Thursday, January 29, 2009

The Real Bruce Lee(1979)d/Larry Dolgin,Jim Markovic

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To effectively balance the yin and yang of the cinematic universe,we've gotta offset the recent string of Four Wop scores with a real asspie.This one will do nicely.The exploitation one-two knock out punch of producers Serafim Karalexis and Dick Randall decided to piece a film together around some ancient footage from Bruce Lee's childhood HK films,which on its own,grainier than a fifth of Everclear and bereaft of anything remotely resembling a fight scene,wouldn't entertain the Lee family on home movie night.So they added some clips of Ho Tsung Tao(Bruce Li) kicking around some karate proponents,and an entire feature centered around Korean Lee imitator,Dragon Lee.They would have been better off with an hour and a half of six year old Bruce Lee being cute.In the days before video rentals,Video Gems asked sixty-five bucks for this atrocity.Nowadays you could skim the bottom of a budget dvd bin and score a copy for a buck.Either way,the price is too high.As the announcer proudly exclaims,"The rest will be history!"
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Don't concentrate on the finger,or you will miss Dragon Lee kicking oversized polyurethane boulders.
Dragon Lee is practicing kicking giant foam boulders into bullseye targets in the cold Korean winter air when his long silver haired sifu interrupts him for a pensive moment."Don't call me teacher.Call me father."Okay....creepy?Dragon's martial arts school is the focus of jealous Japanese bullies.These aren't your average evil Japs,mind you.The vast majority of these guys proudly rock the Hitler moustache like nobody's business.If I was the martial arts choreographer here,I'd be hiding behind a lion dance costume until you left.At first,Dragon dispatches clusters of sorry samurais trying to cop some surprise sex off of his sifu's daughter,then another amalgam of angry Asians who ambush him in the forest.In a classic moment of movie don't-know-how,Lee flies at two half-beaten Japanese on a slow wire about seven feet off the ground in a transitional shot that takes about two minutes to transpire.His kung foolery is being overseen by a white ninja,who's camoflage skills are on par with Lee's sloppy wire fu,as he sticks out like a martial paint splash in the colorful fall foliage of the forest.He bounces away in slo-mo on trampolines.The Japanese are beside themselves at their failed bullying,as always.
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Movement number three,Dragon flies across the shot on a wire at about a half mile an hour.
The head of the rival Japanese school,a sickly thin Asian Hitler lookalike,sends a spy to infiltrate Dragon's school,but the wily Lee shows up at the Jap dojo with the spy in a net,stripped down to his knickers soon afterwards.I don't even wanna know what the Chinese did to the poor guy over there.A fight ensues between Dragon and the Japanese master,who's swordplay isn't up to par with Lee's overdone Bruce Lee imitation,when he unleashes his deadly extend-a-sword on our hero.Dragon kicks some flower pots at him and the evil master dies,with some daisies sticking out of his belly(!).The Japanese enlist the help of a man named Gruber,who's half Japanese,half German(what else?)to eradicate the Chinese.Gruber fights the unmasked white ninja(Dragon's teacher,shocker.)to a martial draw until the foreigner unleashes his deadly flying speaker diaphragms of death(!) on the old man.When Dragon hears of his teacher's untimely death,he goes to the Japanese school and takes out every last one of those damned Japanese students,distorting his face in a Bruce-ish manner the whole time.Even Gruber's speaker diaphragms of death are no match for the Bruce lookalike,as he again takes to the slo-mo flying wire,and catches the discs in his teeth,before breaking the pesky weapons in his bare hands.He sticks his fingers through the German/Japanese man's stomach,then picks up his kung fu jacket for a Bruce-esque freeze frame,where the announcer returns to apologetically remind us that there will only ever be one Bruce Lee,but his memory(despite the hour and half of pissing the film's makers had just done on it!) will live on forever.
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Not evil enough simply being Japanese,our antagonists grew collective Hitler moustaches.
If Liu Chia Liang is the Chinese Martin Scorsese,these guys combine to form the Korean Ed Wood,Jr.The usual god-awful dubbing and sound effects(but worse,if you can comprehend that)added to sloppy choreography which overcompensates for lack of martial arts with assininely outrageous fictitious weapons,and a threadbare plot should equip copies of this entry with a package of diapers and a box of tissues,as you're bound to laugh til you cry and/or piss your pants at its ineptitude.When I first bought this ages ago,we rewound the forest wire shot no less than twenty times in a row in disbelief.For Bruce Lee enthusiasts,the real Dragon completed four kung fu movies in his life.Everything else is Brucesploitation.Some of it,like this,is just so bad,it's actually hilarious fun for your whole gaggle of miscreants on movie night.On the scale,The Real Bruce Lee slowly flies into the finish line with a score of:
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Even Dragon Lee thinks breaking "speaker diaphragms of death" on camera is silly.
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2 comments:

Balberith said...

You are so silly B.W....

beedubelhue said...

Can't be too serious all the time,that's what hexes yer good luck!Haha

 
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