"Dynamo" (1978) d/ Hwa I Hung

Yeah, set aside that Game of Death(1979) tracksuit in the one sheet  for a moment (besides, he wears two different JKD tracksuits in this one), as such Brucesploitative imagery might sour you on an otherwise entertaining Ho Tsung Tao(Bruce Li) movie; Ho being the most  recognizable of all the Lee imitators and the one with the largest body of work, having appeared in thirty-eight movies dating back to the Taiwanese production, Death Duel(1972). Despite being peppered with a supporting cast of the usual overmatched suspects (i.e. Ku Feng, Chiang Tao), this one gets by with passable fight choreography provided by Yuen Cheung-Yan, but eyes familiar to the more dynamic stunt work of Jacky Chan, Sammo Hung, or Liu Chia Liang might find these brawls as primitive as a pair of cave bearskin knickers. Still, the odd rapport between Ho and Ku is laugh-worthy enough, and let's not forget about those "Bruce Lee and I"(1976) inserts.

 
"The bottle ends before these Bruce Lee rip-offs ever will...", gurgles Teacher Chow (Ku Feng).
A movie producer named Miss Mary arrives in Hong Kong for Bruce Lee's funeral ("They wouldn't sink so low as to include actual Bruce Lee funeral footage here, would they?", he asked knowingly) and manages to catch cab driver Lee Ting Yee (Bruce Li) putting the hurt on some common street trash, offering him ten grand a month as salary to be the next big action star on the silver screen. She hires a heavy boozer named Chow (Ku Feng) as Lee's Sifu, and he informs his student, "Feel free to attack me any time, because I'll do the same." A strange request, to be sure, but Lee obliges, and suddenly attacks his elder at every juncture. Lee also often dreams of the real Bruce (or Danny Lee doing a pretty bad Bruce Lee imitation from another movie, if you've got eyes), and before long he finds himself in similar shoes to the late kung fu actor.

 
"Sometime when we touch, honesty too much."
The cabbie turned actor's sudden popularity draws the ire of rival movie producer named Mr. George who sends random gangs of toughs to every country that Lee is filming in, leading to a headache-inducing number of  attacks in what's supposed to be America (it isn't even), Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, sating the viewer's need to see a bellhop fight, and even James Bond-style ski slope brawls, but Lee reigns triumphant over all comers, forcing George and his cronies to up the ante by kidnapping Lee's girlfriend and forcing him to throw a fight in an upcoming martial arts tournament if he ever wants to see her alive. Natually, Chow helps rescue her in the nick of time, and Lee wins his match in the end, but he gives up the glamorous movie lifestyle for good, having had enough of it, and returns to happier times as a cab driver.


"I'm not Bruce Lee either!", boasts Li Hsiu-Hsien, in a scene from a different movie altogether.
The plot of tonight's review mirrors lead actor Ho Tsung Tao's rise to fame, much like his later effort, The Chinese Stuntman/ Counter Attack (1981).You might notice Steve Sander, also an extra in Enter the Dragon(1973),  in one of the fight scenes, in his trademark funky stocking cap, can you dig it, baby? Director Hwa would go on to work with Billy Chong on Crystal Fist (1979), A Hard Way To Die(1979), and Kung Fu Zombie (1981). Perceptive readers might wonder how one of the better Bruce Li efforts only merits two wops on the scale, but I think that rating speaks volumes on how much worse most of his other stuff really was. Then again, compared to the next most prolific Lee imitators, Huang Kin Lung(Bruce Le) and Dragon Lee, whose collective unwatchable stink-bomb rate is prodigious as all fuck, average is pretty much as good as it gets in this subgenre.

 
"Sayyy, are those Swingster ski pants?"
 

"Bruce Lee We Miss You"(1977)d/Lee Goon Cheung

When my roommate and I are sitting around zooted with lungs full of convivial vapors, oftimes we'll throw our favorite ADR-dialogue from kung fu movies back and forth at each other.It wouldn't be the least bit strange to wander in and hear lines like, "Say, Tiger! Since you're here we're on top!" or "I'll even go to Shaolin!If I have to GOOOOOOO!" affected in those familiar Brit accents around here on a good day.It just so happens that tonight's review, a godawful slice of seventies Bruceploitation also known as 'Golden Sun' and 'The Dragon Dies Hard', contains a deluge of quotable lines familiar to both of us dating all the way back to Channel 11 WPIX's propensity to serve up z-grade chopsocky affairs every Saturday afternoon back in the early eighties.Apart from a few brilliantly inept sequences, some loud silk shirts, and some of the hokiest Bruce Lee mythology ever committed to celluloid, that's really about all this one has going for it.Forget your old prerecorded VHS of the Golden Sun print, Master Arts Video has trotted out a luxurious new remastered(translation:dubbed from video cassette) print with no less than four lengthy-n-clunky black pauses in the action, and a nifty scene chapter index.No, seriously, it's a bare bones disc, and not even an average one at that.Forwards!

Stone(Bruce Li) meets Bruce Lee's ghost(also Bruce Li).Uhhh, yeah.
After a sluggish entry-level form display and sparring match, Stone(Bruce Li)'s brother(Au-Yeung Chung) tells him that he reckons his sibling has surpassed his lifelong idol, Bruce Lee, in martial skills.Before anyone with half a brain can chime in to the contrary, some students rush in with a newspaper whose headlines declare the legendary kung fu superstar dead.Shattered by the news, Stone takes to the local bar and gets pie-eyed on booze, then gets dragged home and tucked into bed by his martial chums.During the night, Stone is visited by the ghost of Bruce Lee(also Bruce Li), who tells him through some vague charade-esque hand gestures, that he died violently while hating.This, alone, is enough for Stone to cast aside any and all prior engagements and do some amateur investigation(translation:saying "I want the truth" repeatedly) into the movie star's premature death, once he's visited Shaolin, related his wild story to the head abbot there, and fight all the monks while wearing polyester slacks and platform shoes.While Stone meditates, Lee materializes over some candles and takes a golf club to the labonza.Stone returns to his brother, who ponders aloud where his inquiries will start, to which he replies, "Betty Ting.But first I must find her." "You're right there," says Stone's gaudily-garbed sibling, "That's the most important thing." Sure enough, one of the other students who knows Betty and her nightly haunts happens to stroll up and divulge the info.After saving the starlet from some drunken chiselers who want Ting to pay their tab, Stone takes her back to her apartment, where he frightens her into thinking he's Bruce Lee with the lights off, then splits, satisfied with the evening's sleuthing.Meanwhile, Betty calls her mob-tied bosses...

We now return you to "Shaolin vs. JC Penny's Leisurewear for 1975".
First, Betty is told to cozy up to Stone, while various novice thugs-in-silk-shirts pounce out at the couple as they walk, forcing her new champion to climb atop a Fillipino bus with low tires, and fight several of them on the roof while it speeds along at ten miles an hour.Look out, Chan-man.Ho Tsung Tao has your number...or not.The mobsters kidnap Stone's brother and warn him to keep his brother's nose out of their business.Too late, fellas, he's looking for the truth.After laying low for a while, Stone visits the crime bosses during a thunderstorm, while wearing a kung fu uniform, and is naturally mistaken for Bruce Lee's ghost.Frightened, they point him back in Betty Ting's direction, remarking that Lee died in her apartment.He catches up to her and roughhouses her into a flashback sequence from that fateful night, just as she's splitting town with her bags packed.We see Bruce(again, Bruce Li) arrive at her place, pour himself a drink, strip his silk shirt off, and writhe in agony at a bruise on his hip.Oh, he doesn't stop there, friends.He bounces in slo-mo on the bed with his sunglasses on like a dying teenaged chick at a tragic sleepover, to Betty's horror, for five solid minutes before shuffling off the martial coil.Before Stone can brood over still not knowing who killed Bruce Lee, the mob bosses send some dusky-looking Asians with bad teeth and afros to his school to bully everybody.The last of his vanquished foes directs him to the local stadium(translation:golf course)for the end of his investigation.There, he faces the man responsible for his idol's wrongful death, in the form of permed n' moustacchioed Lung Fei, who mistakes him for the real thing several times.I don't see the resemblance, but anyway...Fei tries to shank Stone's labonza(I wonder why golf clubs with hideaway daggers never caught on), but thanks to the tutelage of Bruce's ghost, he happened to wear a sheet of metal under his clothes in exactly the right spot.After a sloppy n' lethargic fight(they're all like this here, believe me) that ends when Stone kicks him down a gravel bank and into the waiting arms of the police, who arrive just in the nick of time.

I don't know which is slower and clumsier...the bus or the fight choreography.
Director Cheung would only take the chair for one more feature after this, 1979's Immortal Warriors, marking his eleventh credit as such, dating back to 1968.I'm in no hurry to catch the other ten, really.For Ho Tsung Tao, 1978 would bring some of his better films to date, in Edge of Fury, Dynamo, and Deadly Strike.Unfortunately, the year would also mean titles like Bruce Li's Magnum Fist, Bruce Li in New Guinea, and Bruce Lee-The Invincible, for him.It's hard enough convincing movie audiences that you're the second coming of Bruce Lee, let alone taking on twin kung fu gorillas that fight on their hind legs.Another movie, another day perhaps.Lung Fei appeared in no less than 139(!) kung fu movies dating back to 1969, but I'm gonna wager a guess right here and now that the vast majority of them are complete piles of arm-waving shit a la Furious Slaughter(1972) with Jimmy Wang Yu.I'm not holding my breath waiting for someone to prove me wrong, either.On the scale, one embarrassing Wop, and I'm being pretty generous.For hardcore Brucesploitation completists only.

Flopping around in slo-mo on the bed for five minutes.Or an aneurism.Whichever sounds better to you.

"Goodbye, Bruce Lee His Last Game of Death"(1975) d/Lin Pin, Harold B. Schwartz

"...He uses every human capability, with a fingertip sensitivity... His kung fu courage set in motion, it is a massive dynamic explosion!" Cue: wah wah-heavy disco guitar riff. Yeah, from the funky opening strains of the title song(the aptly-titled "King of Kung Fu", as sung by a man simply named Candy) the viewer should automatically realize what he's in for in screening tonight's review, a tastelessly grimy Brucesploitation cash-in vehicle for Taiwanese karateka Ho Tsung Tao, who toiled thanklessly throughout a career in countless low budget grindhouse rip offs as 'Bruce Li', certainly the most prolific of the many Bruce Lee imitators out there, for whatever the hell that might be worth to you.Sadly, what few decent movies exist in his filmography(Bruce Lee:The Man, The Myth(1978), Dynamo(1978), Edge of Fury(1978), and The Lama Avenger(1979) are a few I can think of atm) tend to get buried underneath the massif of exploitative deuces he had the misfortune of signing on to appear in, like 1977's Bruce Li in New Guinea where he's forced to trade kicks with extras in shabby gorilla suits.
In regards to tonight's entry, the film's producers opted for groovy seventies wear, hastily painted plywood sets, and inept fight choreography over upright martial simians.They probably should have gone with the kung fu apes instead.Three years before Golden Harvest would build a rotten cut n' paste B movie with lookalikes and doesn'tlookalikes in Elvis sunglasses and crepe wool beards around the sloppy test footage Bruce Lee shot for his 'Game of Death' idea, German production company Atlas International also tried to bring Lee's multi-level pagoda full of different martial arts masters idea to fruition with Goodbye, Bruce Lee, but as you'll read(or see, if you've the guts!)here, it didn't work out too well.At all.Towards!

Lee(Ho Tsung Tao) shows off his impressive flexibility, which ranks somewhere between 'petrified wood' and 'block of titanium'.
We first see Lee(Bruce Li) showing off on gymnastic rings and a pommel horse in a cheap attempt to impress his girlfriend that draws smiles out of the girl.Maybe if his stunt double was more proficient at gymnastics he'd have scored some kisses.After completing an atrociously choreographed fight scene(there'll be a lot of these, mind you), he is approached by Lin and Cho, two producers who explain that they'd been working on a film with Bruce Lee until his sudden, untimely death, and over some quick cut, dimly lit profile shots of Li(reinforcing just how little he resembles Lee afterall), that he was meant to finish the motion picture for them, as he's the natural replacement for the fallen kung fu star.The young man promises to get back to them, after he's pondered the project thoroughly, and changed his gaudy seventies outfits(looks like Charles Nelson Reilly was wardrobe manager on this movie) several more times.After Lee and his gal are randomly harrassed into more sloppy fights by several groups of unrelated pedestrian non-martial artist guys for no apparent reason whatsoever, they sit down to screen the unfinished Bruce Lee film with the producers.The film-within-a-film, involving a package stuffed full of cash as handed over to Bruce Lee(translation:Bruce Li, who's playing both the star and the imitator, and looking no different as either) by a dying Chinese who's been given a martial reprieve from a slow mo labonza-shanking by a gweilo.It just so happens that the cash is much coveted by no less than two triad gangs.I sense some more atrociously choreographed fights on the horizon.

"Meathead" has had enough of your bigotry and chauvenism, Arch.
After a piss-poor Kareem Abdul Jabbar wanna-be lankster tries to gaffle the box off of Bruce, his squeeze is lifted by The Far East Trading Co.(translation:bad guys), which is headed by the pompadoured Boss K(Fei Lung), who's decked out in such gaudy red turtlenecks, bell bottoms, and leather trenches he might as well have been named Pretty Tony.All he's missing is a stable of baaad bitches.K takes Bruce's arm candy to the 'Tower of Death'(translation:brightly painted particle board set for interiors, Chung Hsing Tower for exteriors) where he'll have to fight his way through various 'opponents'(I use this term very lightly here) to the top to gain her freedom and bring this muddled mess to a close.On the first level, he easily defeats two lethargic karatekas of little skill.Reaching the second level, he uses his legendary teleportation kung fu(?) to blink himself a la 'I Dream of Jeannie' all around a non-Japanese looking samurai, thus driving him pazzo, wildly chopping air with his tanto in the process.After dispatching a Korean practitioner on the third level, he's faced with a dirty-looking white guy with a beer belly in nut hugger shorts on the fourth.The fifth level brings Mao Shan, of Five Shaolin Masters(1974) fame, only he's decked out in Hindu gear and ass-bouncing across the floor from a lotus position.One sloppy fight later, Lee faces off against a black boxer who would have been better served carrying spit buckets for Mickey Goldmill.Finally, at the top, Lee goes head to head with Boss K, whose whipping technique proves no match for the clumsy nunchaku work of the impostor in the famous yellow and black tracksuit.As Lee is reunited with his dame, we're taken to the end titles by Candy's disco theme for what seems like the hundredth time.You can just imagine Lee Jun Fan slowly spinning on that rotisserie in Hell over this one.

"Exciting movie?!!?Whoa, stop right there, this doesn't qualify!"
It's almost ironic that a Z-grade Brucesploitation craptacular like this would receive a widescreen remastering and special dvd treatment from a company like Anchor Bay(!!!), when it's probably not even worthy enough for placement in one of those 20 kung fu movie collection tins you find on a five dollar sale rack at K-Mart.If the sub-par fights, embarrassing fashions, annoying disco title track, and dodgy plot don't draw you in, though, this might: the ADR for the 'Boss K' character is unmistakable, as provided by none other than apex silver screen baddie, David Hess!Worth a look for Bruce Lee exploitation fans, Krug Stilo completists, and lovers of rotten chopsocky cinema everywhere, Goodbye Bruce Lee merits a single wop.It's a lot like your kung fu.It doesn't look that hot.

They couldn't have matched up the nunchucks and the track suit? C'monnnn.