As Good As It Gets

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

With the news of actor Bruce Lee's sudden death in July 1973 from a mysterious brain aneurysm at the age of 32 it's decided by Mr. Colin of the SBI-Special Branch of Investigations-to have a sample of Bruce's brain used to have him cloned into not one but three Bruce Lee's to fight crime in the orient. It's a task given to mad professor Lucas who as we'll soon see has plans of his own in using the Lee's to do his insane bidding; Which is to kill each other in mortal combat for his own sick entertainment!The Lee's get involved with a number of bad guys in the movie one a film director who uses his job as cover to smuggle gold bars out of the country-Hong Kong-and have Bruce murdered while staring in his movie as a cover to his crimes as well as increase the film's box-office returns. There's another crazed psycho who plans to create a army of free rang and grass fed men of steel or bronze to take over the world and make him the supreme dictator. And then finally Professor Lucas himself who's just plain crazy who plans to destroy the very thing or things that he created the Lee's just for the fun of doing it! Played for laughs the movie does in fact have a number of great fight scenes with the three Lee's doing their best to imitate the late Bruce Lee but falling a bit short. There's also in the movie a number of shocking but very titillating T&A scenes-With naked and very busty Chinese girls running around on the beach-in the film that are in fact far better then any of the action scenes in it. Worth watching in seeing just how influential the late Bruce Lee was in that his death didn't put an end to his career but made him far more popular then he was when alive. That to the point of movie studios raising Bruce from the dead in order to do it!

Following Bruce Lee's death, Hong Kong made a number of "Bruceploitation" movies: they starred people who looked like Bruce Lee (and some got advertised as genuine Bruce Lee movies). "The Clones of Bruce Lee" is a prime example. It depicts the creation of Bruce Lee clones sent on missions. Of course, the whole thing is an excuse for non-stop action. The best scene is set on a Thai beach. Without a doubt, the movie's target audience is 14-year-old boys.This is the first Bruceploitation movie that I've seen. All that I can say is that I hope that the entire genre is like this. The funny action and erotic beach constitute one fun flick! A really good time.

One of the crassest of an already crass genre was The Clones Of Bruce Lee (1977), a wildly episodic car crash of a film featuring not one but FOUR of Bruce Lee's most prolific imitators: Bruce Le, Bruce Lai, Brice Tai and our old friend Dragon Lee. It starts with the death of the "real" Bruce - but not before a secretive organization known as the SBI contacts Professor Lucas and ushers him to the hospital slab to extract a syringe of Lee's DNA, in order to create a trio of Bruces in his secret lab. The three Lee-alikes are brainwashed by a disco light known as a "Magnitator" and are trained to a stolen Rocky theme, by the more stocky (and therefore un-Bruce-like) Yang-Sze, better known to world as Bolo Yeung from Enter The Dragon.Before long, the three Bruces are sent on their secret missions: Bruce One (Dragon Lee), is sent to the kung fu sausage machine set of film producer Chai Lo, a dodgy front for all kinds of nefarious un-Lee-like activities. Chai Lo suspects the new Bruce is a narc, and plans to literally "shoot" him in front of the camera! Meanwhile in Thailand, Bruce Two (Bruce Tai) and Three (Bruce Le) team up with a fourth Lee-alike "Chuck" (I presume this is Bruce Lai) on the trail of Dr Nai, a Thai narcotics smuggler who sweats maniacally into his three dollar suit and plans on world domination with his formula for turning schmucks into invincible bronze warriors. The three Lees chase him from one border laboratory to the next; the sight of them rubbing up against tough martial artists fighters in y-fronts and easily removed shiny paint is, in a word, GOLD.The increasingly insane Professor Lucas decides to use the Clones for his own purposes, and pits the Brainwashed Bruces against each other in the ultimate Bruce-Off. Which is exactly the way to read this movie: four wannabes trying to out-Bruce each other. As they're actually meant to be Bruce Lee, they devolve into the most grotesque of caricatures - animal howls, thumbs to the nose, biker sunnies, and the always-popular ripping off the shirts. In the final tally, EVERYone's a winner - or loser, depending on your political persuasion.The Clones Of Bruce Lee comes courtesy of Dick Randall, the American exploitation genius and distributor who literally ran amok in South East Asia in the Seventies: he returned to Thailand to make the Z-grade horror Crocodile (1979), discovered Weng Weng in the Philippines and sold him to the world. Here, in one of his first excursions into bad kung fu territory, he actually threatens to rip the very fabric of film reality itself: Clones... plays like a shonky mad doctor opus like Randall's King Of Kong Island (minus the gorilla suits, of course), a second rate James Bond and a third rate chop socky, with some random nudity thrown in - because they can. Call it Bronzefinger or Bruce Only Lives Twice, or call it completely out of its mind - prepare yourself for one of the most bizarre Bruceploitation epics, The Clones Of Bruce Lee.

I saw this film in the early eighties, so my memory of the plot details is pretty hazy. I do recall, however that the clones mentioned in the title not only didn't look very much like Bruce Lee, they didn't look like each other! Also, there was an army of overweight men in diapers who were covered with metallic paint and were supposed to be made out of bronze. Whenever these guys would get kicked or punched a metallic "bong" was heard on the soundtrack to enhance the illusion. The only problem that the effect was ruined by the way their flesh jiggled on impact. I went to a lot of lousy films in those days, but this one got by far the worst audience reaction of all of them(although the place was nearly full!). If they were dumb enough to think a film with a title like this would be good, they deserved to be disappointed. Personally, at the time I thought it was a lot of goofy fun.