The Dragon Lives Again (1977)

I was a fan of Bruce Lee before I had ever seen one of his films in full (which wouldn’t have been until my college years).  Further, he died before I was born, so the fact that he had (and I would argue still has) such a cultural impact is fascinating.  Ironically, the first film of his that I was intrigued by as a youth was Game of Death, the one during the production of which he died.  When I saw that brief shot from the trailer of Lee squaring off against Kareem Abdul Jabar, I was mesmerized.  It had to be a special effect or a trick shot.  The difference in size between the combatants was mind-bending for me.  More than that, it made Jabar into a monster simply by dint of his gargantuan size, something which was right in my wheelhouse.  

Later, when I saw the slow motion shot of Lee preparing for battle (I want to say from Enter the Dragon), his arms duplicating and flowing into one another, reminiscent (again, maybe only to me) of Ray Harryhausen’s Kali statue from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, it made the man into the myth in my eyes.  How many pop culture figures can say that they inspired an entire wave of exploitation films feeding off both their lives and their legends?  I don’t know that Lee would have appreciated films like Law Kei’s The Dragon Lives Again (aka Deadly Hands of Kung Fu; incidentally, also the title of a Marvel Comics magazine that featured martial arts characters like The Sons of the Tiger and Iron Fist), but you must admit, it would certainly catch his attention.

Bruce Lee (Bruce Leong aka Siu-Lung Leung) lies in state before the King of the Underworld (Tang Ching).  Upon waking and learning of his situation, Bruce is shunted off to a local village, where he runs into and makes an enemy of Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman (Wong Mei).  Turns out, Zatoichi is in league with the Exorcist (Fong Yau, dubbed in English with a French accent for absolutely no reason), the Godfather (Sin Il-Ryong, who looks more like a Sonny Chiba character than either Vito or Michael Corleone), Clint Eastwood (Bobby Canavarro, in Eastwood’s Man with No Name guise), Dracula (Cheung Hei), James Bond (Alexander Grand), and Emmanuelle (Jenny), who want to usurp power from the King.  Joining forces with the One-Armed Swordsman (Nick Cheung Lik), Kwai Chang Caine, and Popeye (a very young, fit Eric Tsang), Bruce takes on the villains and stands up for the rights of the common man.  Huzzah!

Bruceploitation is one of the oddest trends to ever hit celluloid.  I can think of no other personage who inspired an entire exploitation cottage industry.  Sure, there have been Nazisploitation, Nunsploitation, Blaxploitation, Mexploitation (which is just exploitation films made in Mexico, not genre films exploiting Mexicans), Canuxploitation (again…), but there has never been Elvisploitation (for the most part, and if there has been, it’s an extremely small pool), McQueensploitation, and so on.  Lee’s legacy carried beyond his actual achievements.  Many of the Bruceploitation films are either factually inaccurate biopic/documentaries (a la Chariots of the Gods) or simply cheap Martial Arts films where its star was given a moniker similar to Lee (Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Bronson Lee, ad nauseum) and billed on the poster as the true successor to the genuine article.  The Dragon Lives Again is something altogether different.  It’s a pure fantasy that plays with the legend of Bruce Lee as a symbol.

The film skirts the more unsavory aspects of the whole Bruceploitation movement (but that someone had this idea at all is audacious as hell) by dealing with the man as myth.  Bruce is first shown with a blanket over his dead body and sporting a massive erection.  Said tumescence is revealed to actually be Lee’s signature nunchaku, a weapon he keeps on him at all times.  Right off the bat, we get allusions to Lee’s sexual power and his skill with nunchucks in one fell swoop.  The two are inseparable.  Just about every character remarks about how sexually powerful Lee is, and the women all want to bed down with him (even the King’s wife and concubines, who want to “try him out for size”).  Once Bruce gets to the village, he becomes a hero of the people, teaching villagers Jeet Kun Do (let’s just say that’s what it is), standing up to corrupt policemen, and staving off the machinations of both the bad guys and the King.  Yet, Bruce isn’t exactly a nice guy.  He’s a conceited braggart who knows just how good he is at what he does.  He has posters of himself in his room, for crying out loud!  Conversely, Bruce realizes that he was flawed when alive.  He states that, “I used to play around just too much,” and even apologizes to Linda Lee Cadwell (Lee’s widow) directly.

Similarly, the characters Bruce encounters in the Underworld are myths, cultural icons of the time.  That he is thrown in with them asserts that this is an idealized Bruce, a character of superheroic proportions.  Still, Bruce is Bruce, and though he is the legend, he is also the person (though he’s not really).  Even when the other characters use actual peoples’ names (read: Clint Eastwood), they are still acting as the character that person made famous.  Most surreal in this regard is the appearance of Kwai Chang Caine, a character reputedly created to be played by Lee on the Kung Fu television show but that wound up being portrayed by David Carradine.  Needless to say, Bruce takes potshots at Caine throughout the film, and the floppy-hatted, wandering warrior-philosopher takes it all with a sheepish grin, knowing his place before the true master.  Further, Bruce himself appears in the film in the guise of Kato, the sidekick character he played on The Green Hornet.  Why?  Why the hell not?!  The point is that Bruce is simultaneously the most iconic and the most real of all the legends of the world in this film.  While he’s still a cartoon portrayal of the man, Bruce is less of one than everyone else here.  The sole exception to this is the villagers, and even they are playing the roles laid down in every Kung Fu movie ever made; even they are cultural reference points.

You can’t really judge this film based on its story (it doesn’t really have one that it cares enough to follow, and what is there is standard for its base genre), its acting, its success as a comedy (it isn’t, or at least, not intentionally), or even its fight choreography (which is passable but unremarkable).  Instead, The Dragon Lives Again should be judged on how far it’s willing to go, on how imaginative the producers were willing to get with their premise.  For example, whenever Bruce squares off against one of the villains, they suddenly all appear in a rock quarry, and the film essentially becomes one shade away from a Japanese Tokusatsu effort.  The film pushes every limit it has (budget, scope, taste, you name it), and though it’s ultimately a wildly hot mess, it’s still wild, and, I would argue, one of the most unique films ever made to cash in on a pop culture icon.

MVT:  The size of the balls it took to make this film.

Make or Break:  The opening credits where Bruce spars with each of the fantastical characters he’s about to meet in the film.  This itself is a common trope in the Martial Arts genre, but it’s somehow more insane in this instance.

Score:  7/10       

Soul Brothers of Kung Fu (1977)

a.k.a. The Last Strike, Kung Fu Avengers

Director: Yi-Jung Hua (as I Hung Hwa)
Writer: Chan Wei Lin
Cast: Ho Chung Tao (Bruce Li), Feng Ku, Meng Lo, Carl Scott, Siu Yam-yam (Yum-yum Shaw), Au-Yeung Pooi San, Hoi San, Peter Chan, Alexander Grand, Yuen Biao

Following a recent viewing of the PBS documentary The Black Kung Fu Experience, I resolved to include more of the early cinematic contributions of African-American martial artists in my film viewing for 2014. (After all, why set goals for self-improvement in personal finance and health when I can set completely arbitrary media consumption benchmarks?) While Jim Kelly is probably the most famous and Ron Van Clief the most prolific of these pioneering actors, Carl Scott repeatedly emerged as the guy most overlooked and underappreciated. When I saw that RZA had name-dropped him in an interview with Film Comment as number one and the best, it all but cemented my urge to see his films -- all three of them! (I can’t, in good conscience, count Bruce Lee: The Man, the Myth, where he appears as an extra).

Like any group of young urban professionals, the trio of Wong Wei Lung (Li), Shao-san (Meng), and Chai Yun (Au-Yeung Pooi San) work a variety of crummy jobs to pay for their Hong Kong apartment. However, as hard-working immigrants from the mainland, they’re willing to do just about anything in order to live out their dream to live beyond their means. Wong Wei Lung and Shao-sen are doing menial labor down at the docks one day when they come upon a fellow dock worker, Tom (Scott) getting beat up by several of his bosses and colleagues for spilling paint while also being a young, black male. In rushing to his defense, the roommates catch the ire of a cruel boss named Mr. Chien (Feng), a man involved in absolutely every business in Hong Kong, legit or not.

All three of the men lose their jobs, but eventually get new, shittier ones. They lose those too. While Shao-san ceases all productivity and falls into a gambling addiction, Wei Lung participates in organized fights to make ends meet. During a conversation with Chai Yun about the next day’s huge championship match, he announces his intention to marry her if he wins, and wait a minute, it’s her birthday tomorrow, so they’ll just get engaged during her party because apparently they’ve been banging on the side this whole time. We see glimpses that Shao-san harbors a secret jealousy about their relationship, but all that sexual tension never really goes anywhere and he gets sidetracked by his involvement with a mysterious bar-girl (Shaw). I held out hope that this arrangement would explore the complex spectrum of human sexuality in the same vein as the 1994 romantic comedy, Threesome, but the filmmakers played things safe.

Throughout it all, Wei Lung and Shao-san train Tom in kung fu so he can better defend himself against angry shipping supervisors and asshole Triads. Meanwhile, Mr. Chien assembles his own trio of bad, nameless motherfuckers, respectively portrayed by Alexander Grand (Sideburns), Lee Hoi-Sang (Jug-Smasher), and Peter Chan Lung (Tiger Style). Allegiances shift, people change, and everyone is freaking out about money. A showdown is inevitable.

Despite my skittish disposition towards most Bruceploitation fare, this was a pleasant surprise. The film doesn’t do much to hide its iconographic nods. Even though his hair is more Bieber than bowl cut, Bruce Li’s character makes frequent references to his idol, has a Lee poster hanging in his room, reads his books, and is even regarded by Mr. Chien as a dangerous fighter because he “fights like Bruce Lee.” Sure he does, movie dialogue. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

I don’t know that 1977’s Soul Brothers of Kung Fu was the best place to begin in Carl Scott’s filmography, but it was definitely the earliest. He earns a strong supporting role here, with plenty of screen time and a performance nearly undone by one of the most horrific voice actor dubs I’ve ever heard. Fortunately, we’re not watching a Carl Scott movie to see him channel Sidney Poitier, and he conveys plenty of screen presence in his engagements with an eager and energetic Hong Kong stunt team in some good fight scenes. At times, he looks like an absolute world-beater. The Gents have discussed in past episodes how rare it was for gweilos to be able to hang with action players in golden-age Hong Kong, but Scott looks very much at home here and his fighting talent is undeniable.

Wading through the glut of 1970s kung fu cinema, let alone the output of second- and third-tier Hong Kong production companies, can be a cinematic minefield. Does this film rival stuff with the Shaw Brothers stamp? Is it Magnificent Butcher? Of course not, but when you’ve seen something as actively bad as Swordsman with an Umbrella and been burned by bargain bin multi-packs, a film like this is a happy accident. The exploitation elements were surprisingly strong too, as debuting director Yi-Jung Hua navigates from x-ray punches, organ gouging, and attempted rape to casual bloodletting and groin attacks. It should be said that not all of these elements revealed themselves on my first watch; after observing some confusing edits during the back-end “boss battles,” I discovered that the film had an uncut version floating around under the title Kung Fu Avengers (detailed here, be wary of spoilers). A simple rewatch of a few select climax scenes probably elevated this film a full point or more.

Make or Break: No matter which cut of the film you watch, the aforementioned sequence of boss battles is the stretch upon which your enjoyment of the film will likely hinge. If you see the Xenon
version, the herky jerky editing and jump cuts to nowhere will probably break the film into a hundred bite-sized pieces. The grisly conclusions in the uncut version, however, make for a satisfying film overall and provide logical extensions to the techniques we observe during training scenes earlier in the film.

Does the Film Have a Random Yuen Biao Appearance?: Yes, it has one.

MVT: I wish I could report that this was *the* Carl Scott film to see, but he’s underutilized here and the awful dubbing doesn’t help matters. Everything about this film is, at minimum, solid. Which is to say, not horrible. This makes it hard to single out any aspect as the most critical, but the fighting is probably the element closest to exceptional. All of the fighters, from Deadly Venom Meng Lo and Alexander Grand to Carl Scott and Feng Ku move well and throw convincing strikes, and the gore at the back end of the film helps to sell the stakes of each fight. The inventive training sequences added a nice visual touch as well. Dig it.
Score: 6.75 / 10