Enter the world of Bruceploitation

Send in the clones

Enter the Clones of Bruce spotlights three actors in the Bruceploitation stable: Ho Chung-Tao, AKA Bruce Li; Wong Kin-lung, AKA Bruce Le; and Moon Kyung-seok, AKA Keo Ryong, AKA Dragon Lee. Occasionally, their Bruceploitation roles had them playing Lee himself, like the biopics Bruce Lee: The Man, The Myth, and The Dragon Lives, both of which happen to star Ho; largely, they appeared in films that read as consolation prizes for diehards craving new Lee material. Put appreciatively, Ho’s, Wong’s, and Moon’s roles as Lee’s replacements effectively helped his fans, admirers, and devotees process his death.

“I think the Bruces themselves, now that they look back on it, and when we were interviewing them, they very much think that they were filling a void, or paying tribute,” Gregory, the co-founder of Severin Films, the independent production and distribution label behind the doc, tells JoySauce.

Throughout Enter the Clones of Bruce, Ho, Wong, and Moon pay tribute in myriad ways; with praise for Lee’s unparalleled skill, of course, but with humility, too, an acknowledgment that to truly fulfill their surrogacy duties was nigh-impossible. For starters, none of them look like Lee, something Roy Horan—probably best known as “man fatally hit in groin by Jackie Chan,” in one of cinema’s all-time greatest death scenes—likewise points out early in the movie. “Well, if I really stretch my imagination a little bit,” Horan says of Ho’s dubious resemblance to Lee, with a genial laugh.

Ho doesn’t think he looks like Lee, either, but he could mirror Lee’s body language. In Enter the Clones of Bruce, Ho cites common wisdom among artists that hands are the hardest part of the human form to draw; they’re so complex, even small movements change their shape. Ho drew inspiration from that intricacy as a method of evoking Lee’s spirit. (In an aside, the actor Eric Tsang opines that had the market not chosen Ho as a Lee clone, “he would’ve been quite good” making his own films and playing his own characters. It’s a heartfelt compliment with a wistful sting.) Wong, meanwhile, dedicated himself to doing everything the same way as Lee, like training his forearm muscles—essential for Wing Chun, the Southern Chinese kung fu style Lee trained in as a teen.

In contrast to Ho and Wong, Moon, who cut a swole figure as Dragon Lee, called upon memories from his school days: He watched martial arts films every day, then would stand before a mirror and copy Lee’s movements and mannerisms to a tee. Moon notes the desperation among moviegoers to process their bereavement; he sees his work, plus Wong’s and Ho’s by unspoken extension, as a kind of grief balm. “So many people were mourning [Lee’s] death,” Moon says in the documentary, “the positive aspect of my films was to help appease that longing.”

“So many people were mourning [Lee’s] death, the positive aspect of my films was to help appease that longing.”

Putting the ‘exploitation’ in Bruceploitation

Moon never felt comfortable as a Lee imitator—for that matter, neither did Ho—but he understands now what his films meant for the people who saw them. The same can’t be said of the people who made them, though. “The producers and the screenwriters weren't quite so in awe of the talents, or their personalities, or so sensitive to doing it right,” Gregory says.

That level of foundational apathy shows in the average Bruceploitation movie’s synopsis. Take Chi Lo’s The Dragon Lives Again (1977), AKA Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, the closest you’ll get to an out of body experience without chugging ayahuasca. Here, Bruce Leong, another Lee clone, plays Lee’s literal spirit, who, after descending into perdition, brawls with characters ranging from Dracula to Zatoichi to the Man with No Name. (Think of it as a precursor to Japanese shock auteur Takashi Miike’s surrealist fantasy samurai picture Izo, minus his anarchic touch.) Consider Return of the Dragon, not exactly a “movie,” but a clipshow of Lee’s appearances in ABC’s Green Hornet series, which ran from 1966-67. Or jump forward to 1980 with Matthew Mallinson’s Fist of Fear, Touch of Death, a guerrilla-style pseudo-documentary shot at a 1979 martial arts event passed off in the film as the 1979 World Karate Championships.

Any of these movies could be cited as the most shameless among other Bruceploitation films, if not the worst. Near Enter the Clones of Bruce’s end, the Hong Kong-based producer and casting director Mike Leeder makes his own suggestion: Game of Death, Lee’s “final” film. Famously, Game of Death comprises about 12 minutes of the original footage shot during production on the film Lee meant to make, titled The Game of Death; five years after the martial arts legend died, the production studio, Golden Harvest, released a veritable Frankenstein’s monster of a movie into theaters, stitched together from a hodgepodge of material including scenes with Lee’s doubles—Kim Tai-jong, Yuen Biao, Albert Sham—plus a ghoulish stretch of footage shot at Lee’s actual funeral.

“It promises so much,” Leeder says in a talking head interview in Enter the Clones of Bruce, referring to Game of Death’s rhapsodic opening credits. If you’ve seen the movie, you know how well they set the mood, and how rapidly that mood self-extinguishes once the film cuts to that funeral footage; the moment the camera shows Lee’s actual corpse in its open-topped casket, all the fun gets sucked out of the room, only to return when the real Lee shows up with 10 minutes left on the clock, to hint at what could have been had he lived.

Game of Death’s climax contains some of Lee’s best work over the course of his career; Gregory describes these scenes as “gold” without hesitation, particularly Lee’s fight with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. That detail, coupled with Lee’s ultimate presence in the film when it counts the most, may disqualify Game of Death as Bruceploitation for some; how can the movie not be a Bruce Lee movie when Bruce Lee is, in fact, in it? But Leeder’s point emphasizes the “exploitation” clause in the term. As horrendous as so many films in the Bruceploitation canon are, none of them is a clearer example of parties unscrupulously benefitting from Lee’s name and fame than Game of Death.

There’s zero chance a viewer might, for instance, mistake The Dragon Lives Again as an authentic Bruce Lee movie, whereas Game of Death has Bruce Lee, the genuine article, and not Leong. The standard is higher. The crime isn’t the same. “[Game of Death] actually pretends to be a real Bruce Lee film,” Gregory says, “from the company that was behind Bruce Lee’s film!” Let there be no doubt that The Dragon Lives Again is an unimpeachably bizarre movie. It remains, however, harmless weirdo cosplay. Game of Death is a transparent attempt at salvaging value from tragedy. If the unwholesome implications of this gallimaufry’s release are clear, the behind the scenes hand-wringing over what to do with the unedited footage isn’t. Golden Harvest had two choices: Bury it so deep it never sees the light of day, or make what they could of it and hope for the best. They chose as close to option two as possible, but recall Leeder’s statement about Game of Death’s “worst” status and decide for yourself if the studio actually succeeded.

Credit and compassion where they’re due: Golden Harvest was in an impossible situation. “[The studio was] also being bombarded by fans from around the world,” Gregory tells me. “‘You need to release the footage!’ Well, in what form do they release the footage?” They could have left it raw, and who knows how it would have been received? It’s a question without an answer, though the likely reaction to a rough cut would’ve been complicated, as so much of the reaction to Lee’s death was. About an hour into its run time, Enter the Clones of Bruce turns an eye to Europe, where he enjoyed wide popularity and where an entire subculture of fake movies with his name on them flourished.

French producer René Chateau, who passed away earlier this year, drew hard lines around Bruceploitation. In archival footage presented in Enter the Clones of Bruce, he describes these movies as “counterfeits”; at the same time, he’s also responsible for putting out the aforementioned Return of the Dragon into the world. Next door in Germany, distributor Uwe Schier opened Bruce Le and Bruce Li films in theaters but passed them off as Bruce Lee films simply by rewriting their names as “Lee” on posters; speaking on-camera, he justifies the unscrupulous move by arguing that Lee’s name was “a synonym for great martial arts fighting,” which, while partly true, effectively clouded his filmography.

Separating Bruce Lee from all the Bruce Lies

“At the time, it was definitely much more muddying and confusing for the public about what was Bruce Lee, or who was Bruce Lee,” Gregory says, referring to shady practices like Schier’s at the height of Bruceploitation. Today, we can distinguish the real deal from the legions of proxies. In the 1970s and 1980s, separating the two was harder, and in turn made Enter the Clones of Bruce a challenge for Gregory when he began working on the film in the late 2010s.

Gregory is well-versed in the documentary form. It actually suits him well in his duties running Severin, which at any one time has several projects going at once, including, but not limited to, production on additional documentaries and restorations on cult cinema for home video. (For example: A month after Enter the Clones of Bruce’s commercial release in April, Severin dropped a box set, The Game of Clones: Bruceploitation Collection Vol. 1, containing Bruceploitation hits like The Clones of Bruce Lee, Enter Three Dragons, The Big Boss Part II, The Dragon Lives Again, and Challenge of the Tiger.)

“With documentaries, you can say, ‘I need to get this interview. I can do that in a couple of months,’ and then you can keep the other trains moving in the Severin production wheelhouse all at the same time while the documentary's gradually moving forward,” Gregory explains. Enter the Clones of Bruce moved more gradually, for reasons both practical and infuriating. The language track is varied, with interviewees speaking in Cantonese, Mandarin, English, German, Japanese, Korean, and French, which meant outsourcing sections of the film to multiple translators; contacting the interviewees took Herculean effort, too, with Wong proving especially hard to get a commitment from. (In the end, Gregory says, Wong was one of the best interviews he got, incredibly fit for his age and bursting with enthusiasm. It shows in the film.)

But the structure was a nightmare, on account of the many, many threads and falsities that comprise Bruceploitation. “Unlike my other documentaries, which have a very clear story arc,” Gregory says, “[Enter the Clones of Bruce] actually has several stories within the story, so that was something that really made me pull my hair out.” The film isn’t about Bruceploitation alone. It’s about what Lee meant to his friends, family, peers, and audience, how his death shaped popular culture, the legacies we leave behind, and how they’re either curated or abused by others. The matter of legacy extends beyond Lee; Ho, Wong, and Moon each have their own set of accomplishments and failures to look back on, mixing regret with pride in their careers as well as their personal lives.

Ho recalls the death of his wife, the pressure to provide for their four children, the toll his film roles took on him once he halted his training regimen. Moon similarly talks about his family, and his regret over spending so much time apart from them in his capacity as Dragon Lee. It’s reasonable to wonder what misgivings, if any, Lee might hold about his career and celebrity, but because the universe is a cold, unfeeling place, he is spared the task of taking stock of his life.

Given a choice, he’d probably take that chore any day over his untimely demise. But his story isn’t his anymore. It’s everyone else’s. Meanwhile the clones are left to ruminate on the paths they took—a painful process, though not without positivity. Ho carries Enter  the Clones of Bruce to its credits roll with his paean to cinema. We all live on borrowed time. It’s rare any of us achieves all that we set out to before we shuffle off our mortal coils; life’s quotidian details, fatherhood in Ho’s case, mean shouldering all-consuming responsibilities that winnow down our window for seeing our dreams realized. Not so in the movies, where we can exist in different timelines, or be different people—like, say, Bruce Lee. “Such fun,” Ho gushes. Then he stands up, arches his hands like Lee did, and delivers one last kick at the screen.