Bruce Lee managed at least one really good trick in
his brief career: examining my (admittedly) out of date copy of
Video 
Hound's
Golden Movie Retriever, I find that Lee is credited with 24
movies, which is amazing since he only actually appeared in about
a quarter of them. Lee's untimely death in 1973 led to an astounding
spate of movies, like the pseudo-documentary Fist of Fear, Touch
of Death, the pseudo-bio-pic Bruce Lee, We Miss You and
the utterly dismal but beautifully-titled Bruce Lee Fights Back
from the Grave.
There
were also the inevitable flood of Lee-alikes: Bruce Le, Bruce Li,
Bruce Lai, Bruce Thai, Dragon Lee, Conan Lee, Bronson Lee, Richard
Li, Lee Press-On Nails.... anyway, someone had the brilliant idea
of getting some of the Lee-alikes together, and the result was this
movie. Cool idea, predictably poor results.
We start with Lee being rushed to the hospital on
the day of his death. We know it's Bruce Lee because he's wearing
Bruce Lee sunglasses. (Our favorite part of Bruce Lee, We Miss
You was the Lee-alike's hyper-violent, convulsive, thrashing
death scene - in slow motion - during which the sunglasses remained
firmly in place. Luckily, the ambulance crew did not remove the
glasses, or we might suspect that the guy on the gurney is not
actually Bruce Lee!)
After Lee is declared dead, enter two Anglos - Mr.
Collin, who apparently heads up the Special Branch of Investigations
(hereafter the SBI), and the Professor, who draws some blood from
Lee's body. No permission is granted from the emergency room staff
or Lee's family; apparently the SBI has wide-reaching, discretionary
powers that would make your average X-Files villain swoon
with envy.
The Professor uses the blood to make three Bruce Lee
clones, named Bruce Lee One. Bruce Lee Two, and, in a fit of 
creativity,
Bruce Lee Three. They are apparently numbered in order of actual
resemblance to the fallen film star, with One (Dragon Lee, I think)
looking closest and Three (Bruce Lai, again I think) not having
a chance on the darkest of stormy nights. Disturbingly, the Professor
conditions each of the clones to obey only him.
After some intensive training (one of the teachers
is Bolo Yeung, whom the real Lee stomped on in Enter the Dragon),
the Lees are judged back up to snuff, and the SBI begins to send
them on missions. This is where we get into the actual meat of Clones
of Bruce Lee. The first Bruce Lee is sent to work undercover
at the film studio of Chi Lo, a gold smuggler (how heinous!) You
have to question the wisdom of sending the clone of a well-known
film star to work undercover at a film studio, but then you realize
that the clone doesn't look that much like the original...
In any case, the "New Boy" at the film studio
is getting some notice, as we see him kicking some stunt men in
front of a very bad sky cyclorama. Chi Lo is the suspicious type,
however, and orders The Director to "get rid of him".
To this end, they dispatch the hired killers White Panther and Quick
Tiger, two white guys who proceed to get themselves beaten up quite
rapidly. White Panther seems to take his name from his habit of
wearing a gi, the traditional white outfit normally only
seen in dojos or tournaments. Kinda makes him stick out on
the street.
Rhat night, Bruce Lee One listens in on the Director
and Chi Lo. Chi Lo feels it more important than ever to do away
with The New Boy because the smuggler is about to dig up his gold
("Burying the gold in the ground... that was a good idea!"),
so he's sent two more hired hit men after Bruce Lee One. The Director,
on the other hand, has the brilliant idea to "shoot him in
front of the camera... then we can sell a lot of tickets!"
Rhat's an eerie moment in an otherwise two-dimensional
film full of sub-comic book claptrap: a subplot that bizarrely presages
the tragic death of Lee's son, Brandon, almost two decades later
on the set of The Crow.
After stomping the next two hit men into the ground,
Bruce Lee One receives a visit from Nancy, one of the professor's
assistants, who has come to inform him of Chi Lo's plans. It's a
remarkable, rushed piece of breathless voice acting, the best Speed
Racer delivery I've heard outside of that fine program.
Well, something goes wrong with the "shoot him
in front of the camera" plan, so all the stuntmen (in Chi Lo's
employ, after all) gang up with various implements of destruction
(all right, a bunch of pipes and a knife) on Bruce Lee One. Hey,
you morons: You're fighting Bruce Lee! It's ass-kickings
for all, and Bruce Lee One apparently beats Chi Lo to death, just
for good measure.
Then it's time for another mission, and Bruce Lee
Two and Bruce Lee Three are sent to Thailand, where they meet up
with 
Agent
Chuck (Bruce Thai, who does not resemble Bruce Lee enough to be
a clone). There, they are to track down and take care of Dr. Nye,
a Mad Scientist Who Is Up To No Good. And as this is a crap film,
it must be time for... travelogue footage! Ah, scenic Thailand!
But wait! Just to make up for that... Nekkid Women!
A whole bunch
of them! Capering about on the beach and rubbing suntan lotion on
themselves! (And having absolutely nothing to do with the rest of
the movie!) Having made sure her breasts are liberally coated with
SPF 30, our featured nudette opines, "Now all we need is a
man!" Enter one skinny nerd, amazed at the display of female
pulchritude. The nudettes spot him and charge, cheering. The skinny
nerd screams and runs away, demonstrating that it is, indeed, a
culture far different from our own. In a nod to the movie we just
left, Bruce Lee Two asks Agent Chuck, "Do those girls need
help?" "Nah," is the reply. "He's the
one who needs help." And our stalwarts walk away, ultimately
helping nobody.
Dr. Nye, it should be mentioned, has made his science
henchmen come up with some sort of bubbling brew that will kill
all vegetation. He motivates them with
a scintillating corporate-style speech ending
with that phrase you've heard so many times before, "Today
we will conquer Thailand! And tomorrow... the entire world!"
Then he goes to relax in his Super Villain Den, where a suspicion
I have long held about Super Villains was confirmed: Dr. Nye has
several Nekkid Women waiting for him*.
(That's a lot of female flesh packed into one tiny corner of this
movie - looks like someone figured out they were skating too close
to a mere PG rating and decided to throw in some R material - "The
Americans insist on it, you know.")
The two Bruces and Chuck Storm the Castle (some
secret agents!), and run afoul of one of Dr. Nye's experiments:
somehow, by a series of injections, he has managed to turn the flesh
of several of his henchmen into bronze, by which we mean
there
are a bunch of gold-painted stuntmen walking around in their skivvies.
Luckily for the world, Bruce Lee Three discovers (by suspiciously
convenient accident) that a local poisonous herb not only kills
bronze men dead dead dead, but tastes so good they can't resist
it! Soon there's a lot of yum-yum-yumming and clangs as the
bronze men eat themselves to death. Then Dr. Nye receives his comeuppance,
as Bruce Lee Two apparently beats him to death, just for good measure.
Or maybe it was Bruce Lee Three.
Oh, hell, we've still got movie left! The Professor
receives a heartfelt thanks from Mr. Collin of the SBI, and this
is enough to send the scientist over the deep end, as he feels that
a mere 'thank you' is not enough. Well, he'll show them! He'll show
them all! For some reason, Showing Them All in this case entails
ordering the three Bruce Lees to fight each other to the death.
That'll show 'em, hah? Hah?!?!
Unfortunately for the Professor, his two assistants,
Nancy and Cathy, are good, and figure out that to save the
Bruce Lees, they must cut the wires to the "magnetators"
which allow the Professor to control the clones. This they do in
a highly un-suspenseful fashion, and now it's time for the Bruce
Lees to go after the Professor. To do this, each Bruce Lee (having
taken wildly different routes, it seems) must fight one of the Professor's
bodyguards, which just happen to be their trainers. 
Bruce
Lee One takes on Bolo. Then Bruce Lee Three is killed by a death
ray trap in the Professor's sanctum. Then Bruce Lee Two kicks through
the wall into the sanctum, bypassing the death rays and taking on
one last bodyguard out of frickin' nowhere, giving the Professor
time to escape right into the waiting arms of Collin and the SBI.
The Professor probably takes cold comfort in the fact that one of
the surviving Bruce Lees did not apparently beat him to death, just
for good measure. The end.
No, I mean it. The end. In my print - as there were
in a lot of kung fu cheapies - there is no fade to black, no end
credit roll - the movie doesn't actually end so much as stop.
The final fate of the last two Bruce Lees remains unresolved, forever.
My personal opinion is that the importing company didn't want to
spring for the cost of an English end roll, but still - leaving
incredibly loose ends concerning your title characters is pretty
criminal.
Not that this should surprise us. This movie is primarily
a novelty act - past the opening concept, not a whole lot of thought
was devoted to this project (and the novel concept is the only
reason this movie scored as highly as it did. Well, that and the
fact that the professor's laboratory appeared to be on loan from
either The Astro-Zombies
or The Time Tunnel). This is particularly shameful given the rich
possibilities in the setup. Granted, the clones have to be trained;
it is not simply assumed that cloning Lee's DNA also clones his
abilities (it does, however, seem to duplicate his trademark sneer
and cat-like ki-ya).
But there is much that is glossed over; the clones
seem to accept their lot quite peacefully. A particularly interesting
bit of 
character
development is missed here - "Good morning; you're actually
dead, and you are a carbon copy" would not be the most soothing
of wake-up calls. Then again, the concepts of character development
and this movie do not go together particularly well. The Bruce Lees
seem particularly cold-blooded; witness not only the beating deaths
of the two villains, but a scene where Bruce Lee Two cooly tortures
one of Dr. Nye's science henchmen to obtain the good doctor's whereabouts.
Perhaps this can be construed as indicative of a clone's lack of
a soul. More likely, it is indicative of really poor filmmaking.
Another wasted moment is when Bruce Lee One tells
Nancy that he has a "score to settle" with Chi Lo - perhaps
Chi Lo could have been responsible for the original Bruce Lee's
death? We'll never know. If it's a plot point, it whizzed by me
so fast it finally skidded to a halt in a movie over three blocks
away.
Although the Lee-alikes are in superb shape, and certainly
know their Lee chops, there is a deadening sameness about the fight
scenes that eventually robs the movie of all joy; this flick is,
after all, 95% fight scenes. I've always preferred the swordplay-oriented
kung fu movies- the more weapons, and the more bizarre, the better.
Let's face it, the numerous styles notwithstanding (and there are
several on display), there are only so many ways to aim a blow at
your opponent and only so many ways to block that blow. Without
a good fight coordinator, like Lee himself, Jimmy Wang Yu, Samo
Hung or a host of others, after forty-five minutes of the same fight
over and over, each subsequent fight becomes the kinetic equivalent
of white noise: your mind more or less goes on vacation.
In all honesty, though: viewing parts of the film
again to do the vidcaps, I came to feel that Bruce Lee One's 
segment
was far superior to Two & Three's combo mission. The
fights are more frenetic, and it ends on a very high note as Bruce
Lee One swims out to Chi Lo's boat to personally kick the living
sh*t out of each and every creature aboard. It's a pity the weaker
second story arc (and oooh so lame final act) serves mainly to poison
your memory of the first one.
This leaves us only with the things kung-fu film fanatics
look forward to when watching such films: the first is spotting
which movies the soundtrack is stolen from - in this case, The
Warriors, and during the training segment, the theme from Rocky
(Hopefully that was an intentional laugh). That, and the fact that
every defeated opponent makes the same sound, a sort of pained "Ai-ow-oooowah".
Sadly, that was the same sound we were making by the
time this movie was over.
