Thursday, June 25, 2020

Goodbye Bruce Lee: His Last Game of Death (1975)

Yet another variation of Game of Death and yet another middling Bruceploitation film. "Bruce Li" (Ho Tsung-Tao) is chosen by a producer to help finish Bruce Lee's final film and then we go straight into that film. In truth the film-within-a-film angle is completely pointless. What we do have is a basic story of Bruce getting duped into handling hot money and dragged into a gang fight.

And there are a lot of fights as the two rival gangs both try and get the money off Bruce. Finally the gangs unite and kidnap Bruce's girlfriend Lu (Mung Ping) and take her top of the Tower of Death. Bruce then has to fight the best fighters in the world as climbs the tower floor by floor to save his girl. The "best fighters" are actually pretty terrible and include a samurai who gets dizzy very easily, a boxer who doesn't look he could punch his way out of a paper bag and an "Indian" fighter who wields nunchucks - though doesn't really seem to know what they are. Finally he faces Boss K (Fei Lung) with a whip.

It isn't the worst Bruceploitation film, the story is simple but coherent. The fights range between mediocre to awful but are often pretty funny.