You like Bruce Lee. Ever been a victim of Bruceploitation?

I’ve seen it and I’ve been there myself, especially when I started getting into Bruce Lee films when I was a kid – you want to see absolutely anything Bruce Lee to catch some more of the legend.

You happen to be checking out some DVDs and you see some eye catching titles – ‘The real Bruce Lee’, Bruce Lee’s secret or Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger starring Bruce Li! – Funny name? That’s Warning Number 1

“Wow! This film is only 99 cents!” – Warning Number 2

You get home, something doesn’t seem right about this movie. You watch it and there’s some skinny little Chinese guy jumping around pretending to be Bruce Lee in a sub-par film. That’s when you get severely disillusioned. How crappy is this!?

What the hell is this?

Bruceploitation!

A sub genre of movies which has, believe it or not, it’s own small fan base encompassing hundreds of films and numerous impersonators.

You see when Bruce Lee died, a lot of fans were left waiting for more. So why not impersonate him to fill the gap? Yes it was a terrible idea, but they did it anyway! Even Raymond Chow jumped in on some of this action! God he’s a dick.

Similar names were used – Bruce Li, Bruce Lie, Bronson Lee, Bruce Le, Bruce Lai, you get the idea. The titles? I did say ‘The Real Bruce Lee’ earlier didn’t I? You can catch on pretty easily how deceptive some of the marketing for these films reached as they were tricking people into excitedly grabbing these films.

Although I still don’t think they fooled too many people, it’s hard to fall for something as fishy as what these films seemed to market.

But there’s a light side, now we have an entire genre of movies to watch and poke fun at. They’ll never be taken seriously anyway! So in this spirit I thought I’d share some of these films with you, and for the hell of it, I watched a couple so I can share the hilarity with you. Although you may be surprised at some of these…

Some of the Movies….

Game of Death

Yes, as far I’m concerned this is pure Bruceploitation at the hands of Raymond Chow!

The original reasoning behind this film was that Bruce Lee had filmed roughly 40 or so minutes (once edited) of fight footage for his feature called ‘The Game of Death’. That’s almost half a film of top notch Bruce Lee footage (you can watch it all in A Warrior’s Journey – buy a copy here). They had a general storyline so all they had to do was set up roughly half a film to present this 40 minutes of quality action.



So off to work they went, cutting up this 40 minutes into less than 20 or 15 minutes and creating a train wreck of a movie to set it up. You’ve probably heard of the cardboard cutouts, intercut pre-existing footage from his other films to give the appearance of his presence in the film. But other than that it was purely look-alikes and very dark scenes with the impersonators wearing the Sunglasses and facing away from the camera.

If you’re curious to see this film – it’s part of the Legacy Collection.

Fans hated it, but at least they got to see a fraction of Bruce’s unfinished work. But old Chow wasn’t satisfied so then came…

Game of Death 2

…otherwise known as Tower of Death

Inter-cutting more footage, including a then unreleased scene of Bruce talking with a Shaolin Monk, Game of Death 2 saw Bruce reappear in a chopped up mess in which his hair changes length within the space of a few seconds thanks to clever, cutting edge editing techniques.

This time, he was to be killed off early in the film and his character’s brother was leftto solve the mystery of his death and take revenge.

After the lifeless and surprisingly stiff manikin that was supposed to be Bruce’s character fell from a helicopter and died, our main character starts investigating. During which he is attacked by henchmen, prostitutes and a strange looking Lion which looks an awful lot like a man in a cheap lion suit (I’m deadly serious!).

Before long he face’s off against another henchman who spends the entire film with only one arm. This one armed villain surprisingly loses their fight – only to reveal he actually has two arms! He then springs back into action.

YES! He spent his life pretending to have one arm so he could surprise people one day with both arms just in case he accidentally lost a fight! GENIUS.

But things aren’t all that cheesy, there’s actually some impressive martial arts fighting at the end of the film during the final fights. Plenty of acrobatic action in an intensely fast and entertaining fight. The weakness is that our main character is impersonating Bruce Lee’s fighting style the whole time in a ‘space ship’ looking interior underground.

In all seriousness, it’s good for a laugh and highly recommend it if you’re into “it’s so bad it’s good” Kung Fu movies – check it out here.

Bruce Lee Fights back from the Grave

We see Bruce Lee’s Graveston, where the martial arts legend rests (ok, it’s not his actual gravestone). Suddenly a flash of lighting and a still shot of his resurrection from the grave!

Old Bruce is back to fight gangsters! Hell Yeah!

The story begins and we’re introduced to Bruce K.L. Lea’s character as he teams up with a woman and fights Gangsters. It has nothing to do with Bruce Lee at all.

The monkey sounds and some general Bruce Lee like movement take place as he fights some unique villains such as a caped man wielding an Axe , a sword crazy Samurai or a car-park rapist. No, I’m not making this stuff up.

Bruce K.L. Lea does have the physique for the job though, and his fights are actually not too bad considering the rest of this sub-genre. His impersonation is pretty ordinary though. Like all Bruceploitation films, I found this film got boring and unexciting and it simply looks cheap and nasty.

Check it out for yourself!

Enter The Game of Death

You get the idea here. Straight away we see Bruce Le in the Game of Death Yellow & Black Striped Tracksuit, doing a decent yet still laughable impression of our man Bruce Lee.

Bruce Le has the physique, stances, sounds and an almost comically exaggerated ability to mimic Bruce’s facial expressions despite that fact his own face is nothing like Bruce’s. He’s just got the body language (a lot of ‘thumbing the nose’) and hair style down.

He’s probably the most entertaining impersonator I’ve seen yet apart from Sammo Hung :P.

Of course this film couldn’t stand up to it’s title without Bruce Le wearing the yellow tracksuit again, and fighting in a similar environment to the actual Game of Death footage. This is one of the better ones but still horrendous though 🙂 – it’s available on DVD.

The Clones of Bruce Lee

Check this out, there’s more than one Bruce Lee!

Their names? Bruce Lee One, Bruce Lee Two and Bruce Lee Three. This I feel is really inventive and is made just to play further on the theme of individuality that Bruce promoted so passionately (have a unique style of your own? Ignored.)

It’s a Bruce impersonator extravaganza!

It’s a crazy movie with more than one Bruce and not to mention a scene with some naked women running along the beach with big bazookas. This is what every Brucesploitation movie should be, only more relevant as they are cloning Bruce Lees and making them fight each other!

More than that, there’s some familiar faces like Jon T Ben – the bad boss from Way of the Dragon (the ACTUAL Bruce Lee movie) and Bolo Yeung, from many other Bruceploitation films and Enter the Dragon.

This is probably one of the most famous of Bruceploitation cinema but like the rest of them it’s pretty sucky and only good for a quick look to poke fun at.

Each Bruce has the look, movement and clothing that Bruce made iconic. The fights were a little more ‘standard’ Hong Kong action though.

Check it out for yourself if you have nothing better to do.

Enter the Fat Dragon

There is light at the end of tunnel after all!

Not entirely Bruceploitation but a good result of it. Sammo Hung plays (an overweight) Bruce Lee fanatic who lives and breathes Bruce Lee.

It suits because Sammo is a big Bruce fan, having worked with him on Enter the Dragon.

Of course there’s some bullying involved and Sammo’s character uses his Bruce Lee impersonation/martial arts to sort out his opponents.

Sammo has the most entertaining and humorous Bruce Lee impersonation ever. Especially considering his frame in comparison to Bruce’s (heavy set as opposed to ripped and thin like Bruce.) It’s a funny film so check it out!

That’s not all of them!

Sad isn’t it? There are countless numbers of these movies, pretty much all of them are horrendous.

With a man who promoted self improvement and finding your own unique self I think this part of history illustrates how little those he surrounded himself with in the film industry cared for his message – not that he knew all of these people.

It’s a wonderful thing that Bruce’s legacy rose above this blip on the radar to become the most iconic martial artist in modern history. Thank god the man was as good at his craft (both martial arts and movie making) to make these movies look so pathetic and forgettable as I don’t think martial arts movies would be as mainstream without his influence.

But hey, I’m always up for poking a bit of fun! What do you think about Bruceploitation? Tell us below or here on Facebook!

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