Soul Brothers of Kung Fu (1977) - Wa Yat-Wang

Bruce Li and venom, Lo Mang, arrive in Hong Kong as refugees and attempt to eke out a living doing odd jobs. Their tendency to get into fights every other minute complicates matters though and soon they have to deal with both gambling debts and pissed off mobsters. Li manages to win a martial arts tournament and become a kung fu sensation, but this just infuriates the mob boss further. Shortly after the tournament, Li's girlfriend is killed by murderous rape-gweilos and Li is left badly wounded. Li fine tunes his fighting skills with SCIENCE (by punching glowing dolls) and sets out for bloody revenge. Along the way they pick up youngster Carl Scott, who apparently had a short career in the Hong Kong movie industry. It should be mentioned that the different editions of this flick vary quite a lot. Soul Brothers of Kung Fu aka Last Strike is a fairly violent flick, but most of the violent bits are missing from the german widescreen print. Be warned that there's a bunch of death finger nut stabs and X-ray heart puncturing you could miss out on! Furthermore, Carl Scott is strung up and killed (!) in the widescreen print, while he's alive and well at the end of the pan and scan editions. While Soul Brothers of Kung Fu has a place on the cheaper side of film making, it's really not too bad. The choreography is nice, the plot is relatively concise and Li punches a ton of dudes in the nuts. Enjoyable!

Bruce Lee in New Guinea (1978) - Joseph Kong Hung

Bruce Li heads to New Guinea (specifically "Snake Worship Island") on an anthropological expedition to avoid having lunch with his annoying cousin. He's there to find the snake tribe who are supposed to be cool jungle dwellers, but soon discovers that they are run by the less cool devil sect these days. The devil sect are into snakes, black magic and punching intruders in the face. Li ends up falling in love with the local snake princess, and is cursed by her in return (she means well though). Back in Hong Kong Bruce discovers that he turns into a snake if he's touched by other women, and heads back to New Guinea to sort his shit out. New Guinea sort of looks like a Hong Kong rock quarry in this to be honest, and the soundtrack is lifted straight from Once upon a time in the West. It's a truly ridiculous film with dudes in monkeysuits, curses and banana theft. Bolo Yeung and the googly-eyed chap from Hex after Hex makes an appearance and I'm fairly certain I've seen the devil sorcerer before too. All the good bits of a black magic flick with the addition of decent fights. Exquisitely silly and generally amazing!

Thou Shall Not Commit (2001) - Chan Kin-Tak

I grabbed a copy of this as it had Wong and lightning bolts on the cover. As an added bonus I had never heard of it before and it does not seem to be on IMDb. I set my expectations to zero and stepped into the world of bad cantosynth soundtracks. Thou Shall Not Commit opens with a cheap as sin Dick Dale cover of sorts, and has one of the  lousiest soundtracks I've heard in a while. The movie is about adultery obviously and is a bad one at that too. An unknown narrator's wife and her lover dies in a ludicrous hostage situation at the beginning of the film, before the film skips to the killer getting released from jail a few years later. The killer is taken in by Wong, who claims to know his dad. They bond and from hereon most of the film is told through flashbacks. Of course the film has "twists" and yawns luring around every bend, with cheap editing to boot. It sort of feels like one of those overly convoluted and poorly executed film student flicks. It ain't all bad, but it isn't a mystery why this thing isn't on IMDb either. An odd duck.

Challenge of the Tiger (1980) - Bruce Le

Challenge of the Tiger is another Bruce Le-directed film, featuring both him and the always charming Richard Harrison. As an extra bonus Le also got hold of top musclemen Brad Harris and Bolo Yeung, in addition to  sex queen Nadiuska! Le seems to know exactly what his audience are after and as a result Challenge of the Tiger is aces from start to finish. A pair of scientists develop the ultimate spermicide and figures it would be a terrible idea if it got into the wrong hands. Of course a bunch of hoodlums storm their office at the very second they utter these words, murders them and decides to blackmail the free world with it! Soon (possible) Nazis, the Vietcong and the CIA clash over the "formula". Le does his usual thing while Harrison tags along to sleep with every dame he lays his eyes on. The plot is all nonsense of course, but the fighty bits are tight and there's tons of it (at one point Le fights a bull!). If you were to remove all the fighting you would basically be left with nude tennis, sex scenes and some silly dialogue to connect the fights. Le's direction is actually fairly sober too, and the film never becomes the mess that Black Spot was. Excellent stuff with a neat soundtrack!

The Dragon Lives (1976) - Wong Sing-Lui

The amount of alternate titles for some of these Lee ripoffs is staggering and often the same titles appear on several films. As a result I actually spent quite some time trying to figure out exactly which flick I had just seen and I am not sure if I'm much wiser now. The title screen said The Dragon Lives at least, it stars Li and I'm fairly certain it was released in the period between 1976 and 1978. The movie is some sort of bizarre biopic, that presents us with an alternative reading of Lee's life. I think the only part of this that actually happened is that Lee died young. On the other hand, I'm not entirely sure if he did so screaming with laughter following a prolonged (it's long) sex scene... The gist of the story is that Li goes to the states and becomes a star, but is disgusted with their racist portrayals of Chinese people. The views of this flick's director are equally murky however, as the black bad guys in this are portrayed as degenerate creeps. As Li puts it at one point: "I had to teach those monkeys a lesson"... You disappoint me, Li :/ While the fights are not too bad and not entirely tedious, the rest of the flick sort of is. There's some ludicrous stuff going on in the seemingly endless fight at the beginning, a nice parody of Shaw Bros productions and a nutty training machine, but it's mostly just Li arguing with various movie producers. A mediocre movie all in all, with an excellent soundtrack.

Clones of Bruce Lee (1980) - Joseph Kong Hung

Bruce Le, Dragon Lee and Bruce Lai in the same movie, and all of them even plays Lee! As the proper Bruce Lee is rushed to the hospital and confirmed dead, a wacky gwailo decides to make three clones of him to fight crime. After being taught a lesson in fighting by Bolo Yeung they set out on separate missions of asskicking. Of course they kick the required butts and finally unite their powers to fight a mad Thai doctor, who has raised an army of bronze supermen. Also, there's nudity. Theoretically I should have been entertained by this movie, the concept of triple Lees battling robots seems pretty hard to screw up. Joseph Kong Hung however, somehow managed to make it into flick devoid of entertainment value that at 90 minutes feel like the Neverending Story. There are few if any highlights worth mentioning - the fights are dull, the nudity is dull, the dialogue is dull, the baddies are dull, the showdown is dull, the Lees are dull, the camera work is dull, etc. At one point it seems like the baddies themselves have had enough of this stinker, as they begin to commit suicide by eating poisonous grass instead of fighting the Lees  (this scene is actually fairly entertaining though). Bolo Yeung had a chance to end my suffering 20 minutes earlier in what I expected to be a final showdown, but of course the Lees defeat him by basically boring him to death. Hats off to Joseph Kong Hung for managing to make this story into a total yawn inducer. Zzzzz.

Curse (1985) - Pang Ling

Another black magic flick from Pang Ling, the man behind Brutal Sorcery! I had no idea this was made by the same guy, as I mistakenly had looked up the info for the 1988 Curse. A woman is in big trouble, seeing as she literally pissed a powerful wizard in the face in a past life. Needless to say, the wizard was less than happy about this incident and cursed the shit out of her. Every man she marries becomes unhealthily horny and eventually drops dead from exhaustion. As one mother-in-law puts it, the husbands become "too much engaged in marriage life". It takes ten husbands before our lead begin to realize that something is not right... Constantly dying husbands isn't enough for the pissed off (ehehehe) wizard though, so he also makes sure that a ghost rapist moves into her flat. Eventually she grows tired of all the raping, and Herman Kwan enters the fray. Kwan does his usual taoist priest routine and makes everything right (not really) with the often used Kwaidan-method (employed in Hex and Powerforce among others). Kwan explains that our lead is suffering due to the "cause and effect theory", which is his way of saying it was a bad idea to piss on that wizard way back when. Curse basically jumps from one ludicrous scene to the next (with pointless shower-scenes in between), and is a pure joy to watch. There's krasue, odd rituals, funky special effects, hopping vampires and raping ghosts. At one point a wizard drinks blood straight from a cow using a straw, before  annihilating some unruly vampires by spitting it on them! Glorious!

Black Spot (1991) - Bruce Le

Black Spot is a 90s action flick directed by and starring the one and only Bruce Le! Having grown tired of running drugs, Le has retired to a relaxed life as a fitness guru in Hong Kong. Of course, his bosses wants none of it, and before you know it Le is on the run from gangsters in Paris (of all places)! According to an IMDb user this was supposedly a bit of a hit in France. Escaping halfway across the globe wasn't such a good idea though, as the French authorities force him into going undercover for the very gangsters he's running from. What follows is an insane cagefight against a sheep-killing giant, and a ton of jumping around in Southeast Asia with lackluster explanations of what's going on. Le's direction leaves Black Spot as a confusing mess of a film, which is somewhat of an accomplishment considering how thin the plot actually is. The drug smugglers are generally fairly bad dudes, while Le is a paragon of virtue standing up for the rights of poor opium farmers. Black Spot does have a bunch of action and shit though, so you'll probably manage to be entertained. All in all an OK flick. Also, Lo Lieh makes an appearance in this for some reason!  

Powerforce (1982) - Michael Mak

In Powerforce Bruce Baron and Bruce Li team up to rescue a princess or something! While that sounds pretty awesome and all, it's about all I understood of the plot. Baron is lounging in a pool with some skanks, before he receives (by means of fortune cookie) his princess-mission. Said princess has been kidnapped by an Orson Welles impersonator, seeing as he needs her country's chromium oxide for his nuclear power plant/space program/cocaine production/appetite. His motives are never entirely clear, but to make up for it he has an army of ninjas and an evil karate lair. Apparently, Baron's powerforce isn't enough by itself, and he has to get some help from Li's Dragon Force - a sorry trio  of fighters that are into weird snake rituals. There's a bunch of shit happening in this flick, some of it is quite entertaining too (exploding ninjas all over the place). In the end it gets a bit tiresome though, seeing as you have no idea whats going on or why shit is happening, while the movie drags on for way too long. OK-ish.