This Taiwanese extravaganza has all the flaws you could expect from an independent Karate-movie, but it has also a funny concept that could have been great in the Kung-Fu Comedy invented some year later: there's material for a spoof in the style of Sammo Hung's Enter the fat dragon, 1977, and I don't think that this WAY OF THE TIGER aka BLACK DRAGON VS YELLOW TIGER was playing too unintentionally. The plot is a clever joke: hero Tong Lung is a pupil/friend of Tang Lung/Bruce Lee and when the local crime syndacate learns that theyr Rome's branch was annihilated by the latter, they goes against the former, who promptly fights them generating a doubt: is he just a lookalike or the real Tang Lung? The Bruceploitation scheme lends to a final duel between the fake Bruce Lee against a western martialist (Afro-American Taekwando master Clint Robinson), just like Lee Vs. Norris in the original, but they are inside a pagoda, since Colosseum is not at hand. The poor tech values are in some way (of the tiger?) balanced by alot of action, and the presence of colorful personages as the english fence-master, the chinese wrestler and the usual Jap killer (played by the ubiquitous Enter the Dragon's extra Dai Ai Saan, aka Little eye), all adds a bizarre fun. There's also a rainy-night fight between Tong Lung and two american killers, a whiteman and an Afro, where the cheap photography makes almost impossible to distinguish the fighters, so all you can see are the white jackets of the killers dancing in the dark as if they were ghostly jackets with nobody inside. Actor-stuntmen Jackie Chen Shao Lung plays the gang henchman dressing a vest and a striped shirt, and he's a really good fighter. The whole thing is played for serious, but, as I wrote above, the intentional spoof is always around the corner. Released 2/26/73 and directed by Li Kuan Chang, later a director in Bruceploitation with Bruce Li/Ho Tsung Tao. Main star and bodybuilder Tong Lung (a nome-de-plume of course) was the real-life brother of Taekwando champion Aleaxander Lo Rei, later a star himself in the Ninja subgenre (Superninja, 1984). I rate this joke 6 just because oh his concept and some good action, even if the final duel at the pagoda is stolen from Lee-Norris almost frame by frame... well, you can't accuse the director of not having a good taste in copying!
