After the death of the near-legendary Bruce Lee, distributors of Hong Kong films were faced with a problem: the tragically young star had completed only four martial arts films: The Big Boss, Fist of Fury, Enter the Dragon and The Way of the Dragon; but demand, especially in the United States, France, and Italy, was higher than ever. As the great Godfrey Ho explains in his idiosyncratic mixture of Cantonese and English (Cantonenglish?), “’We want Bruce Lee’s movies!’ ‘Impossible, he died!’ ‘Yeah, but we still want Bruce Lee’s movies, man!’”
And so began one of the more tasteless B-movie subgenres of the time, or any time, really: Bruceploitation, films which would star any one of quite a number of “lookalikes” – lookalike here meaning any East Asian man who can fight and sport a bowl haircut – given stage names usually involving “Bruce”, “Lee”, or variants, and film titles that either echoed those of Bruce Lee’s films, or spuriously billed themselves as outright sequels, and employed marketing that suggested or outright stated that these films starred the real deal. You expect exploitation cinema to be exploitative, but this surely takes the biscuit.
Worse, the vast majority of these 200+ films are trash, and shockingly boring trash at that. Still, the various clones of Bruce – at least, the ones interviewed here – were dedicated performers and showed genuine talent, in physical performances if not as actors. The first we’re introduced to, and the most interesting interviewee, is Bruce Li (Ho-chung Tao), who laments that his Lee-esque looks kept him from ever becoming a star in his own right. He doesn’t really look like Bruce: it was more likely the haircut, fighting style and stage name that was the problem. Still, one gets the impression that these many performers were exploited by Hong Kong producers and international distributors just as much as audiences were. Others similarly exploited included Bruce Le (Wong Kin-lung), Bruce Leung (Siu-Lung Leung), and Dragon Lee (Ryong Keo), all of whom the filmmakers have gathered here along with a number of Hong Kong film industry veterans and scholars of Bruceploitation, of which there are surprisingly many for a subgenre so unseemly.
Still, one thing you can say about the phenomenon is it certainly didn’t discriminate; to be a Bruce Lee clone, you could be Thai, like Bruce Thai; Korean like Dragon Lee; Japanese, like Yasuaki Kurata; even African-American, like Jim Kelly and Ron van Cleef, also legitimate martial-arts stars in their own right. Jim Kelly is also the product of another, more wholesome strand of the Bruceploitation phenomenon, whereby many stars who had appeared in Bruce Lee’s films were able to build careers of their own on the back of that association: Bolo Yeung of Enter the Dragon; Jackie Chan, who was an extra in Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon; Chuck Norris, killed by Lee in The Big Boss. Some had their own gimmicks: Chan’s was his fast-paced, Buster Keaton-esque slapstick, so successful that most today wouldn’t think of him as ever having been a knockoff; meanwhile, Sammo Hung, star of Enter the Fat Dragon, was fat.
The phenomenon even allowed for those who had appeared opposite Bruce Lee to stage phony rematches of those fights; in the case of Bolo Yeung, who never fought Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, he was able to finally fight Bruce Lee for “real” in The Clones of Bruce Lee. That film, the culmination of the craze, sees the Special Branch, upon the death of Bruce Lee (the actual movie star), have a mad scientist transfer his brain patterns into three clones of him, played by none other than Dragon Lee, Bruce Le, and Bruce Lai, go undercover on different assignments, including a nefarious plot to have Bruce Lee One die on camera, a world domination attempt that involves injecting men with a special formula to turn their skin into bronze, and copious amounts of bare-breasted dancing. For all its dementedness, and its impressive cast, which also features Bruce Thai as Chuck Lee, who is not among the clones, The Clones of Bruce Lee is ultimately empty and dull, with none of the heart, grace, or central charisma of the real deal’s films, and serves to show why the fad died out relatively quickly. To quote the mad doctor’s glamorous assistant: “Are you sure it’s Bruce Lee? It doesn’t look like him!”