiba. When I first got into Asian cinema in the late 90’s, I found myself developing an insatiable appetite for Hong Kong action and, without realizing it, I came to expect action from any corner of Asia to be on the same level. When, inevitably, I found myself watching The Street Fighter, its exploitative tone and raw karate style were met with indifference from my younger self. What was the deal with everyone digging this guy so much? Of course, in the preceding years I’ve come to appreciate The Streetfighter for the raucous slice of OTT exploitation greatness that it is, but let it be said – if the first Sonny Chiba movie I watched back then was Soul of Chiba, I would have been on the bandwagon straight away!

In 1977, allegedly tired of the Toei executives lack of understanding on how to make a proper karate movie, Chiba took matters into his own hands and hauled ship over to Thailand to produce a movie over there (and more importantly, do things his way). He brought several members of his Japan Action Club with him, including Etsuko Shihomi, and the director and star pairing of the Za Karate trilogy, Yukio Noda and Tadashi Yamashita (aka Bronson Lee). Throw in the likes of Bolo, and frequent Shaw Brothers player Luk Chuen, what you’re left with is 90 minutes of unadulterated, delirious entertainment.

Dispensing with such trivialities as a coherent plot and characters that make a lick of sense, Soul of Chiba chooses to go for broke from the word go, with a frequently laugh out loud nonsensical plot, some of the best action I’ve seen Chiba partake in, and randomness around every corner. The guilty parties at the helm are co-directors Yukio Noda and Chan Tung-man (the father of Peter Chan, director of Wu Xia, who also has a small role as a child that looks up to Chiba). Noda was a journeyman director in Japan, and would also direct Chiba again during the same year in Golgo 13: Assignment Kowloon. Tung-man on the other hand is more interesting, and seemed to specialise in Hong Kong or Taiwan co-productions with Thailand, with titles like Killer in the Dark and The Wolf Girl (sadly no relation to Chiba’s Wolf Guy) contributing to his short filmography of just 5 movies.

There are various angles one could take when considering how best to explain the plot, and after some deliberation, I’ve decided to go at it like this. There are essentially 3 main characters – Chiba, who we meet as a child when the movie opens just as his parents are murdered. Swearing to take revenge, he grows up under the tutelage of an old kung-fu master, however when the master is murdered by a traitorous student (Luk Chuen), he decides to hunt him down instead (seriously, his mission to avenge his parents is never mentioned again). There’s been some shady drug dealings going on involving the murdered teacher and student, so Yamashita turns up as an undercover cop (= a fake moustache) to get to the bottom of where the drugs are coming from.

Then you have Thai actor Krung Srivilai, whose unfinished Thai movies often turned up in cut and paste IFD ninja flicks, playing a black market diamond and drug dealer visiting from Hong Kong. Hilariously, Srivilai’s character is treated almost like a suave 007 style debonair, as he seduces Shaw Brothers sexpot Lau Nga-Ying (indulging in some From Here to Eternity beach frolics), and struts around with a confident swagger. Somewhere along the way, he kind of/sort of sees the error of his ways, as he comes to terms with his difficult upbringing (more on that later). This results in Yamashita teaming up with both Srivilai and Chiba at various points throughout, but for those wondering, there’s no need for concern as this is very much the Chiba show, despite him not always being front and center.

It would take forever to detail all of the wonderful bizarreness contained within Soul of Chiba’s duration, but my favorite moment was when Srivilai takes a bullet, so Yamashita sends him down the river to his family, who he promises will take care of him. While there he falls unconscious, constantly yelling “Mother! Mother!”, until he wakes up and it’s revealed that… Yamashita’s mother is also Srivilai’s mother! The mother then proceeds to ramble on for what feels like 5 minutes stating this fact, “This man is my son, yes, he really is my son…” It’s one of the strangest family reunions ever committed to celluloid, but is quickly topped by another scene of Chiba training his fists and feet in an insane flurry of motion, while electricity surges through his body via various electrodes connected to his limbs (and posterior, as the camera frequently reminds us).

As if turning yourself into a human car battery wasn’t enough, he also kills the pain by gulping down handfuls of cocaine. Yes, long before Beast Cops gave us Anthony Wong going into battle under a cocktail of booze and pills, Soul of Chiba has Sonny Chiba throwing down while fuelled on the white stuff. No wonder he’s forgotten about avenging his parents. Regardless of the moral ambiguity of it all, the fight scenes on display are of a stellar quality. The budget is obviously much lower than Chiba’s local Japan productions, but this was made up for by the fact he gave himself much longer to film than Toei would provide on native soil. From a confrontation against a group of Muay Thai fighting locals on a bridge, which has Chiba literally throw one of them like a ragdoll into the river below, to a face off against four fighters in the jungle, who are possessed by monkey magic.

This fight is a particular standout for a myriad of reasons. The fighters, played by members of the Japan Action Club, eschew the traditional monkey style kung fu, instead opting to utilise a more feral approach, that sees them attempting to bite Chiba to death. When Chiba decides to let loose, it’s a sight to see, in a wildly satisfying display of ferocity. Amusingly, one part of the fight has someone off-screen throwing real monkeys at Chiba, but I guess that’s Thai filmmaking for you. This fight also utilises the technique that was first seen in Karate Warriors, with the mix of slow motion and normal speed within the same shot (which in more recent times Isaac Florentine has become known for using), used to emphasise both the impacts and the choreography itself. While some say today the technique is overused, here it’s a perfect example of how it can enhance a fight.

Events eventually build up to Chiba and Yamashita closing in on Luk Chuen, Bolo, and the equivalent of a small army in the Thai jungle, for an extended finale that features more bullets missing people at point blank range than you can shake a stick at. After dispensing of wave after wave of hapless lackeys, the finale culminates in a showdown that pits Chiba versus a silver wigged Chuen, and Yamashita versus a trilby hat wearing Bolo. Seeing the karate style pitted against kung fu is perhaps Soul of Chiba’s biggest strength, as in a way it forces it to look more dynamic than how it’s usually portrayed, and both fights are a pleasure to watch. It’s likely a safe guess that both Chuen and Bolo contributed their own ideas to the choreography, especially considering Chuen choreographed The Damned from the same year, and Bolo also contributed to 10 Magnificent Killers.

There aren’t too many movies like Soul of Chiba out there. It feels like the wild exploitative nature of Japanese karate flicks collided head on with the energy of the Hong Kong kung-fu movie, crash landing in Thailand. Instead of going up in flames though, a strange kind of alchemy occurred and the end result somehow works, if not necessarily in all of the ways it intended. Throw in a random parasailing escape, grilled parrot for supper, lackeys being blow torched in the face, and a bow and arrow being made out of some string and a twig, the best way to describe Soul of Chiba is like a jolt of electricity to the posterior. You may want to pretend you didn’t enjoy it, but the reality is, it leaves you wanting more.

Note: The version being reviewed is the English dubbed release.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 8.5/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF-oBDv_m34&feature=youtu.be

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“Unicorn Fist” Chinese Theatrical Poster

AKA: The Unicorn Palm
Director: Tang Ti
Cast: Unicorn Chan, Meng Hoi, Gam Dai, Kitty Meng Chui, Yasuaki Kurata, Wang In Sik, Tong Dik, Mars, Lily Chen, Tina Chin, Chow Siu Loi, Goo Man Chung, Alexander Grand, Tai Yee Ha, Tong Kam Tong, Paul Wei, Ji Han Jae
Running Time: 82/90 min.

By Jonathan Mitchell

Fist of Unicorn (also known as Bruce Lee and I and The Unicorn Palm) is a film noted for its minimal, but direct, association with Bruce Lee rather than for the quality of the film itself. The only movie to have been choreographed by Lee apart from his own starring vehicles, Fist of Unicorn features Unicorn Chan in the leading role. Chan was Lee’s closest friend, and as children they had performed together in films like Kid Cheung. (The viewer will recognize him as “Jimmy”, one of the waiters in Lee’s self-directed The Way of the Dragon.) Here, Chan portrays a reluctant hero who resorts to violence only after his opponents have spilled innocent blood. Despite the fact that they were staged by Bruce Lee, the fight scenes bear no resemblance to his other work and Lee does not appear onscreen… at least not in the original version of the film.

Unicorn Chan plays Lung, a drifter in search of room and board. He befriends Tiger (Meng Hoi), a bald, garrulous adolescent who persuades his widowed mother to give Lung a job as a fixup man. One day, mischievous Tiger incurs the wrath of some thugs employed by Mr. Wong, a wealthy weapons trafficker who runs the town. Lung refuses to fight, but receives some welcome assistance from a martial arts instructor (Ji Han-jae, the hapkido fighter from Bruce Lee’s Game of Death, in a brief cameo role). Meanwhile, Mr. Wong’s stuttering son (Gam Dai, Lee’s comic foil in Way of the Dragon) has developed a crush on a young woman (Kitty Meng Chui) who belongs to a troupe of wandering acrobatic performers. The thugs, led by veteran Hong Kong movie villains Yasuaki Kurata and Hwang In-shik, slaughter the entire troupe except for the woman, who barely escapes with her life. Lung finds her, and she takes refuge in the home of Tiger’s mother. When Mr. Wong’s hired goons come to call, they kill the mother and kidnap Tiger and the young woman. Thus begins a series of lengthy fight scenes in which Lung squares off against the bad guys. Having dispatched a small army of thugs, Lung defeats a Russian karate expert (Alexander Grand, who regularly portrayed Caucasian villains in low-budget Chinese martial arts films) before the mysterious Mr. Wong finally emerges. He’s played by the film’s director Tang Ti — best known as “Smiling Face” in The One-Armed Swordsman —and the final confrontation ends with Mr. Wong dead and Lung, apparently, mortally wounded.

The preceding was a summary of the original Chinese-language version of the film. When the folks at Sing Hui Film Company were preparing Fist of Unicorn for international release, they had a trick up their sleeves: they had secretly filmed a few seconds of Bruce Lee on set (despite the fact that he had expressly declined to appear in the film at all), and this wobbly footage was added to international prints of the movie. But that wasn’t all. The filmmakers appended a prologue which revealed that Mr. Wong had murdered Lung’s parents when Lung was a boy, and in which Unicorn Chan shared screen time with a Bruce Lee double filmed from behind. In the ensuing years, there has been some controversy regarding Chan’s involvement in this fiasco. Was he a willing participant in Sing Hui’s efforts to exploit his best friend’s star power, or not? The embarrassing, poorly edited scene to which I have just referred should lay any doubts permanently to rest. Chan knew what he was doing, and understood the filmmakers’ intent. (Not surprisingly, Lee filed a lawsuit against the company.) The English opening credits in the international version of Fist of Unicorn are a sight to behold: Chan is billed as “Sheau C. Lin” (a mangled romanization of his stage name, Hsiao Chi-lin) while Yasuaki Kurata becomes, for some unfathomable reason, “Tsant T.B. Jau”.

With its standard revenge motif, a stolidly righteous hero and almost cartoonishly unpleasant villains, this is a by-the-numbers kung fu film in every sense. (An eerily surreal scene in which Mr. Wong’s stammering son realizes that the “woman” he’s been romancing is actually a man in drag is handled with unexpected cinematic flair. The discovery is made off-screen: the viewer sees nothing but the curtain drawn around the son’s bed suddenly billowing in a phantom breeze as he gasps in horrified surprise. It’s as though Tang Ti were channeling King Hu or Akira Kurosawa, but the inspiration was fleeting; the rest of the film plods along artlessly.) The fights themselves are competent but not extraordinary. The most interesting thing about them is that, with the exception of a few punches aimed directly at the camera, they fall well within the boundaries of traditional Hong Kong choreography. Because the rapid-fire style in which Bruce Lee staged the action scenes in his own movies was not suitable for Fist of Unicorn, he opted for a more conventional approach, and the ease with which he shifted gears speaks to his capacity for adaptation (a key element of his martial philosophy).

Fist of Unicorn was released on DVD (on the disreputable VideoAsia label) in 2003, and the disc is still available. It contains the original Mandarin version, with burned-on English subtitles, as well as the English-dubbed international version with the extra footage; both prints are heavily battered, but watchable. Unicorn Chan died in a car accident in 1987, having never broken the big time. It’s bitterly ironic that one of the few films in which he managed to secure a starring role was responsible for setting in motion the unsavory phenomenon of Bruceploitation — even before Lee’s untimely death!

Jonathan Mitchell’s Rating: 4/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuFs90ipAEc

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“Dragon, the Young Master” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Eighteen Martial Arts
Director: Kim Si-hyun
Writer: Kim Kyeong-il
Cast: Dragon Lee (Mun Kyong-sok), Yuen Qiu, Choi Min-kyu, Baek Hwang-ki, Kim Ki-ju
Running Time: 83 min.

Paul Bramhall

Back when I was first getting into the kung fu genre many years ago, upon witnessing a handful of Korea’s contributions, I confess to being quick to write them off as low budget imitations of Hong Kong’s far superior output. Looking back, I now feel like I jumped to that conclusion in haste, and over the years have become more and more convinced that, far from being imitations of Hong Kong’s own kung fu flicks, the Korean kung fu movie exists in its own quirky little world. Admittedly, many of the countries titles are all but impossible to view in their original language and version, with those readily available being re-titled, re-dubbed and re-cut versions released by Godfrey Ho and Tomas Tang’s Asso Asia distribution company. It was a practice that formed a successful business model in the late 70’s and 80’s, as western audience’s appetite for kung fu movies secured a successful return for these radically altered variations of the original production.

Director Kim Si-hyun’s 1981 movie Eighteen Martial Arts is one such example of this, with the Dragon Lee starring adventure re-titled Dragon, the Young Master for its western release. Si-hyun was no stranger to making kung fu movies, and is a name synonymous with the genre in Korea. His movies were also no stranger to being given the Asso Asia treatment, with his other collaborations with Dragon Lee, such as A Fight at Hong Kong Ranch, being re-titled to Golden Dragon, Silver Snake, and Secret Bandit of Black Leopard being re-titled to Enter the Invincible Hero. Both Si-hyun and Lee had extremely busy years in 1981, with Si-hyun helming 4 productions, and Lee starring in a total of 6 movies, the highest number in his filmography (note the source for these figures is the Korean Movie Database).

The plot for Dragon, the Young Master revolves around the mysterious figure of the Silver Ninja. Indeed the biggest part of the characters mystery is that he’s not silver at all, but rather is distinctive thanks to his all white attire and knitted white balaclava. Yes, if you’re thinking that he’s also technically not a ninja either, you’d be correct. Amusingly, when not involved in any action, the Silver Ninja wears a triangular black hat which covers his whole head, with two holes cut out for the eyes, giving the appearance of a low budget kung fu Darth Vader. Trust me when I say that it’s no spoiler to reveal that the Silver Ninja is Dragon Lee, from the moment he appears on screen and starts gesturing with his head and giving the thumbs down to a group of bandits, it’s blatantly obvious. So for those who want to see Dragon Lee unleashing his kicks while wearing a white balaclava and cape (correct, a cape), you’ve come to the right place.

As with too many Dragon Lee movies to mention, here he plays a wanderer, and as usual, it turns out that he has a secret agenda of revenge. For Dragon, the Young Master he’s paired with kung fu femme fatale Yuen Qiu. While these days Qiu is most well known for playing the landlady in Kung Fu Hustle, it’s worth remembering that she went to the same Opera School as the likes of Jackie Chan and Sammo Hung, and back in the day certainly had the moves. Interestingly from 1978 – 1981 she appeared in three Korean kung fu movies, all starring alongside Dragon Lee, with the other two being Dragon Lee Vs. The Five Brothers and The Dragon’s Snake Fist. Lee is soon busting the moves on Qiu’s flower seller, and performs an impressive fight scene against a group of thugs harassing her, were he keeps a white rose between his teeth from start to finish.

Qiu thankfully isn’t relegated to a damsel in distress role, and proves that she’s more than capable of handling herself, eventually teaming up with Lee that sees her on equal action footing with her co-star. The contrast between the pairs fighting styles is one of the highlights of Dragon, the Young Master, with Lee’s trusty mantis fist and Taekwondo kicks nicely offset by Qiu’s acrobatic flourishes and handwork. As with any Korean kung fu movie, the action comes thick and fast, and the heroic pair get to take on pretty much a who’s who of Korean kung fu talent of the era. Taking on both fight choreographer duties, and playing the main villain of the piece, is Choi Min-kyu, an actor who I’d dare say has made an appearance in every Korean kung fu movie I’ve seen (and I’ve seen a lot). Throw in plenty of familiar faces such as Baek Hwang-ki and Kim Ki-ju, and any fan of Korean kung fu cinema from the era definitely won’t be left wanting.

One point that becomes clear as soon as you start watching Dragon, the Young Master, is that it appears to have been filmed in the depths of the Korean winter. If the visible breath didn’t give it away, then the snow covered landscapes certainly do. Thankfully the wardrobe department have given Lee more than his standard white t-shirt to wear this time around, and the winter setting does allow for a great one-on-one fight featuring Lee at the 30 minute mark, which takes place on a snow covered frozen lake. I wasn’t able to identify who Lee is fighting against, however he provides a worthy opponent for Lee’s skills. The fact that they’re fighting on ice introduces the unique sight of them sliding at each other rather than charging, and there’s some nice exchanges. The same fight also highlights the comedic elements of the movie, with Lee at one point crouching down between the legs of his opponent, and unleashing a barrage of head butts to the nether regions.

An equal amount of comedy is conveyed through the often hilarious dubbing. The line “You’re the Silver Ninja!” must be delivered to Lee over 100 times, and rarely a minute goes by without someone being called a fool, bastard, or being asked if they’re tired of living (a staple line of almost every Asso Asia dubbed movie). The intentional comedy doesn’t fare quite as well, and there are some cringe inducing scenes to suffer though, one in particular which sees a thug adorn his head with a pair of horns, and proceed to charge at Lee while he waves a table cloth like a matador. Luckily though these scenes are in short supply, with some nonsensical dubbing always just around the corner to bring proceedings back on track. A highlight sees a group of bandits return to Min-kyu after being heavily defeated, to which he bellows at one of them “Look into my eyes!” Immediately after doing so, the bandit drops dead. However this seemingly supernatural power is never touched upon again, it looks like the dubbing crew just threw it in there for fun as it fit the scene.

The finale eventually builds to a showdown which sees Lee and Qiu team-up to take on a sword wielding Min-kyu and his brother, played by Kim Ki-ju (decked out in a bow-tie combo, which is never explained). It’s a lengthy fight, which for the most part has Lee and Qiu perform empty handed, however mid-way through Qiu does arm herself with a pair of daggers, and Lee also reveals an extendable fencing sword – think Donnie Yen’s extendable baton from SPL. Bizarrely, Lee only uses it to gain the upper hand, and once he has it (about 20 seconds later) immediately throws it away, a decision that I found to be as hilarious as it was random. The finale also allows for Lee to go into wild mode, with some seriously intense head shaking and chicken clucking going on. Even Qui gets in on the madness, at one point deciding to head butt everyone instead of simply punching or kicking them. Needless to say, by the time the pair are ferociously ripping Min-kyu’s clothes off, there’s no doubt that it could only be a Korean kung fu flick.

While Dragon, the Young Master doesn’t quite rank up there with Lee and Si-hyun’s previously mentioned collaborations, there’s still plenty of fun to be had with it. From location spotting (eagle eyed viewers will notice the Lee and Qiu throwdown against Min-kyu is in the same temple that features in Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger), to the hilarious dubbing, to a manic finale that sees Lee crank it up to 11. For fans of Dragon Lee, there should be no hesitation to check this out, and for everyone else, as long as you remember that white is the new silver, there should be something to enjoy as well.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7/10

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI-DFAror1k

The post Dragon, the Young Master | aka Deadly Silver Ninja (1981) Review first appeared on cityonfire.com.

“Black Spot” Chinese Theatrical Poster

AKA: Earth & Fire
Director: Bruce Le
Cast: Bruce Le (Huang Kin Long), Lo Lieh, Kong Do, James Ha Chim Si, Ho Pak Kwong, Cheng Yuen Man, Wong Hap, Andre Koob, Elizabeth Gordon
Running Time: 98 min.

By Paul Bramhall

Bruce Le has always been the Bruce Lee clone that can. From starting off as a Shaw Brothers bit player in the 70’s, his resemblance to the departed megastar saw him spend the latter part of the decade thrust into starring roles of such low budget Bruceploitation efforts as Enter the Game of Death and Bruce and Shaolin Kung Fu. Often shot in the Philippines and Korea, due to the cheaper locations and crews, Le’s output seemed destined to have history view him as the weakest of the Bruce Lee clones. However the guy persisted, and during the 80’s took greater control over his career, starring in such globe-trotting adventures as Challenge of the Tiger and Bruce Strikes Back, as well as getting in on more grand scale Filipino action movies, such as Mission Terminate alongside Richard Norton.

By the time it was the 1990’s, Le had also established himself as a director, and to kick off the decade made both Ghost of the Fox, a Chinese Ghost Story inspired tale of the supernatural, and Black Spot, the movie that delivers Le’s final action performance in front of the camera. In many ways Black Spot can be considered the swansong for the original wave of Bruce Lee imitators. Bruce Li had retired from filmmaking in the early 80’s, and by 1990 Dragon Lee had long since returned to Korea and moved away from the period kung fu movies he was known for. While Le had also long stopped aping the mannerisms of Bruce Lee by the time Black Spot was released, the story, wardrobe, and just about everything else still safely mark it as the Bruceploitation genre.

Le’s last effort as an ass kicking kung fu man owes much to his 80’s collaborations with B-movie maestro Dick Randall and Filipino director Joseph Velasco (who’s also on-board here as producer). The globe-trotting element is still firmly in place, as Le plays a former drug kingpin trying to lead a quiet life, but is ultimately dragged back into the game by the police. They’re determined to find the location of The Golden Triangle, the source village where all the opium is coming from, and they know they can leverage Le’s connections to get close. The results see Le travel from France, to the likes of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Mainland China, and finally Thailand.

It’s understandable that Le doesn’t want to leave his peaceful life in France, as he seems to be running a kind of health retreat, which has leotard wearing blondes perform somersaults in front of the camera, while others bathe topless on the veranda. However when he’s reminded of how many lives his former activities ruined, he feels morally obligated to get involved, he is Bruce Le after all. It has to be said that despite there being no mistaking that Black Spot is a Bruce Le movie, it’s a world away from the productions he was making only 10 years prior. While it doesn’t consist of non-stop action scenes, the story actually holds up as an engaging tale of the drug trade and those it involves. Black Spot also sports a script that clearly wasn’t made up on the fly, as the story spans a number of months, with the date regularly appearing onscreen to provide a timeframe of the events that are unfolding. Never mind that one of the dates is 30th February.

There’s also plenty of familiar faces in Black Spot to keep the HK film aficionado happy, with cameo appearances from the likes of Lo Lieh and Kong Do, both of whom play drug kingpins that Le used to be associated with. While Le fights both of them, the highlight fight belongs to when he has to square off against a massive monster of a man, who must be about 7 foot tall and just as wide. The fight takes place within a cage covered in barbed wire, and when one fighter decides against stepping into the cage, instead a completely random sheep is thrown in. Before you have a chance to contemplate where the sheep came from, the man mountains lifts it above his head by the legs, partially rips it in half, and lets its insides and blood pour all over his face, which he eagerly laps up. It’s a disturbing scene which I hope wasn’t real, or at least it wasn’t alive at the time, however what’s just as disturbing is that Le barely comes up to the guys chest in height, making for a genuinely tense showdown that ends on a suitably gory note.

There are other factors that make Black Spot an interesting footnote in the Bruceploitation genre, one particular being that Le was 40 at the time he made it, which makes him a full 8 years older than when Bruce Lee died at the age of 32. At this point Le had spent 14 years under a name created to cash-in on the death of kung fu’s most successful star, starting with Bruce’s Deadly Fingers in 1976, so there’s certainly some irony in just how long his career lasted compared to the man who he wouldn’t exist without. Le himself has acknowledged this, however the hard graft he put into those low budget 70’s productions arguably paid off in the long run, as Black Spot comes with a surprisingly high budget.

This is no more evident than in the final 20 minutes, when Le has infiltrated the small rural Thai village that’s the source of the opium, and discovered that the drug is being purified and distributed via an underground lab built in a cave beneath the village. If you ever wanted to see a finale that can be summarised as Rambo meets Enter the Dragon, then you’ve come to the right place. Apparently Le was able to enlist the cooperation of the Thai army for the finale, and as a result, it contains a significant number of extras, a military helicopter, 4 tanks, and more machine guns than you can shake a stick at. The scale is truly impressive, as the village is decimated with explosions, and Le takes to running through the cave, armed with a machine gun of which his finger barely comes off the trigger. Bullets, punches, and kicks are liberally thrown, as Le and his entourage shoot seven shades out of anything that moves (and stuff that doesn’t).

I’d gotten so used to the Bruceploitation genre being derivative of other more popular HK movies, that I couldn’t help but admire how the movie was successfully able to copy the grand scale of the action found in the likes of Bullet in the Head, until I realised it was released the same year. Likewise the village where the showdown takes place looks remarkably similar to the one from Police Story 3: Super Cop, and again it wasn’t until I stopped and thought about it, that it hit me Chan’s movie didn’t come out until 2 years later. In that respect Black Spot can be considered to be Le’s true epic, which is a line that even I confess to never imagining I’d write. Le has stated that the production took 3 years to complete in total, which may explain why his last movie prior to this was the Fist of Fury inspired 1987 production, Ninja Over the Great Wall, and for the most part the effort shows. Le even broke a leg during the production while performing a stunt, and reportedly directed the remainder of the movie on crutches.

However as ridiculous as it may sound, it wasn’t the action that left a lingering impression after the credits rolled. Le clearly wanted to convey a message on how the drug trade profits off the poverty of those in places like the rural village growing the opium, and in the movie he befriends a family that make their money from growing it. He realises that the family have no idea how much harm the drug is doing overseas, they simply grow it as a means of supporting their children and elders. Perhaps it was due to Le’s own upbringing in Burma that he felt a close connection to such a story.

At the end, when the army gathers all the opium and plans to set it on fire, the villagers beg them not to destroy their livelihood, which is met with dire consequences. While witnessing this, Le is sent over the edge, culminating in a surprisingly powerful final scene of a man powerless to stop the death of innocents, even though seemingly all of the bad guys have been wiped out. A Bruceploitaion flick with a finale that delivers a surprisingly emotive punch? Who would have thought, but Black Spot does indeed to exactly that.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7.5/10

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“The Clones of Bruce Lee” Theatrical Poster

AKA: Death Penalty on Three Robots
Director: Joseph Kong
Cast: Dragon Lee, Bruce Le, Bruce Lai, Bruce Thai, Jon Benn, Bolo Yeung, Alexander Grand, Kong Do, Cheng Kei-Ying, San Kuai, Mak Fei-Hung
Running Time: 90 min.

By Paul Bramhall

I have a confession, and I’ll admit that it’s one that won’t be popular. Not only am I a Bruceploitaiton fan, but I usually find the Bruce Lee clone movies to be more entertaining than the Little Dragon’s own output. While I respect the man and his martial arts, who doesn’t, if you were to make me choose, then I’d say give me Dragon Lee vs. Casanova Wong in Enter the Invincible Hero, give me Bruce Le vs Hwang Jang Lee in Bruce Strikes Back, or give me Bruce Li vs Philip Ko Fei in The Gold Connection. For me all these movies serve up more entertainment and repeated viewing value than Bruce Lee’s tragically short filmography, but who knows, there could be some Bruce fans out there who disagree.

It’s fair to say that the number of ‘Bruceploitation’ movies, as the genre fondly came to be referred as, could well reach into triple figures, as almost every country in Asia spawned its very own Bruce Lee-alike. From Hong Kong, to Korea, to Thailand, to the Philippines… in the late 70’s and early 80’s productions trying to cash in on Bruce Lee’s popularity, with actors that vaguely resembled him, were everywhere. In that respect, it’s really a numbers game, if you have 100 movies but only 10% of them are worth a watch, that’s still double the amount of productions Bruce Lee starred in, so it’s important to keep things in perspective.

Despite my fondness for the genre, one of its most infamous entries had eluded my viewing for many years, the notoriously titled The Clones of Bruce Lee. I’m not sure why it managed to escape me for so long, considering that for a fan of Brueploitation, it has a dream cast. Instead of only getting one Bruce Lee-alike, you get three in the starring roles, with Koreans Dragon Lee and Bruce Lai, and Hong Kong star Bruce Le. It’s a movie which is so overloaded with Bruceploitation, that it even has Thai Bruce Lee-alike, the imaginatively titled Bruce Thai, playing a non-clone role (he plays the local contact once the action moves to Bangkok), not to mention the instantly recognizable Bolo Yeung from Enter the Dragon.

The plot for The Clones of Bruce Lee is well known, but to cover it very briefly, when Bruce Lee dies in hospital, the British Secret Service enlist a scientist, played by John Benn (the mafia boss from Way of the Dragon), to use his body and attempt to clone the departed star. Many of these productions paid little attention to being respectful or tasteful, and The Clones of Bruce Lee is no different, so we have real footage of Bruce Lee’s funeral, and shots of Bruce in the casket, mixed into the plot. Benn succeeds, and doesn’t produce just one clone, but three! In one of many bizarre moments, he ritualistically names them Bruce Lee 1 (Dragon Lee), Bruce Lee 2 (Bruce Lai), and Bruce Lee 3 (Bruce Le). The British Secret Service use them to complete missions around the world to assassinate corrupt movie directors and scientists, until Benn himself goes mad, and attempts to use the clones for his own evil means.

Such a synopsis sounds like exploitation gold, and with a three-for-the-price-of-one triple threat of Bruce Lee-alikes tearing up the screen, what could possibly go wrong? Unfortunately, almost everything does. Despite its outlandish premise The Clones of Bruce Lee somehow manages to succeed in being an incredibly dull affair, thanks to a severely disjointed plot (yes, I’m criticising a Bruceploitation movie for having a disjointed plot), and even more so, incredibly repetitive fight action.

To elaborate a little more on the disjointed plot, the main reason for this is that apart from the opening and closing scenes, the clones as a trio don’t appear together at all. After being brought to life by Benn, Dragon Lee is sent on a mission to kill a movie director, who’s using his production company as a front for smuggling illegal gold. This essentially leads to a third of the movie becoming a Dragon Lee flick, as he battles the director’s lackeys and a pair of hitmen (amusingly played by two gweillos). Then once he’s done, Bruce Le and Bruce Lai are told to go to Thailand and find a mad scientist, who’s concocted a formula that turns human skin to steel (cue a bunch of Thai extras in their underwear, covered in cheap gold paint). Their mission in Thailand makes up another third of the movie, with the remaining third consisting of the opening and closing scenes.

Despite not being a cut-and-paste production, the style of editing that Godfrey Ho became notorious for, which consisted of editing scenes from two movies together, and then attempting to dub them into a coherent story, there are times in The Clones of Bruce Lee when you’d swear it was. Dragon Lee’s mission is particularly dull, and the choreography frustratingly leans towards him utilising the mantis fist, rather than unleashing with the kicks that he was known for. Bruce Le and Bruce Lai don’t fare much better, with a mission that consists of almost 90% fighting. The routine goes – get closer to the bad guys lair, group of lackeys come out of nowhere and surround them, fight and proceed a little closer, until another group of lackeys appear and surround them, repeat. This is fine, it’s a kung fu movie after all, but the fight action is ridiculously simple and repetitive, with Le constantly jumping into the air to deliver mini flying kicks that look like they wouldn’t hurt a leaf.

For what consolidation it is, for the fan of exploitation cinema there’s some gloriously random female nudity in the Thailand segment. In a scene which has Bruce Thai and Bruce Lai (wearing a pair of swimming briefs that practically redefine the word ‘brief’) taking a stroll to the beach, Lai spots a man ogling at a bevy of naked women frolicking in the sand. When Lai enquires as to what they’re doing (even though it’s quite apparent – they’re rubbing sun cream on themselves in slow motion), Thai tells him that they’re “just playing around”. Sure enough, the girls are giggling away and proclaiming that they have everything they need except a man. When they spot the admirer who’s been checking them out from afar, they chase after him on the beach, before all falling into the water together. Who is the man? Why are all the girls naked? What’s the connection of the scene to the rest of the plot? Nothing.

The finale eventually brings all three clones back onscreen together, as Benn decides that he’s going to use the strongest of them to help him rule the world, so orders them to fight each other to the death. This results in the exciting prospect of a clone vs clone match, as Dragon Lee and Bruce Le get to face off against each other, but it turns out to be as dull as the rest of the action. Indeed the most energy any of the performers seem to put into the fights, is in the shapes they pull before breaking into a pose. It’s a sad day when the best fight action in a kung fu movie involves only one character being onscreen. Dragon Lee also gets to face off against Bolo, which should have been another dream match-up, especially considering that Lee did most of his work in Korea, so the Bolo showdown was a rare opportunity. But once again it fizzles out quickly.

Low budget old school kung fu movies such as this tend to live and die on the quality of their fight scenes, so to see a cast, which includes the likes of Kong Do and Cheng Kei-Ying, being involved in such sloppily executed choreography is a shame. From seeing participants hesitate before throwing a punch or kick, to bizarre choices such as when Dragon Lee breaks out his famous 1-stick nunchuck, proceeds to whirl it around for a few seconds, then inexplicably throws it away and starts fighting. Director Joseph Velasco and producer Dick Randall would go on to churn out much more entertaining movies, with the likes of the previously mentioned Bruce Strikes Back, but here there’s very little to recommend both to lovers of the kung fu genre or to fans of so bad it’s good cinema.

Having now watched The Clones of Bruce Lee from start to finish, it’s easy to understand why many consider it to be a more entertaining movie to read about than it is to actually watch. There’re many unanswered questions about the production, not least the year of release. Hkcinemagic lists 1977, while the Hong Kong Movie Database lists 1980, with the Korean Movie Database pinning it down to 1981, that’s 3 potential release date in 5 years! (Note for this review we’ll go with the Hong Kong Movie Database) Release dates aside, the disappointment of having such an amazing cast of Bruceploitation talent, and managing to make an under 90 minute runtime seem like such an endurance test, are perhaps indicative that in this case, as the expression goes – too many clones spoil the broth.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 4/10

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“An Emperor of the Underworld” Korean Theatrical Poster

Director: Hwang Jang Lee
Writer: Im Seung-su
Cast: Dragon Lee (Mun Kyong-sok), Hwang Jang Lee, Lee Jin Young, Kim Mi Young, Hyeon Kil Su
Running Time: 87 min.

By Paul Bramhall

If there was ever a genre that could be described as having little to no exposure outside of its native country, then it’s the 90’s Korean action movie. Compared to the likes of Hong Kong and Japan’s own action cinema output during the same decade, Korea’s equivalent remains shrouded in mystery. It’s a shame, as there’s plenty of action gold to be found, however it’s a country whose film industry had little to no attention paid to it before the release of Shiri in 1999, which broke through internationally thanks to its Hollywood style aesthetic. Unfortunately, even at the time of writing more than 15 years on, only a fraction of Korean movies released before 1999 (in any genre), have made their way to DVD.

As it stands, many of the action movies that came out during the 90’s received a release on Korean VHS, and that’s it. To confound matters even further, a significant number of them didn’t receive a theatrical release, instead going direct-to-VHS, and often such titles aren’t even listed on the notoriously difficult to navigate Korean Move Database. Much of the reasoning behind this is that the action genre was treated much the same as Japan’s equivalent in the 70’s. Karate movies were quickly filmed productions, often featuring heavy doses of exploitation, and were never made with the thought that there’d be an audience who’d want to check them out several decades later.

Many of Korea’s own action output in the 90’s could be considered to fall into the same category. During the 80’s erotic film became hugely popular, and the end of the decade coincided with many of the Korean stars, who’d been busy delivering their boot work in the Hong Kong kung fu movie boom of the 70’s and 80’s, returning home. Hwang Jang Lee, Casanova Wong, and Dragon Lee – a trio of instantly recognizable names to any kung fu cinema fan – were all back on Korean soil in the 90’s, and all of them made their final film appearances during the decade while working in Korea. With period movies long gone out of fashion, the gangster flick quickly became the go-to genre for some Taekwondo style action. Fedora hats, oversized shoulder pads, and bulky suits came to define the 90’s Korean gangster flick, which often served up fight scenes and nudity in equal measure.

It could be said that 1994 was a year of particular significance. Casanova Wong, the star of such Hong Kong classics as Warriors Two and The Master Strikes, would make his last screen appearance in, as well as directing, the violent gangster flick Bloody Mafia. Hwang Jang Lee, who needs no introduction, would also mark his last significant screen appearance, in a movie which, like Casanova Wong, he’d also direct, titled Emperor of the Underworld. It’s worth noting that many sources list the 1996 Korean movie, Boss, as Hwang’s final movie appearance, and while this is true, his screen-time clocks in at barely a minute, with a role that’s purely dialogue.

Hwang had directed himself before, most memorably playing the clean shaven good guy in Hitman in the Hand of Buddha in 1981, and as the conflicted anti-hero a couple of years later in Canton Viper. Emperor of the Underworld though marks the first time he doesn’t cast himself as the lead, instead opting to take the villain role. The lead goes to another familiar face from the world of kung fu cinema, Dragon Lee. Both Hwang and Lee had worked together before, on both the likes of old school Korean kung fu movies such as Secret Ninja, Roaring Tiger and 5 Pattern Dragon Claws, as well as in another 90’s action movie, the second installment of The Nationwide Constituency trilogy.

The plot for Emperor of the Underworld is straight forward stuff. Lee is a marine who has a reputation for getting the job done, shown in a pre-credit sequence that has him storming a criminal hideout, decked out in all black fatigues with machine gun in hand. Any movie that starts off with Dragon Lee armed with a machine gun has already earnt instant favour with me. However once he’s discharged, he finds himself stalked by the police. It turns out they want to infiltrate a violent gang, one that’s working in conjunction with some evil Japanese property developers, and Dragon Lee seems to be the guy for the job. He agrees to take on the mission, on the condition that his friend is released from prison so that they can work together. However when it turns out that their former colleague, a girl Lee used to be close to (played by So Bia, an actress who was known for the erotic movies she starred in during the 80’s and 90’s), is also working for the gang, the situation gets complicated.

Despite the simplistic plot, it’s told effectively, and it’s refreshing to see a Dragon Lee movie being told entirely poker faced from start to finish. Despite being over 15 years since the peak of his career in movies like Enter the Invincible Hero, he’s still instantly recognizable and in great shape. Several lackeys end up on the receiving end of Lee’s fists during the run time, and at one point, for no other reason than to intimidate a group of thugs who are threatening him, he flips a stationery car over with his bare hands. The scene is so random that it’s difficult not to appreciate. I’m also unsure if it was an intentional homage or not, but when he’s first discharged from the army, he visits a nightclub to meet his old colleague, carrying a rucksack of his belongings slung over his shoulder. I’ve personally lost count of the number of Dragon Lee movies I’ve seen, which have him wandering the countryside with nothing but a rucksack slung over his shoulder! It’s like it was his permanent prop.

The nightclub scenes are also notable, purely for the fact that the music playing in the background, an American rap song, has some of the most obscene lyrics I’ve ever heard in a movie (or anywhere). It became a little difficult to concentrate when Lee was having a serious conversation with his old friend, when all you can hear in the background is the rapper distinctly announcing that he was “gonna put my d*ck in your behind.” I’m sure some MC Hammer would have been much more suitable.

Hwang Jang Lee himself doesn’t make an appearance until the 55 minute mark. Playing a former colleague who feels heavily indebted to the gang boss, he agrees to become the chief enforcer. When events transpire that see the gangsters retaliating against Lee and his colleague by killing their mentor, it’s time to serve up some 90’s style Korean action movie revenge. The lead-up to the finale somewhat echoes the finale of A Better Tomorrow 2, as Lee leads a funeral march with the coffin of his mentor up to gates of the gangsters mansion, in which Hwang Jang Lee and the other gang members are wining and dining on the front lawn. Thankfully as well as bringing the coffin, they also brought along a machine gun, in a scene which perhaps has the record for number of bullets fired without managing to hit a single solid object.

The showdown eventually culminates in a face-off between Dragon Lee and Hwang Jang Lee, which has them going at it on the lawn, in a pond, and finishing off in one of Korea’s many mud flats. For anyone that’s seen the Korean flick Rough Cut, it’s a possibility that the idea for that movies similar ending, which has the two main characters slugging it out on a similar mud flat, came from here. Like any good Dragon Lee movie, he ends up shirtless, and covers himself in mud, using it’s slipperiness to deflect Hwang’s lethal kicks. While it’s easy to argue that the choreography of the fight, and the action as a whole in Emperor of the Underworld, is far from matching that of the pairs work at their physical peaks, it’s never anything less than entertaining.

Best of all (or worse, depending on how you look at it), is that whenever Lee gets involved in a fight, he immediately switches to Bruceploitation mode – flicking his nose, staying light on his feet, and breaking out Bruce’s famous facial expressions whenever he hits someone. It’s almost as if he doesn’t know how to fight any other way, it’s simply become ingrained. Far from being detrimental to the story though, the scenes remind us that we’re watching a Dragon Lee flick, and how much we would have missed it if there hadn’t been a single nose flick in sight. These types of production can never be considered anything more than B-movies, a fact that’s no doubt contributed to securing their obscurity, but Emperor of the Underworld sets out to do exactly what it says on the tin – deliver a tale of macho gangsters and people being punched. I only wish there was more of them to choose from.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7/10

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