Game of Death II (1981)

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Game of Death II (1981)

A truly surreal piece of exploitation which is so insane you can’t help but admire it. This is another grave robbing exercise in creating a seemingly new ‘Bruce Lee‘ film, much in the same vein as its non-related predecessor. But this is a lot more fun than Robert Clouse’s garbled Game of Death.

‘Bruce Lee’ paradoxically returns as Billy Lo, eager to discover the reason behind his master’s sudden death which (sure enough) leads to his own death. This is clearly the moment where Golden Harvest ran out of unseen Bruce Lee footage, so Billy falls from the undercarriage of a …

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Game of Death (1978)

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Game of Death (1978)

Lee’s unfinished Game of Death would prove to be one of his most successful films despite its shameful exploitative nature.

Scrapping Lee’s original concept, Enter the Dragon director Robert Clouse was brought in to recreate a new posthumous Bruce Lee movie using footage Lee had already filmed prior to his death. The result is a mostly pedestrian Hollywood melodrama, horribly cobbled together and completed almost entirely with the help of body doubles and lookalikes (Kim Tai-chong and Yuen Biao among them), and featuring less than subtle snippets from Bruce Lee’s other films.

This comedy of errors is matched by an equally souped …

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Fighting Mad (1978)

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Fighting Mad (1978)

A strange amalgamation of blaxploitation, Italian mafia and Japanese Samurai films. The best scenes in this predictable but amiable B movie are when sensitive Mr. T type Leon Isaac chops up coconuts on a desert island with two stranded Japanese World War II vets who still believe the war is going on. Isaac fills them in on the past three decades of history in exchange for some sword fighting lessons. He uses his new skills to exact revenge on his double crossing friends who now own most of downtown Los Angeles. When the US army reach the desert island, Isaac …

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The Magic Blade (1976)

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The Magic Blade (1976)

Fantastic sword and sorcery from Chu Yuen, an adaptation of a Gu Long wuxia novel. The film is often credited for being one of the first wuxia-horror crossovers, although the Shaw Brothers dabbled with the supernatural years before with their hokey Hammer co-production The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. This is a sharper, more atmospheric and gimmicky caper, bristling with imagination and similar in shocks to something like Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba.

Ti Lung is tremendous as wandering swordsman Fu, who borrows a poncho and five o’ clock shadow from Clint Eastwood and a spinning steel tonfa sword from Shaw Brothers’ …

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Return of the Street Fighter (1974)

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Return of the Street Fighter (1974)

The irrepressible Terry Sugury returns to red-blooded glory in this sequel to The Street Fighter, playing peacemaker to two warring Japanese karate schools. Instead of stringent political debate, the head of a mafia-run martial arts conglomerate hires Sugury to deal with their rivals. Terry refuses, so the baddies try to silence him, only to have their limbs disconnected as a consequence. The film is just as gratuitously violent as before, maybe more so (fingers are jabbed through throats, guns are inserted into bodies, and Terry hits a man’s head so hard his eyes pop out), but it is a rushed affair …

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The Street Fighter (1974)

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The Street Fighter (1974)

Sonny Chiba is practically rabid in this iconic fight fest, an attempt to create a Japanese Bruce Lee with an exploitation film so blood thirsty the plot barely gets going before another attack of the red stuff. Yet there is a perverted poetry to the film, despite Sonny’s penchant for targeting the body’s most delicate parts (he tears out eyes, throats and, yes, that part), and follows a code of conduct not too dissimilar from Japan’s classic chambara films and the subsequent spaghetti westerns popular at the time.

Chiba’s character, Terry Sugury, isn’t really a street fighter. He’s more of a …

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Rage and Honor (1992)

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Rage and Honor (1992)

Presumably as retribution for playing second fiddle to Rothrock‘s China O’Brien, Norton steps up to helm this brainless B movie. He is renegade LAPD detective Preston Michaels, new to America after a turgid time Down Under following the death of his cop partner. After unearthing police corruption he is framed as a cop killer – the only link to his innocence caught on a missing videotape. With the cops on his trail, Michaels buddies up with spunky karate instructor Kris Fairfield (Rothrock) who may just happen to share a special connection with the head of the mob responsible for Michaels’ …

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Fist of Fear, Touch of Death (1980)

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Fist of Fear, Touch of Death (1980)

Even if Mallinson’s outrageous Bruce Lee ‘mockumentary’ started out with the best of intentions, there is no hiding from the filmmaker’s complete lapse in concentration as this barmy movie slowly unfolds. The more bizarre scenes actually work in the film’s favour – the objective being to tell the life story of Bruce Lee with dubbed archive footage and a list of B-movie actors as they watch a big fight between Louis Neglia and John ‘Cyclone’ Flood at the 1979 World Karate Championship. This footage is intermittently disturbed by a running commentary from Oscar-nominated actor Adolph Caesar, who reads his lines …

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The Head Hunter (1982)

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The Head Hunter (1982)

Chow Yun-fat plays a multifaceted explosives expert working on a HK film set. He also has a side project as a sadistic hitman working for The Eagles – not the band – but a crime syndicate using the movie industry to fund their gang warfare. Rosamund Kwan plays an intrepid news reporter who smells something fishy when a gas attack at a nearby school traces the explosives directly back to the crooks and their deadly film workshop. The most convincing scenes involve a burgeoning romance between our two leads and a rather punishing series of Vietnam flashbacks, with Chow struggling …

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Butterfly and Sword (1993)

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Butterfly and Sword (1993)

Crazy wuxia wire fu from Michael Mak, loosely based on a Gu Long novel and featuring exploding bodies, flying sword fights and sickly keyboard music. Butterfly (Joey Wang) is the doting wife of Sword (Tony Leung) who are planning a life of domestic bliss among the tree-tops of the Happy Forest clan – a cult of martial warriors led by the stoic Sister Ko (Michelle Yeoh). At the dying wish of her sifu, Ko is told to track down the evil Master Suen (Elvis Tsui), who is masterminding a rebellion alongside His Excellency to kill off all of their rival …

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