Truly Dreadful Film

Don't listen to the negative reviews

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

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.

So the plot makes little to no sense and sometimes involves strange critiques on American democracy and capitalism and whose dialog is clearly translated into English by a non-native speaker, there is only one dubbed voice for all of the male characters, half the movie contains scenes of people walking or free footage from parades and such (there's even a scene where there's people waving and giving the peace sign to the camera), and you can tell when the lines of the movies are plagarized and pieced together from other movies, but its unintentionally comedic value is immeasurable. The bad guys consist of (and I quote) "a Japanese, a white man, a black man (who is 15 seconds later described as "tall, kind of thin, a flashy dresser, with an ear ring"), a Mexican, and a cowboy (yes, a cowboy)" and a mysterious cigar smoking man. If you go into this movie taking it seriously, your not going to like it. But if you go into the movie realizing its absolute trash then it has the potential to be absolutely hilarious.

An oriental Kung Fu expert named Wong Han (played by Bruce K.L. Lea) travels to America at the invite of his long-time friend and former Kung Fu school training partner only to learn his friend is now dead, apparently the result of a suicide. Suspecting foul play, Wong Han sets out to bring down a gang of strange characters he suspects are responsible for his friend's death but when he attempts to do so, there's also quite a few unexpected surprises awaiting our hero.Despite the title referring to Bruce Lee, he actually has nothing whatsoever to do with this movie apart from an extremely cheesy, silly opening introduction title sequence in which we see a man resembling Lee jump out of a grave with the headstone behind him bearing Lee's name. What this movie is actually about is a man coming to America trying to avenge his fallen friend while protecting his deceased friend's last belongings. There he befriends a beautiful young woman named Susan (played by the delectable Deborah Chaplin) who tries to help him in his quest. However, the gang of colorful thugs, a true assortment of weird characters if there ever was one, are after him and Susan for some reason unknown to Wong Han and go all out in their efforts to bring them down meaning Wong Han has to constantly fight for his own survival while also trying to protect Susan.As you can tell, the basic plot for this movie isn't half-bad. The Kung Fu fighting scenes featuring Bruce Lea, who throws a mean-looking kick, also proved much better than expected although they fall rather short in comparison to the one and only Bruce Lee. The major problem here is that the movie seems to go on a bit too long, the pace feeling a little too slow, which isn't helped by the fact there's too much obvious filler footage of people simply driving vehicles from place to place. Also the colorful villainous assortment of characters Wong Han tries to bring down never evolve beyond anything other than one-dimensional caricatures.

This movie escaped me for years. Several times I watched the first five minutes and every time I stopped thinking: This isn't Bruce Lee, this is some cheesy rip off. Anger and hatred soon followed, shortly before my ejecting the tape and throwing it once again to the confines of my shelf. One day however, during an early Jackie Chan fest we ran out of videos. In the Kung fu mood we stumbled across none other than BL fights back ftg. What a film. From the very beginning you soon realise this films true potential, not as a serious Kung Fu movie but as one of the funniest films of all time. The hilariously dubbed voices are funny but if that's not enough check out the wacky editing of the fight sequences, 300 songs on one soundtrack, impossible scene changes, you name it. Plus a list of characters you'll never forget. Cigar smoking man, pipe smoking man and his accomplice eye candy, the cab driver, Susan, and most of all: The Cowboy. I'm gonna show this film to my grandkids!