Sadly Over-hyped

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

At first glance, "Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave" seems to be indistinguishable from other 1970s martial arts movies, though there are two differences. The first is that it was filmed in the United States, and the second being that it was made by Koreans instead of Hong Kong filmmakers. But apart from those differences, the movie doesn't really stand out from the pack. As you may have expected, while the movie's title promises a resurrected Bruce Lee - and the opening sequence shows that title action - the movie quickly forgets what it promises and makes no further actions to be "Brucey". What follows is a long and hard slog through a really thin and boring story, with occasional martial art sequences that are badly directed, badly choreographed, and badly edited. Is there any saving grace? Well, there is some really awful dubbing that occasionally provokes a chuckle, and the Korean filmmakers' occasional misconceptions of America and American people also is unintentionally funny at times. But there are not enough unintentional laughs to make this worth a look. Even aficionados of martial art movies will find this particularly tough to sit through.

This is a film with one of those great exploitation titles that promises so much more than it eventually delivers. At first glance I was expecting to see some extreme kung-fu horror flick with a mad sorcerer reviving Bruce Lee from his death and turning him into an unstoppable zombie killer, with only a young novice martial artist to stop him. Sadly this was not to be. Aside from the cheesy opening shot, in which a guy pretending to be Bruce Lee jumps straight out of a grave and a drawing of such a scene follows on quickly, we're in the middle of a run-of-the-mill fight flick that has nothing to do with Bruce Lee at all. In fact, he's not even mentioned!The film instead concerns a young Bruce Lee lookalike named Bruce Lea (see where the confusion can arise?). It turns out that an old buddy of Lea's has died, so he goes to investigate and find the killers responsible. It turns out to be, apparently, the Village People! Yep, a Japanese man, a black man, a cowboy and a white man were last seen with the deceased and soon Lea finds himself battling the criminal gang in a succession of largely unimpressive fights. Things are tied up with a very unsurprising twist ending, a touch of tragedy and lots of very bad dubbing and worse acting. Lots of running time is taken up with scenes of human bonding which occur between Lea and would-be girlfriend Deborah Chaplin and the will-they-or-won't-they relationship which develops between them.Interspersed with the light plot are some fairly average scenes of kung fu which are nothing to get excited about. They are okay, but Lea is no Bruce Lee or even Bruce Li. In fact, Bruce Lea is a better actor than he is a fighter, which is unusual considering the proliferation of good fighters/poor actors that fill our screens year after year! Chaplin is also not bad in a developed part, although the bad guys are little more than clichés waiting to be cut down by our hero.The film is quite slow and uninteresting, let down by poor production values and a somewhat gloomy atmosphere. The photography is always dark and the editing looks like child's work, with silly slow-motion inserts for no reason (the moves aren't even that impressive to begin with). For some reason, some prints of the film claim that Umberto Lenzi is the director, but I believe this to be a simple case of mistaken identity; also, why on earth would Lenzi leave his beloved cop films in Italy to go globetrotting for a low budget kung fu trash oddity? A guy named Doo-Yong Lee appears to be the real culprit.

This is another strange movie from the public domain. It's a part of these "Bruceploitation" films made after Bruce Lee's death to try and keep the memory alive. It starts with a blot of lighting hitting Bruce Lee's Grave, and that's as close as it is to Bruce Lee. Then it begins with a kung fu instructor, Han Wook, played by Bruce K.L. Lea. He goes to Las Vegas to find his brother and when he does. He finds out he was a part of an opium ring and died. Han Wook takes what I think is his brother's ashes or bones in this box wrapped around his neck. Then Han Wook encounters a girl Susan, and protects her from someone bad. She explains that a Japanese guy, a black guy, a Mexican guy, and a cowboy were the ringleaders in the drug ring. Han Wook ends up defeating them one by one. There also this scene where Susan gets hurt and is close to dying so Han Wook uses acupuncture to save her even though I'm not sure if that really helps at all. There's also this scene where the cowboy uses a gun but I don't think he even pull's the trigger when shooting. At the end there's this slight twist I won't spoil for you. I think this movie was also made in Korea since I saw a Korean flag in a dojo scene. Anyway this is a kung fu movie with bad dubbing so if you like that go ahead and watch it.

Bruce Lee Fights Back From The Grave is a very misleading title from grindhouse distributor Aquarius, run by the late Australian-born exploitation genius Terry Levene. Aquarius, renowned for their lowest-of-low budget chop sockeys and Sonny Chiba tamperings, later recut scenes from Bruce Lee's films into an entirely fictitious documentary called Fist Of Fear Touch Of Death (1980), and released the Italian zombie/cannibal shocker Zombie Holocaust as Doctor Butcher MD (1980) - along with mock surgery performed on the back of a truck driving through New York City. I don't know about you, but it makes me proud to be an Australian.Levene's poster for Bruce Lee Fights Back... promises a zombie Bruce in a supernatural slap-down with the Black Angel of Death. The credits even feature someone suspiciously Bruce-like leaping out of a polystyrene tomb - then cuts to a film that has NO Bruce, NO Angel of Death, and is in fact some crummy nameless generic kung fu filler starring someone claiming to be "Bruce K.L. Lea". Ripped off? You may well feel so, but WAIT - it's one of the real howlers of bad kung fu cinema, in EVERY sense of the word."Bruce" plays Wong Han, a Korean immigrant in LA visiting his old friend Go Hok Khan who he discovers has committed "suicide" and is now being cremated in the basement. Heartbroken, "Bruce" starts to wander the streets of LA at random, carrying his friend's bones and a glossy 8x10 in a sling around his neck. Through a bizarre chain of coincidences he rescues a girl called Susan from a shirtless rapist who worked for Go Hok Khan, and remembers - with photo clarity, mind you - the five strangers who visited him before his death. A black guy, a cowboy, a Mexican... lady, you're channeling a Village People concert! A p*ss-and-vinegar-filled Bruce decides to slay his way through the list Kill Bill style - and there's a bit of EVERY kung fu film in Kill Bill, isn't there, kids? - but not before visiting a very keen Susan's crashpad. She asks him to stay; a very pale and humorless "Bruce" warns her it would not be proper - but leaves the box of human remains for safekeeping. What a guy.Bruce Lee Fights Back... is a real schizophrenic mess, filmed in America but dubbed in Hong Kong, with everyone voiced in the same petulant monotone. You can almost feel sorry for the American actors forced to exaggerate every motion, so that picking up the phone becomes a three-act Greek tragedy. The filmmakers break the cardinal kung fu rule by speeding up a fight in a wrecking yard into a Benny Hill chase spectacular, but best of all is the howling, yelping, whimpering and robot noises in EVERY fight scene.For years, horror fans thought it was a kung fu anti-classic directed by Italian cannibal maestro Umberto Lenzi - purely because Levene switched credits with a Euro cop thriller and was too cheap to change the poster. Well, there's no cannibals, no zombie Bruce Lee, just the sounds of R2D2 having a heart attack in Bruce Lee Fights Back From The Grave.