Library of Classics: BRUCE LEE AGAINST SUPERMEN

Former Hong Kong child star Bruce Lee achieved mature stardom in the role of Kato, masked chauffeur and all-around henchman of the Green Hornet in a 1966 TV version of the old-time radio program. It lasted only one season but was a big hit in Hong Kong, so the story goes, under the title The Kato Show. This enabled Lee to begin his starring career in feature films. Kato, therefore, was an iconic figure for Asian audiences. For that reason it was inevitable that the "Brucesploitation" genre that emerged following Lee's death would appropriate Kato's image. Now that we've established that fact, all bets are off.

The origins of the film presented in the Dragon Immortal box set as Bruce Lee Against Supermen are mysterious. The Internet Movie Database denies the existence of such a film. The closest thing to it in their filmography for star Bruce Li is a 1977 release called Superdragon vs. Superman. Other sources date the film under the title we know to 1975. That title is certainly one of the most misleading ever used. It's one thing to invoke Bruce Lee in your title; that's standard practice in Brucesploitation. It's another to suggest that Bruce Lee is either starring or a character in the movie. As for the other part of the equation, ... we'll get to that in due time.

C. C. Wu's production opens with a pre-credit car chase, during which criminals toss their swag practically into the laps of a tourist couple. They hardly have time to marvel at their luck before they are rebuked by a masked gentleman in the black livery known to millions. This as yet unnamed person confiscates them and their money and drives them to the police station. The opening credits roll.

Post-credits, the masked chauffeur deals with three antagonists. We then see him at ease in what must be Green Hornet headquarters. Here our hero (or assistant-hero, I suppose), can slip into something more comfortable: a red superhero costume with a green hornet logo. It's the club uniform apparently, and for some inexplicable reason the club has at least three members. I could swear I saw three guys when there are normally only two, Sith-style, and all in the same casual attire. Then the telex lurches to life, setting the plot proper into motion.

The two faces of Bruce Li in Bruce Lee Against Supermen

Professor Ting has discovered a way to synthesize food products from petroleum by-products. The resulting compound is reportedly "rich in vitt-a-minns." Unscrupulous elements want Ting's formula. They follow him to an Arab country where he inspects some likely resources under the approving eyes of Chinese actors who don't even try to look Semitic, apart from the clothes. The criminals do little at this time, however, apart from ogling the professor's daughter, Alice, as she skinny dips in a nearby pond.

While this goes on, the unmasked chauffeur, now in civilian garb, shows up at a martial arts school. He announces that, owing to an injury to the Green Hornet, he has been sent to protect Professor Ting. Here's where we finally hear his name: they call him "Carter."

This is one of those moments when you want to slap someone upside the head. Why in the blue hell did they change his name? Were they somehow afraid of copyright infringement after identifying "Carter" as the Green Hornet's assistant? Did they perhaps believe that the name "Kato" was a form of intellectual property in a way that the name "Bruce Lee" was not? Did they fear that audiences would confuse the character with Inspector Clouseau's servant?

Let it go, and let's move on. As you may have guessed once Carter declared his intent to protect the professor, Ting and his daughter are promptly kidnapped, fortunately in sight of Carter and one of his pals. An unusually orderly, sedate and protracted car chase follows. It is very time consuming, and only looks like a chase because understand that it's supposed to be. It finally ends when the good guys figure out a short cut, get ahead of the crime car, and lay themselves down in the road in front of it. The gangsters actually stop, thinking the men must be hurt. But it is they who are hurt as our heroes rescue the Tings.

"Hello, S.O.S. I need me a real good sharpshooter," the head criminal says on the phone. In short order, Carter finds himself the target of a sniper who is not really good. For the sake of variety, the film now gives us a leisurely, roundabout foot chase through the city that finally ends with the sniper falling off a building. Not knowing exactly whom he's dealing with (and I was sometimes uncertain myself), the head criminal realizes that "That Green Hornet's a real problem." Thinking aloud, he muses, "Superman? I'll get him! He can fix Green Hornet, I'm sure."

Far away, in a dark fortress of solitude, a weird caped figure practices his super calligraphy. With every leap and flip comes a new brushstroke, until a complete statement is visible. Written in Chinese characters, it is completely incomprehensible to me. The caped figure reads his own handiwork and laughs maniacally. This is Superman, rocketed to Earth from the planet Crip Tong and endowed with powers indiscernible to mortal men. That's my theory, at least, but the film itself makes no effort to explain why a man in black tights and flimsy white cape with a troupe of half-mimes, half-ninjas in tow should either see himself or be seen as a Superman, much less the licensed property of DC Comics, a Warner Communications company.

Superman (second from right) considers a rich offer to fight "Bruce Lee" later in the picture.

Still, Superman demands a high price for his time and trouble. The criminals offer "$400,000 cash, ten girls, and a truckload of booze," paid for by foreign backers. "That's not bad," Superman admits, "Foreigners are generous." His employer is less sanguine. "Foreigners are nothing, but very rich. Nothing upstairs but their big fat wallets." Yeah, but their money buys you Superman, ingrate! And isn't he kind of a foreigner himself, jerk?

You will believe a man can fly -- please?

But was that purchase really necessary? It seems like all the gangsters needed was a woman to seduce Carter while another band of miscreants re-kidnaps the Professor. It's only when Alice bursts in on the seduction and incites an ill-choreographed catfight that Carter realizes that he's made a tactical mistake. By the time that sinks in, Ting has been subjected to the dread torture
of hot lights and hair pulling. Screen distortion allows you, the audience, to share in the doctor's agony. Alice can only imagine it, but it can't possibly magnify her present disdain for Carter. "What can you do but kung fu?" she sulks.

When the criminals negotiate a deal so that Alice can bring her father the medicine he needs to keep alive, a chagrined Carter follows their car by pulling a rickshaw at something like super speed. This finally sets up some successive showdowns, first with a pack of gibbering minions who throw frisbees at one another and threaten to taunt him to death.

And then finally with Superman himself, who displays the powers of jumping, flipping, kung fu and knife fighting. The only special effect at his disposal is the ability to reverse film, enabling him to leap upright out of the water and onto a ledge several feet above. The entire climactic fight is pitched on this level of ordinary. No one walking into Bruce Lee Against Supermen, no matter what they might have expected, expected the big battle to come down to knife thrusts, but it does....

As I wrote a few days ago, I picked up Dragon Immortal collection from the Albany Public Library expecting Bruce Lee Against Supermen to be the highlight of the set. Instead, I was only amazed by how brazenly lame it was. This is the kind of effort that gives exploitation a bad name. Either the original producers or the American distributors, or both, seem simply out to put one over on the gullible public. It's the sort of show that almost needs a square-up reel, though the producers do make gestures in that direction with the skinny dipping, the catfight, and a near-rape scene involving Alice and a sweaty white guy.

Nor is Bruce Lee Against Supermen on the mesmeric level of ineptitude that makes something like Bruce's Fist of Vengeance fascinating and unpredictable. It's nearly the worst thing that any exploitation effort can be: utterly mediocre. It hasn't even the Turkish gall to show what it promises: a fight, let's say, between a dude in a yellow track suit and a guy in a genuine Superman costume, or guys with some sort of superhuman powers. The pure scandalous idea of the film as a great ripoff of U.S. pop culture is really more entertaining than the actual movie.

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Next in the Library of Classics series is the remaining film from the Dragon Immortal set, and the real highlight of it -- Power Force: Coming Soon to this blog.

Library of Classics: The DRAGON IMMORTAL COLLECTION

A public library ought to base its DVD collection at least as much on historical interest as on entertainment value. As historians may well ask what possessed moviemakers around the world to exploit ruthlessly the memory of Bruce Lee, it's fitting that the Albany Public Library has made VideoAsia's Dragon Immortal 10-movie set a part of its own collection. It can't help but look like a pact with the devil, given the company's reputation as a poacher of international film and a purveyor of dubious dupes off of well-worn tapes, but let's face it: the people who stocked the museums of Europe and America with the treasures of Greece were kind of like pirates themselves -- and that's the closest I'm going to go to comparing Brucesploitation to the Elgin Marbles.

There had really been nothing like it since the days of Charlie Chaplin, and there really hasn't been anything like what they did to Chaplin, since he was still very much alive when actors like Billy West started imitating his tramp character. On the other hand, West didn't change his name to Charlie Caplin or Chaz Chaplain or -- you get the idea. It might make more sense to compare Brucesploitation to the folk phenomenon of Elvis impersonation that followed Presley's death. But while that was probably more spontaneous and based in the grass roots, I don't get the impression that actors volunteered to be billed as Bruce Le or Bruce Li. Did Bruce Lie occur to anyone? Brucesploitation is more like if Col. Tom had sent someone named Alvin Pressley or Elvis King out on the road in 1978 -- and even more like if other people did it without asking the Colonel. It's hard to say whether Brucesploitation is a unique tribute to Bruce Lee's meteoric stardom or an indictment of the global exploitation industry.

What was the object, anyway? Did anyone actually hope to convince ignorant moviegoers that they were seeing new movies by the actual Bruce Lee -- apart from Game of Death, that is? Or had Bruce Lee already become so mythic a figure that producers could tell new stories about him and his legacy like folklore? Or was Bruceploitation a simple promise to kung fu fans that they'd at least be offered the next best thing? There's a little bit of all that in most of the Dragon Immortal offerings.

The library has had the set for at least a month, but I was waiting for it to be available for a weekend. As it happened, Mother's Day weekend made it impossible for me to watch all the films, but I did watch four in their entirety while sampling most of the others. I'm going to do full-length reviews of two movies, but I want to summarize the set as a whole here.

The Clones of Bruce Lee may be the definitive Brucesploitation title, and since I have it in other sets, I skipped it this time. I also avoided The Story of Chinese Gods because simply including a character based on Lee in a cartoon fell short of true exploitation. Bruce's Way of Kung Fu is another big cheat because it's a period piece about an evil king with 18 female warriors. It counts as Bruceploitation because one of the imitators stars. I can tell you even less about Bruce Lee's Deadly Kung Fu and Bruce vs. Snake in Eagle Shadow.

Fist of Death is double exploitation because it includes a performance by one Jackie Chang as a comical specialist in drunken boxing. The Brucian star is Tong Lung (aka Kim Tae-Jeong), best known for being the real Bruce's double in Game of Death. In this item, gangsters seem to be manipulating a feud between a martial arts school and the dreaded Y.M.C.A., killing the master of the former and framing the latter by using one of their trademark daggers as well as killers in uniform. Both dagger and uniform say "Y.M.G.A." but the dubbing says otherwise. The school is also torn, post-master, by a struggle for succession, one of the strugglers being a stooge for the gangsters. Here's a clip of the heroes in a friendly fight.

Fist is reportedly a Korean film, while Bruce's Fist of Vengeance hails from the Philippines. This one is from the sub-genre of "Bruce Lee's Secret Book" that I first encountered a few months ago in the crapopulent Kung Fu Fever. In this version of the Brucian revelation, the book is, as far as I can tell, just a further elaboration of jeet kune do. Jack Lee is a trusted pupil who brings the book to Manila to bolster the flagging morale at Peter's (Bruce Le) martial arts school. Peter just got his butt whooped by Filipino master Miguel at the last tournament, staged in a college gym for an audience of a few dozen people. Not content to rest on his laurels, Miguel wants the book for himself, repeatedly sending minions (and occasionally seductresses) to Jack's hotel room to wrest the precious tome from him. When seduction fails, the disappointing floozy is strangled and drowned. It's not until Jack actually hands the book over to Peter that Miguel, in a rare fit of common sense, has someone just shoot Jack down. This decisive strike follows a lengthy digression that sends Peter and his girlfriend to the local cockpit for a night of gambling on mortal combat between roosters. Pete le flambeur gets a winning streak going while doom closes in on his friend. But you couldn't have vengeance otherwise, could you? After some terrible acting in Jack's death scene, Peter storms Miguel's mansion to reclaim the book, leading to an extremely extended fight scene that ends up in a water fountain. Bruce Lee must be turning in his grave to see how well the last men to read his secret book put its lessons to use, since after a while in the water it may as well be a Toughman competition. Yet director Bill James thinks it's all so awesome that there have to be instant replays of key moments.

Bruce's Fist of Vengeance is almost hypnotically bad. The terrible acting is complemented by dreadfully paced direction and an inane script. Part of its charm comes from the soundtrack credited to Totoy Nuke, who apparently has very strong and detailed memories of the music from Enter the Dragon, The Sand Pebbles, Cleopatra and other films. But before you conclude that we've tasted the dregs of Brucesploitation, let me introduce you to They Call Him Bruce Lee. Also from the Philippines, it is regarded as an older film than Fist of Vengeance, given a 1979 release date while Fist is dated to 1984. But I think Fist has to be the older film, because They Call Him Bruce Lee actually reuses part of the plot and part of the film itself, namely some of Jack Lee's hotel room fight scenes. Given how lousy those scenes are, you get an idea of how desperate an affair They Call Him is. Another argument for it being a later film is the fact that Bruce Lee's secret book is now an exposition of ninjitsu, as this purportedly comical clip explains.

That bit was original to They Call Him, but this one isn't.

Even though I looked at They Call Him first, I decided that Fist of Vengeance had to come first because it has several scenes filmed in that same room --unless, Bruce help us, Fist is based on outtakes from They Call Him. While I feel certain that They Call Him is the worse film, I can't verify it, because on two different nights I made the mistake of trying to watch it too late in the evening, and it put me to sleep before the ending. That may be significant.

I'm leaving what proved to be the two most interesting films in the set for separate posts later this week. One of these, Bruce Lee Against Supermen, was the one I thought would be the strangest and most entertaining. That was, at most, half right, since by far the most entertaining film out of those I watched was Power Force. Come back later to find out more about both.