"Martial Monks of Shaolin Temple"(1983)d/Godfrey Ho

I dunno about you guys, but I'm in the mood for some spinning wheel kicks, kiais, and nunchaku tonight, as we avenge our teacher's death at the hands of an: a)ruthlessly homicidal rogue martial expert out to rule over all the area boxing clubs, b)those Manchu bastards! c)a kung fu scoundrel in a frog buttoned jacket and Farrah Fawcett wig, or d)some crazy combination of a, b, and/or c.I'm not looking for something epic, or even remotely well done in any regard, and I think I know just the source material...
I can still remember stumbling across tonight's little dittie in an out of town Mom and Pop video store,the sunbaked VHS box promising to only set me back a couple of greenbacks, well worth the price for guilty but cheap entertainment in the middle of the week.Years later, I would upgrade to dvd at a corner newsstand late one night outside Port Authority for something like two bucks.On the positive side of the coin, this cheap chopsocky choice stands as one of the better Dragon Lee movies I've sit through to date, the negative being that it still is a Dragon Lee flick, and as such, the bottom of the barrel would be a step up, indeed.If the Shaw Brothers were the Sergio Leone of Kung Fu movies in the seventies and eighties, then Godfrey Ho would almost certainly be the genre's answer to Ed Wood, Jr.In Ho's mostly incompetent hands, bad voice overdubbing becomes laughably worse voices providing the embarrassing, mismatched dub.You'd have to remaster and restore one of his prints just to upgrade it to "washed out and dull looking",and plots are seemingly handled by drop outs with short term memory loss.If you happened to find yourself actually following along with one of his half-baked stories, he'd simply lose you with ineptitude behind the camera, throwing all continuity to the wolves with choppy, guillotine editing and/or badly framed shots.Of course, as you may have already guessed, this makes his body of work highly enjoyable for viewers in the right(severely altered) state of mind.

This week on Chau Lee's Angels: Farrah goes undercover as a Wu Dong thug in pajamas.
Okay, so the Abbot of Shaolin takes a spirited pummelling at the hands of the head of the Wu Dong clan, he of the monotone delivery and dramatic cape(which, by the way is decorated with two clawing hands that vaguely resemble a pair of tigers, if designed by an eight year old girl.Stylin'.),as portrayed by the venerable Wong Cheng Li(I'm sure his character has a name,I just didn't pick it up amidst the annoying-assed dub voices).Besides mastering "panther fist",a style designed solely for committing evil acts(!),he's got a ruthless band of martial miscreants at his disposal, men not opposed to donning a Farrah wig or impersonating Shaolin's great hero in smoking out the whereabouts of Shaolin's true hero,a man who filters his canteen water and keeps a snake in a box as a pet, who goes by the name of Dragon(Surprise.Dragon Lee.).Wong's henchmen attack Dragon from all angles and at every juncture; on the rocky beach, in wheat fields,even at the restaurant where he's been posing as an orphaned stock boy/waiter/blind mop headed beggar.Meanwhile, Wong's bald headed associate(whose piss-poor monk pose includes indulging in wine and getting bare chested rub down action from a local street urchin) squares off with a chicken-chompin' chooch with obligatory glued on handlebar moustache(to which a greasy chunk of chicken attaches itself, dangling annoyingly through both dialogue and martial action, for roughly five minutes.)and a tin foil sword so colossal he needs servants to carry it for him.During this washed out palooza of wrongdoing, Dragon flexes his skills in disguise(none of which are particularly effective),and sluggish and choppily choreographed physical comedy fights(none of which are all that impressive, or even funny, for that matter).

Enough is enough, put down the giant tin foil sword and get that chicken out of your fake handlebar moustache already, dammit.
Eventually, Dragon reveals himself as Shaolin's would be detective-cum-avenger,but after being captured by Li's henchmens' logic-defying leg ropes(that shoot inexplicably at Dragon from out of their pants legs) his first attempt at revenge gets him slo mo triple kicked at the legs of Wong, earning him the choice of licking Li's feet or certain death."Lick it. Lick it!" says Wong,as Dragon noisily slurps the bottom of his kung fu shoe.That sucks, dude.With the help of the female vagabond, Dragon escapes Wong's clutches to heal his wounds and pride,and to do some crazy Texas Two-Step looking training around an enormous outdoor plywood yin and yang, recalling training sessions with one of the temple monks.As he lazily ploughs through Wong's netherworld ne'erdowells, he proudly relates that he's a direct descendant of "the great Dragon himself".Not that the story was the portrait of coherence thus far or anything, but where exactly does a guy who died in the seventies fit into a period piece anyway?Cue headache.The payoff is a lengthy battle between Dragon Lee and Wong Cheng Li that incorporates several large slo mo acrobatics and jump kick combos,as well as a Whack-a-mole sequence where Dragon traps Wong in a barrel via trick photography then kicks it into splinters with him inside for the bumpy ride.With Wong still kicking, Dragon breaks out a technique which apparently requires a spear and repeated footage of a stunt double flipping off a trampoline that's just out of frame over and over again, but Wong proves harder to kill than Rasputin with a gun full of blanks and a dull butter knife.When Dragon's sparring partner suddenly drops in on the death duel, he sways the odds in favor of the Shaolin proponent,and finally, he doles death down upon the dastardly bastard, winning the day for the good guys and all the viewers in the audience who aren't sawing logs yet.There might be a couple, you never know.

Dragon Lee doesn't only imitate Bruce Lee here,he does a pretty mean Rex Ryan, head coach of the New York Jets, as well.
The Korean born Tae Kwon Do proponent/Bruceploitator has made a storied career for himself playing Bruce-esque characters in zero budgeted exploitation fare,often working with Wong Cheng Li,one of the top cinematic leg fighter villains in martial arts movie history, who really should have known better.The two most recently collaborated on Emperor of the Underworld in 1994.Apart from directing a hundred plus forgettable crapsocky flicks(mostly with "Ninja" slapped in the title somewhere,and poor one-time international star with drawing power, Richard Harrison on board), Ho most notably helmed Laboratory of the Devil, an unofficial sequel to notoriously nasty Men Behind the Sun(1988),in 1992.So uh, yeah.This one stinks, but it's sort of an unintentionally hilarious kind of whiff you just might find yourself quoting or bringing up in conversation for laughs days later.On the scale,just one big one for Monks.

If the continuity-free editing doesn't get your head spinning, the dizzying flips and flying kicks'll do the trick.

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

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!"

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.

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.

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:

Even Dragon Lee thinks breaking "speaker diaphragms of death" on camera is silly.

Clones of Bruce Lee(1977)d/Joseph Velasco

I paid forty bucks for this on Beta in the eighties while you safely nursed on your mother's lactating teats.
Here it is,the ultimate piece of Brucesploitation ever filmed!When the Little Dragon joined the choir invisible on July 20th,1973,filmmakers in Hong Kong tripped over themselves to churn out hundreds of celluloid stinkpies with countless imitators trying to capture the on screen energy of Bruce Lee and cash in at the box office.There was Bruce Li,Bruce Le,Bruce Lai,Bruce K.L. Lea,Dragon Lee,Bruce Ly,Bruce Liu...by the gods,it was neverending for a while there!Though some of these exploitation films aren't all THAT bad to sit down to,this is arguably the worst one of the lot.Seriously.And that in itself makes it highly entertaining!

Professor Lucas(Jon Benn) and a very colorful super computer indeed.
When Bruce Lee dies,the BSI takes matters into their own hands.Aided by the brilliant Professor Lucas(Jon Benn,the Roman gangster in "Way of the Dragon"),they manage to clone the martial arts master not once,but three(four?) times!Amazingly,none of the clones resemble Lee all that much,and even more incredibly,the identical clones don't even look like each other at all!First on the agenda,Lucas controls their minds with a state of the art combination spaghetti strainer/mind control device,and gives them each ingenious names of their own:Bruce Lee Number One,Bruce Lee Number Two,and Bruce Lee Number Three...must have lost hours of sleep deciding on those,huh.Next up,he incorporates Yang "Bolo" Sze and Chiang Tao to train the clones in the martial arts,making sure that all three kiai like a horny cat in a back alley dumpster every two and a half seconds,lest we forget these guys are supposed to be Bruce Lee!As if the giant seventies-tastic sunglasses and gold pimp medallions weren't giveaway enough already!The Lee three are given separate missions:Dragon Lee is sent to take on a gold smuggler,and Bruce's Le,Lai,and Thai are sent to shut down an evil mad scientist in Thailand.Where'd the fourth Bruce Lee come from?Ah,nevermind...

The aptly named "Bruce Lee number three"(Bruce Lai)and a combination mind control device/spaghetti strainer.
Dragon Lee is successful,no doubt due to the seven hundred and fifty three times he thumbs his nose during his fights(was he cutting himself some rails of booger sugar in between takes?).And the three other Bruces also succeed,but not before two of them take to the beach in speedos(!)and purposely avoid a bevy of horny naked Asian women playing with each other's tits in the frothy surf."They'll eat you alive." warns Bruce Le.What's wrong with that,exactly?Next they take on a hoard of slightly overweight bronzemen in underwear,who they defeat during the battle by feeding them poison grass(?).Yeah.Anyway,when they get back to Lucas,he turns them on each other in a huge rumble to the death,so he can have the strongest one to do his bidding.The prof's assistants manage to unplug the big colorful box of lights,effectively ending his mind control over the imitators,and the three clones(what happened to the fourth one?)win the day!

Three Bruce Lees,three pairs of friggin huge sunglasses.
Anytime a kung fu movie travels to Thailand,you know what to expect:floral print shirts with butterfly collars,bellbottom slacks,platform shoes,and a sleazy low budget feel.Add to the equation four Bruce Lee imitators,hokey movie science and technology,flabby bronzemen who are allergic to grass,sub par fight choreography,atrocious dubbing,gratuitous nudity,music culled from "Rocky" and "The Warriors" and you have Clones of Bruce Lee,the most entertainingly idiotic chopsocky movie of all time!But it still gets:

Dragon Lee and Bruce Le square off to see who's the best Bruce Lee clone.Nobody wins on screen,nobody wins in the audience either.