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.

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