Rock's Cheapo Theatre of the Damned

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The ultimate muscle talk and ******** walk!

He's back, and up to his old tricks!

I haven't delved in too deep just yet, but this site might be what you're looking for:


http://clonesofbrucelee.info/

*adds Bruceploitation to official list of thread topics*

We have a review thread crossover! It looks like Bruce Le was in The Super Inframan.



You're a legend, Bruce, but there's one thing your single-voweled doppleganger has over you: you never got to fight a rubber lobster bug.

"the greatest cast ever assembled in one motion picture"

Take that, Philadelphia Story!

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Captain's Log
My Collection

oooh, this will keep my busy for a while, thanks. I did watch that video you posted the other day, but I was kind of turned off by the two dorks

OMG this looks amazing.

The guy with the snakes has won my heart.

Lol


They are usually better in podcast form.

I think the steady escalation in claims made by the trailer really sells it. From "Bruce Le(e) is back" all the way to "this will be the standard by which all motion pictures are judged going forward." Where's the lie?

Also, the movie is available on YouTube in a decent widescreen transfer. The audio cuts out a few times...but let's just say you're not missing a whole lot.

Yeah I actually watched two more of their videos after that. They're fine.

The last two Bruceploitation movies I watched, True Game of Death and Enter the Game of Death, were about what I expected from the genre. They're clear ripoffs of Bruce Lee's actual movies that restaged specific sequences. Though they differed in quality (the latter was quite a bit better than the former) and had their pleasures (the latter more so than the former), they were definitely of the schlockier vein. Neither movie approached any respectable notions of quality (not that they needed to). Which makes Soul Brothers of Kung Fu a pleasant surprise. In the grand scheme of things it's not substantially more polished than those other movies, but you can see the filmmakers putting in actual effort into the end product and treating the material with a certain seriousness. It's a better and more ambitious movie than it needed to be.

The plot follows three migrants newly arriving in Hong Kong and struggling to eke out an existence. One of them, played by Bruce Li, runs into some mob goons beating up on a young black man played by Carl Scott. After he fends off the goons, he decides to take Scott under his wing and teach him self defense. During their practice on a rooftop, Li ends up demolishing a celebratory watermelon brought by his girlfriend in order to demonstrate his nunchaku technique. Li is a mostly sympathetic figure in this movie, but this is a total ******* move. (This visual is astutely reused in a later fight scene to provide some gruesome punctuation.) Li finds some success as a competitive fighter, but any happiness is purely transitory. You see, the mobsters did not take lightly to Li's insult, and begin to close in on Li and his friends over the course of the movie. One rather effective scene has the main villain train a protege to fight, and you can contrast the warmth between Li and Scott with the cruelty being instilled in this scene. I understand there are two cuts of the movie, with alternately upbeat and downbeat conclusions. I watched the one with the downer ending, and it felt true to the preceding story.

Li is considered the most respectful of the Bruce Lee imitators, and compared to the over the top antics of Bruce Le in Enter the Game of Death, you can see him trying to turn in an actual dramatic performance instead of just an imitation. It's a pretty effective one, although hampered a bit by the dubbing. (Li fares better than Carl Scott, who is saddled with a voiceover artist who initially aims for the "wise guy, eh?" cadence of the Three Stooges.) The movie actually resists excessive Lee imitation at first, although it starts to cave in when Li's character reads a book about Lee, gets asked about his Lee influence in a post-fight interview, and spends the last act of the movie in tracksuits that resemble ones worn by Lee in his movies. The movie is also not immune to schlock, particularly in a training sequence that has Li practice his "Iron Finger" technique with a dummy that makes a beeping noise when he hits it in the crotch and two little red nubs pop out from where the testicles should be. (This visual is also reused in a later fight scene.)

But at the same time, its meager production values give it a certain tension, even if it tries to hide the low budget with Bill Conti's score from Rocky. Hong Kong in this movie is depicted as a cruel, predatory place, and the fight scenes here, which are surprisingly grisly and have a certain gymnastic quality to their choreography, feel especially bruising when staged in the claustrophobic slums and industrial settings that populate this movie. This is not a feel good movie, but I admit by the end I was fairly moved.

I guess I have to watch a Dragon Lee movie next.

After having watched Bruceploitation movies starring Bruces Li and Le, I thought it was time for one with the next biggest star in the genre, Dragon Lee. Granted, I'd previously seen him in The Clones of Bruce Lee, which has an appealingly nutty concept that it does little interesting with (a movie with that many Bruce Lees should not be so boring), but I was hoping for one that might let him shine. This is not it. The Dragon, the Hero is barely a Bruceploitation movie. Dragon Lee is barely in this movie, popping up every few scenes, occasionally demonstrating his kung fu prowess, and then disappearing for the bulk of the runtime. In that sense, the movie represents a ripoff in a higher plane, not just offering a knock-off Bruce Lee as the genre was wont to do, but failing to deliver even that in sufficient quantities. The con works on multiple levels.

But as an hour-and-a-half piece of kung fu schlock, it has its charms. The plot...well, that's a bit difficult to explain. There are two dudes (John Liu and Tino Wong Cheung) who were experts in a rare form of martial arts and had a feud, and now their sons may or may not be continuing the feud. Dragon Lee has run ins with local rich ********. There's a baddie who runs a racket where he pays twenty bucks to anyone who can beat one of his goons, but then sends his toughest goon Philip Ko to kill them and take the money back. Now, I suppose this is meant to demonstrate that these are some really bad dudes, but one wonders if it wouldn't be easier to just not do any of this in the first place. Also, that head baddie turns out to have rabies, which we learn in a flashback that he got when he attempted to rape a woman but was foiled by a dog who bit his dick off. (There's a shot of a dog running with a sausage in its mouth, dispelling any possible ambiguity.) Also, there are a pair of dumbasses who provide alleged comic relief, although one of their bits is echoed quite entertainingly in the climax.

All of these pieces feel pulled from different movies, with little attempt to shape them into a coherent plot. Adding to the confusion is the atrocious English dub, which directly contradicts the subtitles multiple times and seems to change character motivations with every second sentence. It also awkwardly stretches out syllables at random to force a match to the actors onscreen, as if the voiceover artists were losing a game of verbal Tetris. (The movie is made a bit more tolerable audio-wise with some pilfered Morricone and Goblin.) This all makes more sense when you realize the movie is directed by Godfrey Ho, best known for assembling movies out of pre-existing footage and adding ninjas for flavour, and whose titles evoke a pre-Internet version of search engine optimization. (My favourite title, from a movie I have not seen, is Ninja Operation 5: Godfather the Master, which sounds like the movie equivalent of submitting a job application where you stuffed all the keywords from the posting into your resume.) This is the second film I've seen from him after Ninja Terminator (pretty entertaining, as long as you don't try to make sense of the plot and focus instead on the ninja ******** and the Garfield phone), and while this was apparently made entirely by him with no recycled footage, it has the same mix of narrative incoherence punctuated by genuinely entertaining action. Despite the title, this is basically the John Liu and Philip Ko show, the former of whom has a kick-heavy fighting style that's never not fun to watch. And Tino Wong Cheung joins in at the end for a pretty neat two-against-one finale.

There's fun to be had here, just don't think too hard about any of it.

As I work my way through These Fists Break Bricks, Black Belt Jones caught my interest as it represents an intersection of a few strains in the book: Jim Kelly's career, the introduction of black stars into martial arts movies and the crossover with blaxploitation, and martial arts culture in the black community. This is a movie that Kelly and Robert Clouse made as a follow-up to Enter the Dragon. In the earlier movie, Kelly played a supporting character in that movie who loomed larger than his limited screentime, thanks to his immense charisma, martial arts prowess, and kinship with Lee's character as people of colour. ("Ghettos are the same all over the world. They stink.") Quite frankly, he should have been given more screentime than John Saxon, who turns in an engaging performance because he's a ********* professional, but comes up short next to the actual martial artists in the cast. (Chuck Norris might have been a better choice, although he lacks Saxon's charisma.) So it's nice to see Kelly front and centre in his own movie.

He stars as a professional ass-kicker (for good) and trampoline instructor, who decides to help out his friends when the mob tries to seize their dojo. The dojo is run by famed karate expert, uh, Scatman Crothers, seen with a hairpiece that resembles a small animal. The mob sends after them a local drug dealer named Pinky, who repeatedly accuses everyone of being a Communist. (The movie's politics contrast with Friday Foster, which I watched the same weekend and which features a character extolling the virtues of "black capitalism".) Pinky and his gang mostly wear shirts with loud as hell prints, likely conducive to the kind of hallucinations that might be inspired by the product he's pushing. They contrast with Kelly's much more tasteful wardrobe, which includes a shirt with portofino (or "James Bond") cuffs, and a Canadian tuxedo (further proof that it's a good look in the right hands). Kelly gets some help from Gloria Hendry (who has a much better character here than the one she played in Live and Let Die) and his trampouline students, and takes down the bad guys once and for all in a climax set in a car wash where everyone ends up covered in soap and Hendry repeatedly hits people in the balls and throws them in the back of a dump truck.

This is a fun movie, but I do wish it was a bit better. Most of the problems can be traced to Clouse's direction, who lacks a feel for the story elements. The action here is largely played for comedic value, like the slapsticky opening sequence (accompanied by the amazing theme by Dennis Coffey and Luchi De Jesus) and the super soapy finale, which isn't a problem on its own but does mean the action lacks much tension. Kelly gets pitted largely against non-martial-artists, meaning that there's little doubt to the outcome of any given confrontation. As a result, the movie plays a bit like an early Steven Seagal vehicle, where Kelly shows up and kicks everybody's ass in an instant, but the direction lacks the streetwise swagger or brutality of an Out for Justice or Marked for Death.

In Enter the Dragon, Clouse's assignment was essentially to sell the genre, so much of the action has a demonstrative quality meant to wow the audience, and working with experienced Hong Kong crew likely contributed to the movie's success in this respect. In contrast, Clouse here is trying to stage his action in urban environments but isn't able to shape the action into forceful enough results or give it much grit, with a few exceptions (there's one scene with flickering lights I found pretty effective). And as I'm going through the movies in the Beyond Blaxploitation series on the Criterion Channel (my favourite so far has been Three the Hard Way, which features three of the genres biggest stars all getting to do a lot of fun stuff; also, Fred Williamson's shirt is unbuttoned down to his stomach and he's friends with some scary but sexy BDSM biker ladies), I found that this one dabbles in common genre elements but doesn't really give them much charge. We're told that this dojo is very important to the community, but I'm not sure how much we feel it.

All that being said, Kelly, whose Kiai sounds have a lot more bass than Lee's, is an extremely charismatic lead and watching him beat up bad guys is undeniably entertaining, so this is a pretty enjoyable hour and a half.

In my review of Showdown, I recounted the story of my attempt to order a pair of cowboy boots, only for them to get lost in the mail, and for the eventual refund to provide a bit of solace despite not fully numbing the melancholy of my cowboy-boot-free existence. (I should also note that I've been too ****ing lazy to go buy a pair in person, although with masking requirements having been recently lifted where I am, I'm reluctant to go rectify that at the moment.) Now, this doesn't have a whole lot of relevance to the story of Last Night at the Alamo, where a couple of losers converge upon their favourite bar the night before it closes down, but you could argue that it has some thematic relevance. You see, I understand that cowboy boots aren't just practical and stylish footwear, but that they hold symbolic value and come with the weight of certain iconography and mythology. And with that, I could put myself in the shoes (or boots) of these losers who are enamored with a certain cowboy in the movie and what he represents.

The characters in this movie are sketched knowingly and arguably with some affection, but hardly flatteringly. There's the young crybaby who drags around his long suffering girlfriend, who you spend the movie waiting to dump his ass. There's the guy who just got kicked out of his house by his wife, who spends the movie arguing with her over the phone and insisting he isn't drunk in between sips of beer while threatening to burn their house down. (In one of the movie's more startling moments, this character drops a racial slur. While the movie doesn't exactly take him to task for this, it also gives him the least flattering portrayal out of this band of losers, so it's hard to read it as an endorsement.) There's also a guy (played by Texas Chain Saw Massacre screenwriter Kim Henkel) who barely talks and can't seem to remember his role in a supposedly amusing anecdote. The effect is a bit like King of the Hill, if that show were populated entirely by Bills and Boomhauers. And like that series, this is very funny in a low key, knowing way.

What these characters all have in common, aside from their presence at the titular bar, is their admiration for a cowboy nicknamed Cowboy. When the character finally arrives, he seems like everything they're not: cool, self-assured, stylishly dressed, handsome, charismatic. But over the course of the night, that facade starts to unravel, and you can see how he tries lamely to maintain his image through small acts of self deception. Getting turned down by a girl? She was married to a doctor, and he don't mess with that. Getting his ass kicked in a fight? Well, you should see the other guy. And that hat? It's not hiding a receding hairline, is it? These might be little lies he's telling his friends, but by the end when he not only proposes staging an armed defense of the bar but seems drunk enough to try it, you can see he's bought into his own ********.

The characters commiserate but lack the self-awareness for it to translate to any real introspection, let alone self-loathing. The movie emerges as a critique of a certain kind of masculinity, one which mistakes cowboy iconography for character and uneasily grapples with modernity. The guy with with wife trouble seems jealous of the computer programmer who lives down the street. Cowboy pointedly plans to star in western movies, seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were a genre in decline at the time. And when he rails against the bar down the street for its Yankee influence, nobody seems to really care about the difference in whatever character he's attributing to the different establishments, as one watering hole is as good as another. But at the same time, I can't help but feel a tinge of sympathy. Some would argue that my city is a gentrified hellscape that's being steadily engulfed in condos, and I can't help but feel some nostalgia for some of the places we've lost over the years, if only for the memories I attach to them.

Now, while these characters are not ones I'd like to hang out with were I sober, I did enjoy spending time in this movie, with its stark black and white images, boozy rhythms and rich dialogue written with an ear for drunken inanities. This was a great little movie to stumble into and out of.

@crumbsroom, this seems especially up your alley.