By David Dent
This is extremely entertaining and well put together documentary from Severin Films acts both as a fascinating story of a small aspect of genre cinema, and also as a potential calling card for one of the company’s forthcoming physical releases.
For those who were around in 1973 – and that includes me, 11 at the time – the untimely death of Hong Kong martial artist and actor Bruce Lee at the incredibly young age of 32 was a big shock. Even though I was too young to have seen his most famous film, Enter the Dragon when it was released in the cinema in the same year that he died (it was X rated), the movie had already brought martial arts front and centre into the public consciousness.
In the East, Bruce’s name meant big bucks, so the gap left by his death was both an emotional and a commercial one. What to do when the guy responsible for a wave of adulation caused by the handful of movies he had completed is no more? “Find another Bruce!” was the answer.
Enter the Clones of Bruce charts that search and the ways in which the cinema of the East appropriated and plagiarised Lee’s name, while at the same time establishing a network of independent film companies as vehicles for their creations.
Beginning with Taiwanese actor James Ho Chung-tao, whose broad similarity to the late star saw him rechristened as Bruce Li, the documentary also covers the careers of Lee non lookee likies including Huang Kin-lung (aka Bruce Le) and the Korean actor Moon Kyung-seok (renamed Dragon Lee). Between these three actors well over a hundred movies were churned out to cash in on the Bruce Lee phenomenon.
For domestic audiences, who would have twigged that the Lee stand ins looked very little like their fallen hero, it was pretty unimportant as they were really there for the fight scenes, which these films certainly delivered on. For export audiences it was another matter; using the common issues of cross racial profiling (literally that to western eyes all the Leealikes looked the same) and the profusion and confusion of movie titles featuring combinations of the words ‘Way’, ‘Enter’, ‘Dragon’ ‘Fists’ etc it was possible to respond to Bruce Lee’s box office appeal many years after his death; and particularly when you use his actual name in your movie title, as many shamelessly did.
Exploitation cinephiles now use the term ‘Bruceploitation’ to summarise this phenomenon; for the initiated it’s still a fun flick, but for those new to the term Enter the Clones of Bruce is both informative and entertaining.
Enter The Clones of Bruce screens as part of Frightfest 2023.
Bloody Flicks 